Soupy Sales
Milton Supman, known professionally as Soupy Sales, was an American comedian, actor, radio-television personality, and jazz aficionado. He was best known for his local and network children's television series, Lunch with Soupy Sales , a series of comedy sketches frequently ending with Sales receiving a pie in the face, which became his trademark. From 1968 to 1975, he was a regular panelist on the syndicated revival of What's My Line? and appeared on several other TV game shows. During the 1980s, he hosted his own radio show on WNBC in New York City.
Early life
Milton Supman was born in Franklinton, North Carolina, to Irving Supman and Sadie Berman Supman. His father, a Jewish dry goods merchant, emigrated from Hungary in 1894. His was the only Jewish family in town; Sales joked that local Ku Klux Klan members bought the sheets used for their robes from his father's store.According to an interview with the Television Foundation, his nickname originated in his youth from a mispronunciation of his last name, Supman, as "Soupman" and "Soupbone", being shortened to "Soupy".
When he became a disc jockey, he began using the stage name Soupy Hines. After he became established, it was decided that "Hines" was too close to the Heinz soup company, so he chose Sales, in part after vaudeville comedian Chic Sale. He graduated from Huntington High School in Huntington, West Virginia, in 1944. He enlisted in the United States Navy and served on in the South Pacific during the latter part of World War II. He sometimes entertained his shipmates by telling jokes and playing crazy characters over the ship's public address system. One of the characters he created was "White Fang", a large dog that played outrageous practical jokes on the seamen. The sounds for "White Fang" came from a recording of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Sales enrolled at Marshall University, known as Marshall College at that time, where he earned a master's degree in journalism. While there, he performed in nightclubs as a comedian, singer and dancer.
Career
After graduating from Marshall, Sales began working as a scriptwriter and disc jockey at radio station WHTN in Huntington. He moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1949, where he was a morning radio DJ and performed in nightclubs. He began his television career on WKRC-TV in Cincinnati with Soupy's Soda Shop, TV's first teen dance program, and Club Nothing!, a late-night comedy/variety program.''Lunch with Soupy Sales''
Sales is best known for his daily children's television show, Lunch with Soupy Sales. It was originally called 12 O'Clock Comics, and later known as The Soupy Sales Show. Improvised and slapstick in nature, it was a rapid-fire stream of comedy sketches, gags and puns, many of which resulted in Sales receiving a pie in the face, which became his trademark. He developed pie-throwing into an art form: straight to the face, on top of the head, a pie to both ears from behind, moving into a stationary pie, and countless other variations. He claimed that he and his visitors had been hit by more than 20,000 pies during his career. He recounted a time when a young fan mistakenly threw a frozen pie at his neck and he "dropped like a pile of bricks".Detroit
Lunch with Soupy Sales began in 1953 from the studios of WXYZ-TV, Channel 7, in the historic Maccabees Building in Detroit. Sales occasionally took the studio cameras to the lawn of the Detroit Public Library, across the street from the studios, and talked with local students walking to and from school. Beginning no later than July 4, 1955, a Saturday version of Sales' lunch show was broadcast nationally on the ABC television network. His lunchtime program on weekdays was moved to early morning opposite Today and Captain Kangaroo.During the same period that Lunch with Soupy Sales aired in Detroit, Sales also hosted a nighttime show, Soupy's On, to compete with 11 O'Clock News programs. The guest star was always a musician, often a jazz performer, at a time when jazz was popular in Detroit and the city was home to 24 jazz clubs. Sales believed his show helped sustain jazz in Detroit, as artists regularly sold out their nightclub shows after appearing on it.
Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Stan Getz were among the musicians who appeared on the show; Miles Davis made six appearances. Clifford Brown's appearance on Soupy's On, according to Sales, may be the only extant footage of Brown, and has been included in Ken Burns' Jazz and an A&E Network biography about Sales.
Sales briefly had a third dinnertime show filmed largely in Detroit's Palmer Park area. His three shows were rumored to earn him in excess of $100,000 per year. One of his character puppets was Willy the Worm, a "balloon" propelled worm that emerged from its house and used a high pitched voice to announce birthdays or special events on the noontime show; but the character never appeared when Soupy moved to Los Angeles. In his lunchtime show, Sales always wore an orlon fabric sweater. In many of his shows, he appeared in costume, performed his dance, the Soupy Shuffle, introduced many characters such as Nicky Nooney, the Mississippi Gambler, etc., and took "zillions" of pies in the face.
Los Angeles
In 1960, Sales moved to the ABC-TV studios in Los Angeles. ABC canceled his show in March 1961, but it continued as a local program on KABC-TV until January 1962. It briefly went back on the ABC network as a late night fill-in for The Steve Allen Show in 1962, but was canceled after three months. All of the puppets on the show during its Los Angeles run were also operated by Clyde Adler, whom a 1962 TV Guide listing describes as "West Coast disk jockey and comedian". Sales' fame was significant enough that he was hired as a Tonight Show guest host in the period between Jack Paar and Johnny Carson.New York
On September 7, 1964, Sales found a new weekday home at WNEW-TV in New York City. This version was seen locally until September 2, 1966. Screen Gems syndicated 260 episodes to local stations outside the New York market during the 1965–66 season. This show marked the height of Sales' popularity. It featured guest appearances by stars such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Jerry Lewis, Judy Garland and Sammy Davis Jr., as well as musical groups like the Shangri-Las, The Supremes and The Temptations.The New Soupy Sales Show: Los Angeles
The New Soupy Sales Show appeared in 1978 with the same format, and ran for one season. 65 episodes were briefly syndicated, through Air Time International, to local stations in early 1979. It was taped in Los Angeles at KTLA, with Clyde Adler returning to work as a puppeteer with Sales.Characters
Clyde Adler, the show's floor manager and a film editor at Detroit's WXYZ, performed in sketches and voiced and operated all puppets on Sales' show in Detroit in the 1950s and in Los Angeles from 1959 to 1962, as well as in 1978. Actor Frank Nastasi, who played the part of Gramps on WXYZ-TV's other kids' show Wixie Wonderland, assumed the role of straight man and puppeteer when Sales took the show to New York from 1964 to 1966. Nastasi was originally from Detroit and had worked with Sales at WXYZ. Appearing on the show were both puppets and live performers.The puppets were:
- White Fang, "The Biggest and Meanest Dog in the USA", who appeared only as a giant white shaggy paw with black triangular felt "claws", jutting out from the corner of the screen. Fang spoke with unintelligible short grunts and growls, which Soupy repeated back in English, for comic effect. White Fang was often the pie thrower when Soupy's jokes bombed.
- Black Tooth, "The Biggest and Sweetest Dog in the USA", also seen only as a giant black paw with white triangular felt claws, and with more feminine, but similarly unintelligible, dialogue. Black Tooth's trademark was pulling Soupy off-camera to give loud and noisy kisses.
- For a short time there was a third dog character that became White Fang's girlfriend, Marilyn Monwolf. She caused some rivalry of affections between Black Tooth and White Fang, but later jilted them both for Joe Dogmaggio.
- Pookie the Lion, a lion puppet appearing in a large window behind Soupy, was a hipster with a rapier wit. For example: Soupy: "Do you know why my life is so miserable?" Pookie: "You got me!" Soupy: "That's why!" One of Pookie's favorite lines when greeting Soupy was, "Hey bubby... want a kiss?". In the Detroit shows, Pookie never spoke but communicated in whistles. That puppet also was used to mouth the words while pantomiming novelty records on the show.
- Hippy the Hippo, a minor character who occasionally appeared with Pookie the Lion. Frank Nastasi gave Hippy a voice for the New York shows. Clyde Adler also voiced Hippy in the shows done in the late 1970s.
New Year's Day incident