October 22, 2009 | 9:18 p.m.
Soupy Sales, the rubber-faced comedian whose anything-for-a-chuckle career was built on 20,000 pies to the face and 5,000 live TV appearances across a half-century of laughs, has died. He was 83.
I have to admit, i thought he was already dead. it was a relief to find out he was still alive, followed by sorrow that now he has passed. i have a special fondness for soupy as i grew up watching THE SOUPY SALES SHOW as a kid. he used to have a puppet called booby. as a child i started to call my mother booby.. then as i got older shorten her name to "B." i still call her this nickname to this very day. "B" is now the ripe ol age of 85.
Sales died at Thursday night at Calvary Hospice in the Bronx, New York, said his former manager and longtime friend, Dave Usher. Sales had many health problems and entered the hospice last week, Usher said.
At the peak of his fame in the 1950s and '60s, Sales was one of the best-known faces in the nation, Usher said.
"If President Eisenhower would have walked down the street, no one would have recognized him as much as Soupy," said Usher.
Sales was born Milton Supman on Jan. 8, 1926, in Franklinton, N.C., where his was the only Jewish family in town. His parents, owners of a dry-goods store, sold sheets to the Ku Klux Klan. The family later moved to Huntington, W.Va.
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.
Another tidbit of interest, soupy's two sons, Hunt and Tony, a pair of musicians play with David Bowie in the band Tin Machine. READ MORE-
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