Soupy Sales died yesterday. A childhood icon is no more.
His greatest success came in New York with “The Soupy Sales Show” — an ostensible children’s show that had little to do with Captain Kangaroo and other kiddie fare. Sales’ manic, improvisational style also attracted an older audience that responded to his envelope-pushing antics.
Sales, who was typically clad in a black sweater and oversized bow-tie, was once suspended for a week after telling his legion of tiny listeners to empty their mothers’ purse and mail him all the pieces of green paper bearing pictures of the presidents.
I used to watch Milton Supman every day. He was a mainstay of my childhood. Now, I guess he’s launching pies at the angels.
I will miss ol’ Soupy. Exposure to his inspired lunacy at a tender age has helped make me what I am today. Oy.
I watched him, too. Rocky and Bullwinkle, also. Now I listen to the old Goon Shows. R.I.P.
I have to point out, Meryl, that Soupy got his real start right here in Detroit. My brother and I would run home from McCulloch School to watch “Lunch With Soupy,” and one of my first lessons in being a minority came when Soupy would say, “Today we’re going to have ham sandwiches” and my mother would snap, “No, we’re not.’
Of course my mother, despite an otherwise very high cultural level, would watch us roll on the floor with laughter and say in exasperation, “But it’s just bad jokes and people throwing pies at each other,” and had the phrase been invented we would have replied, “Yes, and what’s your point?” And…I don’t like to brag…when I was about eight years old Willie the Worm, who lived in an apple core on Soupy’s lunch table, wished me happy birthday.
All I do is echo Soupy: “Always buy thermometers in the winter. They’re lower then.”
I think Obama watched Soupy Sales reruns. “Just go into your mother’s purse, take the pretty green pieces of paper out, and put them into an envelope….”