Soup Sales, 2066
Photo by Frank Beacham
Soupy Sales was born 97 years ago today.
A comedian, actor, radio-TV personality and jazz aficionado, Sales was best known for his local and network children's television show, Lunch with Soupy Sales. He did 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, Sales hosted his own show on WNBC-AM in New York City.
Sales was born Milton Supman in Franklinton in Franklin County, North Carolina. His father, a dry goods merchant, had immigrated to America from Hungary in 1894. His was the only Jewish family in the town. Sales joked that local Ku Klux Klan members bought the sheets used for their robes from his father's store.
Sales got his nickname from his family. His older brothers had been nicknamed "Hambone" and "Chicken Bone." Milton was dubbed "Soup Bone," which was later 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 the Sales, in part after vaudeville comedian, Chic Sale.
Sales graduated from Huntington High School in Huntington, West Virginia in 1944. He then enlisted in the United States Navy and served on the USS Randall 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 in Marshall College in Huntington, where he earned a Master's Degree in Journalism. While at Marshall, he performed in nightclubs as a comedian, singer and dancer.
After graduating, Sales began working as a scriptwriter and disc jockey at radio station WHTN (now WVHU) in Huntington. He moved to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1949, where he worked as a morning radio DJ and performed in nightclubs.
Sales 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.
When WKRC canceled his TV shows, Sales moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he hosted another radio and TV series and continued his nightclub act. It was in a skit on his late night comedy/variety TV series Soupy's On! that he got his first pie in the face.
Sales is best known for his daily children's television show, Lunch With Soupy. The show was originally called 12 O'Clock Comics, and was later known as The Soupy Sales Show.
Improvised and slapstick in nature, Lunch with Soupy Sales was a rapid-fire stream of comedy sketches, gags and puns, almost all of which resulted in Sales receiving a pie in the face.
Sales 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.
Sales died in 2009 at the age of 83.
Here, Soupy gets in a pie throwing match with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack.
Soupy Sales: A Personal Story
As a kid, I was surrounded by the television characters who defined the fledgling medium in the 1950s. As an adult, I was lucky enough to meet many of them and, in some cases, become their friends.
Lew Anderson, the bandleader who was Clarabell on the Howdy Doody Show from 1954 to 1960, was one who became a friend. As a first grader, I joined other kids in chasing him to the roof of a TV station during a personal appearance. In later years, he sought me out after I wrote an obit on his old boss, Buffalo Bob Smith.
I began to visit with Lew each week at Birdland, where he led his big band. I’d usually sit with a bunch of old time 50s television directors and performers who gathered to hear and tell old war stories. I, of course, ate it all up.
This group usually included Soupy Sales, Lew’s close friend and himself a television legend. Soupy, a jazz lover, would order martinis in glasses the size of small fish bowls and hold court on the countless ways to throw pies in the human face. The man was incredibly funny and we all laughed endlessly.
Those were wonderful times. To hear your childhood myths debunked in such hilarious “shop talk” is one pleasure I will never forget.