39 Facts About Soupy Sales

Milton Supman, known professionally as Soupy Sales, was an American comedian, actor, radio-television personality, and jazz aficionado.

Soupy Sales 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.

Soupy Sales's 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.

Soupy Sales graduated from Huntington High School in Huntington, West Virginia, in 1944.

Soupy Sales sometimes entertained his shipmates by telling jokes and playing crazy characters over the ship's public address system.

Soupy Sales enrolled at Marshall University, known as Marshall College at that time, where he earned a master's degree in journalism.

Soupy Sales moved to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1949, where he was a morning radio DJ and performed in nightclubs.

Soupy 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.

Soupy Sales claimed that he and his visitors had been hit by more than 20,000 pies during his career.

Soupy Sales recounted a time when a young fan mistakenly threw a frozen pie at his neck and he "dropped like a pile of bricks".

Lunch with Soupy Sales began in 1953 from the studios of WXYZ-TV, Channel 7, in the historic Maccabees Building in Detroit.

Soupy 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.

Soupy Sales believed his show helped sustain jazz in Detroit, as artists regularly sold out their nightclub shows after appearing on it.

Soupy Sales briefly had a third dinnertime show filmed largely in Detroit's Palmer Park area.

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 Sales moved to Los Angeles.

In many of his shows, he appeared in costume, performed his dance, the Soupy Sales Shuffle, introduced many characters such as Nicky Nooney, the Mississippi Gambler, etc.

In 1960, Soupy Sales moved to the ABC-TV studios in Los Angeles.

Soupy Sales' fame was significant enough that he was hired as a Tonight Show guest host in the period between Jack Paar and Johnny Carson.

On September 7,1964, Soupy Sales found a new weekday home at WNEW-TV in New York City.

The New Soupy Sales Show appeared in 1978 with the same format, and ran for one season.

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 Soupy 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 Soupy Sales took the show to New York from 1964 to 1966.

On January 1,1965, miffed at having to work on the holiday, Soupy Sales ended his live broadcast by encouraging his young viewers to tiptoe into their still-sleeping parents' bedrooms and remove those "funny green pieces of paper with pictures of US presidents" from their pants and pocketbooks.

Several days later, substantial amounts of money had begun arriving in the mail; Soupy Sales stated that the total amount received was in the thousands of dollars but qualified that by stating that much of that was Monopoly or play money.

Soupy Sales said he had been joking, and that whatever real money had been sent would be donated to charity, but as parents' complaints increased, WNEW's management suspended Soupy Sales for two weeks.

One of the fans of the Soupy Sales show was Frank Sinatra.

When Sinatra started his own record label, Reprise Records, he signed Sales to a recording contract, which produced two albums: The Soupy Sales Show in 1961 and Up in the Air in 1962.

Soupy Sales performed "The Mouse" on The Ed Sullivan Show in September 1965, just prior to The Beatles' segment on the show.

Soupy Sales signed with Motown Records in 1969, releasing the single "Muck-Arty Park", as well as the album A Bag of Soup.

Soupy Sales was a panelist on the 1980 revival of To Tell the Truth; he had appeared as a guest on the show during the mid- to late 1970s.

Soupy Sales was considered as a host in Nickelodeon's game show, Double Dare, but was deemed too old.

Soupy Sales hosted a midday radio show on WNBC in New York from March 1985 to March 1987.

Soupy Sales's program was between the drive time shifts of Don Imus and Howard Stern, with whom Sales had an acrimonious relationship.

Soupy Sales had a sporadic film career that spanned over 40 years, including:.

Soupy Sales was married twice: first to Barbara Fox, from 1950 until their divorce in 1979.

In 1980, Soupy Sales married dancer Trudy Carson, who survives him.

Soupy Sales died on October 22,2009, at Calvary Hospice in Bronx, New York, aged 83, from cancer.

Soupy Sales is buried at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.

Soupy Sales' shows have aired since 2011 on Jewish Life Television and since 2013 on Retro Television Network, the latter airing once a week.