NEW YORK (AP) -- 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 receiving end, well, you weren't a Soupy Sales fan.

Not everybody was a Soupy Sales fan. Some kids even turned off the TV and went outside and played.

I was a Soupy Sales fan. I loved Soupy Sales, who died Thursday at age 83. He invaded my consciousness for what seemed like an instant a long time ago but left my sensibility forever changed (I still have an unrequited longing for a pie fight).

Many people today may not even know who he was, apart from a guy with a funny name.

But Soupy Sales was funny. He was really, really funny if you were a kid (preferably a boy) around 10 or 11 in the early 1960s. As he migrated through a succession of TV shows on various outlets (I have no idea where he was originating when I watched him), he elevated cheap, cheesy kids' TV to inspirational levels. If he hadn't caused kids like me laugh so uproariously, he could've qualified for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Excuse my spotty memory if I only cite a few choice Soupy moments. After nearly a half-century, I've forgotten many of Soupy's high jinks, and, in my defense, I should mention that the local TV station that fed him to my small Southern town all too often featured snowy reception, so I couldn't always see precisely what was going on.

But I saw and remembered enough.

His big grin. His silly dance, for which I can still hum the tune. The sporty black sweater (did it evoke, even in its clean-cut way, the Be! ats of t hat insurgent age?), which perfectly offset the white custard dripping from each pie pressed to his face.

In particular, I remember his pet puppet dogs, who, in their clever, penny-pinching minimalism could have rivaled Jim Henson's brilliant early minimalist Muppet innovations.

I'm talking, of course, about White Fang and Black Tooth.

White Fang was a big mean dog that expressed himself with fierce growling.

Black Tooth was a very nice dog who mostly went "mmmm, mmmmm" as an imploring bid for affection.

Each dog, apart from its limited vocal range, was represented on-camera by a single paw that stroked or rumpled Soupy's sweater.

For a child to see how full-fledged, domineering canines could be rendered so sparingly had to fire that youngster's sense of wonder. If a paw and a growl was all it took to be a dog, what couldn't the imagination create!

Not that Soupy Sales had much interest (as I think back on his show) in educational matters.

And let's be clear. He wasn't so concerned about dietary matters (though few people were in those days, even well-meaning moms).

The version of Soupy's show I saw each Saturday noon was titled "Lunch With Soupy Sales," and it ended with his fixing himself a simple meal and eating it just before the credits rolled. Menu items, I am sure as a victim of that less-than-gourmet era, would have included a bologna sandwich with mayonnaise on white bread, and, for good measure, a glass of milk.

But with every bite or sip by Soupy, a comedic sound effect was added: "CAR-unch! CAR-unch!"; "slosh, slosh." He'd roll his eyes and grin with a mixture of surprise and satisfaction. Hilarious!

Then, for dessert, in a deft display of product placement, he always had Jell-O. Every bite of Jell-O was accompa! nied by a perfectly appropriate springy sound effect: "boinnnnng!" Which seemed to send him reeling with delight.

It doesn't get any funnier than that, and likely sold America's kids a lot of Jell-O.

Now I have no memory of seeing Soupy pull the stunt that brought him the most publicity and got him in hot water: when he invited his disciples to raid their mother's purses and mail him those rectangular, green pieces of paper. By then, I think he had moved to another station and I could no longer watch his show, nor comply with his request.

In fact, my last memory of Soupy - before he re-emerged on game shows and such, and seemed to be catering to adults - was an episode of his Saturday show when he was planning to blast off in a rocket shop.

I don't know if this plot device resulted from his show having been canceled, or moving to a different city, or if he was staging a hiatus with a cool NASA theme. All I remember is, at the end of the episode, he boarded the rocket and, remarkably for Soupy, whose schemes didn't always pan out, the rocket lifted off. He blasted off for his visit to outer space - or that's what the no-frills visual effects implied.

And he was gone. My friend Mike kept razzing me, "Soupy Sales went into space today!" Though I didn't get the joke. I already missed Soupy.

But as a grown-up with many decades lying ahead for him, he left me with a priceless lesson that day: It's OK to be goofy and resist outgrowing it.

I think, in Soupy's honor, I need a pie. Custard or banana cream?

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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