ARTS&LIFE BOOK REVIEW
A Beloved Entertainer New book profiles the life and work of the legendary Soupy Sales.
O
nce upon a time, a star, a superstar, perhaps the leading television performer in all of America, lived right here in Jewish Detroit, seemingly next door to everyone. In the 1950s, when school children had a lunch break long enough to allow them to walk home, enjoy lunch with their stay-at-home mom and get back in time for afternoon class, Lunch with Soupy filled a need. It gave households — those that already had the brand-new luxury of a television — a focus for their time together. Soupy, wearing his oversized bow tie and his battered top hat, interacted with his family of characters, including a mostly offscreen pair of dogs, Black Tooth and White Fang, and a mostly offscreen angry neighbor. Often Soupy got a pie in the face as reward for his efforts. Somehow, Soupy also managed to eat his lunch during the show and tout his Jell-O brand dessert. Even the littlest children responded to the unthreatening slapstick of Soupy Sales and the cartoons he showed. Older siblings and their mothers came to love his ridiculous puns and zany skits. Remarkably, while Soupy perfected his program for children at noon, he also hosted a late-night program for adults. At 11 p.m., Soupy’s On featured
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music by Soupy’s guests, the greatest big-band and jazz musicians who appeared at Detroit music clubs, sophisticated conversation about music, and zany skits mocking various aspects of popular culture. Soupy would transform himself for these skits in an instant into the French actor Charles Vichyssoise, or the Western hero Wyatt Burp or noted author Ernest Herringbone. Segregation flourished in the 1950s: Club owners presented some local venues as “black and tan clubs,” where the audiences could include white and Black patrons. Other clubs were not so accommodating. The finest musicians, Black and white, were honored guests on Soupy’s On. Club owners even insisted on inserting a clause in performers’ contracts insisting that, in addition to performing at the club, they appear on Soupy’s program. While running a show at lunchtime and another at bedtime, what did Soupy Sales do with the rest of his day? He scheduled personal appearances all around Detroit, for
LUIGI NOVI VIA WIKIPEDIA
LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Soupy Sales autographing books at the Big Apple Convention in Manhattan, 2008.
nearly anyone who asked him. Dave Usher, Soupy’s manager at the time, said, “He would average about five or six calls a day from viewers asking, mainly because of his kid’s show, if he’d make appearance at various locations. So we’d show up whenever . . .” When he announced on television that he would show up at a Big Boy restaurant or a movie theater, thousands of his followers would swarm
him. He would also make appearances at private parties, just because someone asked. Soupy explained why: “He felt he owed it to the people of Detroit.” You learn all this and more in Francis Shor’s Soupy Sales and the Detroit Experience: Manufacturing a Television Personality (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). THE EARLY YEARS Soupy Sales started out as Milton Supman, born in
