Tim Boxer's Column: The Success of Soupy Sales

by Tim Boxer
Special to the Jewish Week

Soupy Sales signs his book at the Friars Club in 2001. Photo by Tim Boxer

Soupy Sales, who died on Oct. 22 at age 83, was born Milton Supman in Franklinton, N.C., where his father Irving was in the dry goods business.

"The local Ku Klux Klan," Soupy told me, "had to come to this Jew to buy sheets."

He gave credit to everyone and the KKK loved him for that. They even asked him to join them.

After Soupy's father died, his mother Sadie worked 12 hours a day in another southern shtetl, Huntington, W.Va., to put her three sons through school. One became a doctor, the other a lawyer, and Soupy the class terror? After graduation from Marshall College in Huntington he went on years later to become the rising star of a 1960s television show where he made a career of throwing some 19,000 custard pies in the kisser of such victims as Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Jerry Lewis and many others who pleaded to be a target on the highly rated nonsensical children's show.

Soup, who saw himself as a straight man in a world full of kooks, told his life story - better than any obit writer could - in his book, "Soupy Sez: My Life and Zany Times." Nipsey Russell, Kenny Kramer, Larry Storch and Vincent Pastore (Pussy of "The Sopranos") came to Soupy's book party at the Friars Club in 2001 where, instead of a pie in the eye, they hurled zany jokes in his direction.

Appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, Soupy asked the host, "Mind if I throw you a pie?" Sure, Sullivan said, then hesitantly asked, "What's in it?"

He needn't worry. The pie was topped, as always, with shaving cream.

Mickey Freeman, who played Private Zimmerman on "The Phil Silvers Show" in the late '50s, reported at the Friars that Soupy's book was already in its third printing. "The first two were blurred."

Mickey was on a roll, so he continued: "Soupy, your book saved my house. I had a card table with one short leg."

Bernie Ilson, Soupy's publicist for 10 years from 1965, told me his client was the easiest to work with. "What you saw on the show was the same in real life," Ilson said. "Always on."

Soupy was hard working, getting up at 5 a.m. every weekday to prepare for a show that went live at 10 a.m.

"It was a one-man operation," Ilson said. "He wrote, planned and performed all by himself. It wasn't just for children - adults loved the slapstick humor."

Soupy once told a story about a beer commercial he did. He had 30 seconds to open a bottle of beer before the shoot, but there was no bottle opener. In a panic he called out if anybody had one. A sophisticated gentleman walked up, put his wooden leg on the table and opened the beer bottle with an opener attached to his leg.

Read more by Tim Boxer at www.15MinutesMagazine.com.

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