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"Soups:" Another memory
If you haven't seen my appreciation in today's paper, I've posted below.
But the headline from it - Chuck McCann. I caught up with him from the Friends of Old Time Radio convention - it's going on right now at the Holiday Inn-North in Newark, and ends tomorrow.
Yes, Chuck McCann. Another legend from that era.
Chuck sounds fine, and he's glad you asked. He's keeping busy and lives in LA. We had a good long chat.
I also heard from John Roland. Of course you all remember Roland - a good guy and veteran anchor of WNYW/5 who left a few years ago. He was pals with Soupy, or "Soups" as his pals called him.
John rememberd how he and Soupy once stopped trafffic outside Bloomingdale's, while the latter was telling a long, loud and very bawdy joke.
"He was a wonderful wonderful man," per Roland. "He loved his friends and had a heart the size of a Volkswagon...He was always on, always had a joke for you and was very approachable. He loved to be recognized - when people came up to him or yelled "hey Soup" from acorss the street. He got such a big kick out of that."
And the appreciation...
Soupy Sales: Is there anyone out there - from Mineola to Ridge, from Eatons Neck to East Islip - who grew up in front of their TV set in the mid-'60s and doesn't have an absolutely vivid memory of that name, of that face? Anyone? Unlikely, because for a brief, shining and (yes) even slightly controversial period,
Sales, who died Thursday at 83, was a kids' TV king, and the 75-mile radius beyond his
midtown Channel 5 studio was his kingdom. He was one of the early - maybe the first -
postmodern kids' TV hosts (before even anyone knew what "postmodern" meant) who could laugh at his straitlaced contemporaries and know that his audience would laugh along with him. He straddled audience divides, appealing to adults almost as much as to kids, with pure
flights of lunacy.Soupy Sales was the cool kids' host in a genre still dominated by squares. He played music (mostly jazz), told jokes, performed skits, threw (though mostly received) cream pies - famous victims included Soupy fans Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. - and performed a famous and much copied novelty dance, the Mouse. His most famous sidekick was a giant dog, White Fang, never seen except for a pair of
giant, impossibly expressive paws. Fang grunted - Frank Nastasi was both voice and
puppeteer - and Sales translated for his viewers. Some critics said the whole act
subverted the good clean fun of kids' hosts like Bob Keeshan ("Captain Kangaroo"). They were right. The act did. Born Milton Supman - "Soupy" was actually a derivation of a pet kids' name, "Soup Bone" -
in Franklinton, N.C., on Jan. 8, 1926, he later joined the Navy, and after service in
the Pacific kicked around local radio and TV as a comic and DJ. The big break was in
Detroit, where "Lunch With Soupy Sales" became a huge hit, and he later shifted to Los
Angeles where his show went directly to the ABC network. Relations with the network
deteriorated - "interference" from the suits is how some explained the rupture - and he
took the show to New York.He was made for the city and the city apparently for him. "The Soupy Sales Show" was a giant hit for WNEW / 5, then an adventurous independent station with a huge appetite for original programs. "There was a lot of innovative stuff [and] it was a very dynamic place," said Ted Kavanau,
boss of the stations' programs at the time. "But [the hosts] were working with nothing.
The budgets were tiny and they had to be creative in whatever way they could think of."
Chuck McCann - one of the kids' show triumvirate on Channel 5 that included Sandy
Becker and Sales - said Friday that he first met his friend in Detroit. "He was silly and
crazy and electric and alive - and he appealed to adults as much as kids, because the fathers were coming home from work and watching with the kids.
parodies on those guys." The New York run didn't last long, even by TV standards. Sales ruled the New York air only for four or so years during the mid-1960s, ending after kids TV advocate groups pressured stations to drop host-driven shows, according to McCann. Sales went on to become a game show fixture, launched another version of the kids program in the late '70s, and had a radio gig at WNBC (now WFAN) in the 1980s. But he never recaptured the magic of the early years.
"He broke through the four walls," McCann said. "He looked into the lens and went into
their living rooms and their hearts. . . . Nobody does that anymore. It's really a
shame."
Tags: soupy sales , chuck mccann , john roland , channel 5 , wnyw/5 , soupy sales tribute
