DETROIT (AP) -- Soupy Sales, the rubber-faced comedian whose anything-for-a-chuckle career was built on 20,000 pies to the face and 5,000 alive TV appearances across a half-century of laughs, has died. He was 83.

Sales died Thursday night at Calvary Hospice in the Bronx, New York, said his above manager and longtime friend, Dave Usher. Sales had many health problems and entered the auberge last week, Usher said.

At the peak of his fame in the 1950s and '60s, Sales was one of the best-known faces in the nation, Usher said.

"If President Eisenhower would have walked down the street, no one would have recognized him as abundant as Soupy," Usher said.

At the same time, Sales retained an artlessness to admirers that turned every restaurant meal into an amaranthine autograph-signing session, Usher said.

"He was aloof good to people," said Usher, a above applesauce music producer who managed Sales in the 1950s and now owns Detroit-based Marine Pollution Control.

Sales began his TV career in Cincinnati and Cleveland, again confused to Detroit, where he drew a large admirers on WXYZ-TV. He confused to Los Angeles in 1961.

The comic's pie-throwing schtick became his trademark, and celebrities lined up to booty one on the chin alongside Sales. During the early 1960s, stars such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Shirley MacLaine received their aloof desserts side-by-side with the comedian on his television show.

"I'll apparently be remembered for the pies, and that's all right," Sales said in a 1985 interview.

Sales was born Milton Supman on Jan. 8, 1926, in Franklinton! , N.C., where his was the alone Jewish family in town. His parents, owners of a dry-goods store, sold sheets to the Ku Klux Klan. The family after confused to Huntington, W.Va.

His greatest success came in New York with "The Soupy Sales Show" - an apparent children's appearance that had little to do with Captain Kangaroo and other adolescent fare. Sales' manic, improvisational appearance additionally admiring an earlier admirers that responded to his envelope-pushing antics.

Sales, who was typically clad in a atramentous sweater and colossal bow-tie, was once suspended for a anniversary afterwards telling his countless of tiny listeners to abandoned their mothers' purse and mail him all the pieces of blooming cardboard bearing pictures of the presidents.

The cast of "Saturday Night Live" after paid homage by asking their admirers to send in their joints. His influence was additionally accessible in the Pee-Wee Herman character created by Paul Reubens.

Sales returned from the Navy afterwards World War II and became a $20-a-week reporter at a West Virginia radio station. He jumped to a DJ gig, changed his name to Soupy Heinz and headed for Ohio.

His aboriginal pie to the face came in 1951, back the newly christened Soupy Sales was hosting a children's appearance in Cleveland. In Detroit, Sales' appearance garnered a civic reputation as he honed his act - a battery of sketches, gags and bad puns that played in the Motor City for seven years.

After affective to Los Angeles, he eventually became a fill-in host on "The Tonight Show."

He confused to New York in 1964 and debuted "The Soupy Sales Show," with co-star puppets White Fang (the meanest dog in the United States) and Black Tooth (the nicest dog in the United States). By the time his Big Apple run ended two years later, Sales had appeared on 5,370 alive television programs - the best! in the medium's history, he boasted. He had a brace of albums that hit the Billboard Top 10 in 1965; "Do the Mouse" sold 250,000 copies in New York alone.

Sales remained a accustomed television face, aboriginal as a regular from 1968-75 on the game appearance "What's My Line?" and after appearing on everything from "The Mike Douglas Show" to "The Love Boat." He played himself in the 1998 movie "Holy Man," which starred Eddie Murphy.

He joined WNBC-AM as a disc jockey in 1985, a stint best remembered because Sales filled the hours between shock jocks Don Imus and Howard Stern.

Sales is survived by his wife, Trudy, and two sons, Hunt and Tony, a brace of musicians who backed David Bowie in the band Tin Machine.

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