As Roy Edroso pointed out the other day, most children’s programming in the New York area during the early and mid-1960s was dreck. There were exceptions: Chuck McCann, who read the funnies to us on ...

Soupy Sales. The unforgettable character of comedy. The man who was drummed off the air by the FCC when an anonymous harridan complained to the agency after a New Year’s Eve broadcast in the 1960s in ...

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts. Even though the occasion is sad, there is something oddly bracing in ...

If you weren’t around in 1965, it would be hard to grasp just what a huge cultural phenomenon Soupy Sales was at the time. This idol of my adolecence became a national celebrity when WNEW-TV briefly ...

Above (from left): Soupy Sales, Ted Brown, Frank Sinatra, Frank Hastasi, Sammy Davis Jr. and Trini Lopez. We news folks are so eager to boil stories down to the essence that we often miss the point.

If you never thought a pie in the face was funny, you just didn't get Soupy Sales. If you didn't want to splat him with a fluffy cream pie, or - even better - if you never yearned to be on the ...

Soupy Sales was once suspended for asking his young television viewers to send him "little green pieces of paper" taken from their parents' wallets. In January 1965 on his morning children's show, the ...