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🐦 "The Wonderful Double Throat or Swiss Warbler Bird Call" — Prairie Whistle — NOS With Packet — Made in Taiwan
New old stock tongue reed bird call with its original printed paper packet. A cloth reed on a U-shaped metal frame, the same principle as the Punch and Judy swazzle and the mail-order Ventrilo. Packet back stamped MADE IN TAIWAN.
📋 SPECIFICATIONS
- Headline printed on packet: The Wonderful Double Throat or Swiss Warbler Bird Call
- Also printed: "Only Original Bird Call and Prairie Whistle", full directions for use, perched bird illustration
- Packet back: "Swiss Warbler Bird Call" / MADE IN TAIWAN
- Call: orange-red pinked-edge cloth half-moon over a U-shaped dark metal frame
- Packet size: approx. 3½" x 2"
- Era: 1960s
- Origin: Taiwan
🔍 CONDITION
New old stock: unused call kept with its printed packet. Packet paper age-toned, printing legible. See photos.
📖 THE STORYThe packet's promise
The directions say to soak the call until saturated, set it on the tongue with the reed nearest the teeth, and hiss, making "imitations of Birds and Beasts," and they close: "Any person following these directions we will guarantee they can imitate any Bird or Animal in a few minutes." The wording still mentions a "finished side of leather", like the metal-and-leather voice reeds once sold by mail; this call is cloth over metal.
Punch's swazzle
By Punch and Judy tradition, performers make Punch's voice with a swazzle, a cotton tape reed held taut between two curved metal strips, first made of bone or ivory and now of tin. Its design was a trade secret of the "professors." Punch descends from the commedia dell'arte's Pulcinella; Samuel Pepys, the diarist, recorded the first known English show at Covent Garden in May 1662.
"Boys! Throw Your Voice"
The Johnson Smith Company, founded by Alfred Johnson Smith in Chicago in 1914 and later of Racine, Wisconsin and Detroit, sold the same kind of reed as the Ventrilo, advertised in 1932 as "Boys! Throw Your Voice," and published George W. Callahan's 1920 booklet on using and making one. Its ads ran on the back of Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27. A novelty dealer who sold these packets passes along the story that bird calls like this were once Cracker Jack prizes; Cracker Jack put a prize in every box starting in 1912.
Made in Taiwan
Taiwan's export industries got under way in the 1960s with garments and toys, the toy trade boomed through the 1970s, and by 1987 toy exports reached US$1 billion, part of the legacy that earned Taiwan the name "export kingdom." A dealer who handled this same printed packet identifies it as an early Taiwan version from the 1960s.
🎁 GOOD FOR
- Mail-order and comic-book novelty collectors
- Puppeteers, ventriloquists, Punch and Judy fans
- Bird call and prairie whistle collectors
- Early Made in Taiwan toy collectors
- Stocking stuffers and small gifts
