Soupy Sales and the Detroit Experience

When Soupy Sales left Detroit in 1960 after seven years on WXYZ TV, he was the highest-paid local television personality and one of the most well-known and loved celebrities in town. His daytime television programs in the early morning and noontime had an enormous and devoted following. The latter, Lunch with Soupy Sales, was nationally syndicated on ABC on Saturday, starting in the fall of 1959. His late evening program, Soupy’s On, featured everything from renowned jazz artists to pop singers to satirical skits. While he would achieve more celebrity status in Los Angeles and New York during the 1960s, the template for the puppet characters, comedy routines, and zany sketches had been set in Detroit.

This study of the content and context of Soupy’s time on WXYZ TV provides important insights into key threads of popular culture in the 1950s, including the role of television and its impact on the family and children, the influence of Cold War and consumerist ideology, Jewish-inflected humor, and jazz, especially as a component of the Detroit socio-cultural history in this period. All of these seemingly disparate topics, however, lead back to identifying the manufacturing of a television personality at a particular moment in time and in a specific location.

Beyond the network of Soupy fans, anyone interested in how a television personality achieves local and national prominence should consider reading this book. Also, those who want to understand the role of the media and popular culture in the 1950s will be enlightened, and even entertained, by this exploration of Soupy Sales’ Detroit experience.