Soupy Sales

Milton Supman was born on January 8, 1926, in Franklinton, North Carolina, to Irving Supman, a Jewish dry goods merchant who had emigrated from Hungary in 1894, and Sadie Berman Supman. The family was the only Jewish household in town. Known professionally as Soupy Sales, Supman built a career as a comedian, actor, radio and television personality, and jazz enthusiast before his death on October 22, 2009.

The stage name Soupy Sales developed in stages. In his youth, mispronunciations of his surname Supman as "Soupman" and "Soupbone" were shortened to "Soupy." When he began working as a disc jockey, he adopted the name Soupy Hines, but that surname was later dropped because of its proximity to the Heinz soup brand. He settled on Sales partly as a nod to vaudeville comedian Chic Sale. Sales graduated from Huntington High School in Huntington, West Virginia, in 1944 and subsequently enlisted in the United States Navy, serving aboard USS Randall in the South Pacific during the final period of World War II. He entertained fellow sailors by performing characters and telling jokes over the ship's public address system, including a character called White Fang, whose sounds were drawn from a recording of The Hound of the Baskervilles. After his service, Sales enrolled at Marshall University, then known as Marshall College, where he earned a master's degree in journalism and performed in nightclubs as a comedian, singer, and dancer.

Following graduation, Sales worked as a scriptwriter and disc jockey at radio station WHTN in Huntington before relocating to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1949. There he served as a morning radio DJ and performed in nightclubs, and he launched his television career at WKRC-TV with Soupy's Soda Shop, television's first teen dance program, and Club Nothing!, a late-night comedy and variety program. His signature vehicle, the children's television program originally titled 12 O'Clock Comics and later known as Lunch with Soupy Sales and The Soupy Sales Show, began in 1953 at WXYZ-TV in Detroit. The show was built on improvised, slapstick comedy sketches, rapid-fire gags, and puns, and it became identified with Sales receiving pies in the face. He claimed that he and his guests absorbed more than 20,000 pies over the course of his career. A Saturday edition of the program was broadcast nationally on ABC beginning no later than July 4, 1955.

During the Detroit years, Sales also hosted a nighttime program, Soupy's On, which featured jazz musicians as guests at a time when the city supported 24 jazz clubs. Performers including Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, and Miles Davis appeared on the show. Sales credited the program with helping sustain jazz in Detroit, as artists regularly sold out nightclub engagements after their appearances. Clifford Brown's appearance on Soupy's On is believed to be the only surviving footage of Brown and was included in Ken Burns' Jazz as well as an A&E Network biography of Sales.

In 1960, Sales moved his program to ABC-TV studios in Los Angeles. After ABC canceled the show in March 1961, it continued locally on KABC-TV until January 1962 and briefly returned to the ABC network as a late-night fill-in for The Steve Allen Show in 1962 before being canceled after three months. His prominence during this period was sufficient for him to serve as a guest host on the Tonight Show during the interval between Jack Paar and Johnny Carson. On September 7, 1964, Sales brought the show to WNEW-TV in New York City, where it ran locally until September 2, 1966, with Screen Gems syndicating 260 episodes to stations outside the New York market during the 1965–66 season. Guest appearances during the New York run included Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Jerry Lewis, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis Jr., the Shangri-Las, The Supremes, and The Temptations. Sales was the subject of a feature article in the May 14, 1965, issue of Life magazine. A revival, The New Soupy Sales Show, was taped at KTLA in Los Angeles in 1978 and ran for one season, with 65 episodes syndicated in early 1979.

Sales extended his work to Broadway in 1967, appearing in Come Live With Me. From 1968 to 1975, he was a regular panelist on the syndicated revival of What's My Line? and made appearances on several other television game shows. During the 1980s, he hosted his own radio program on WNBC in New York City.