Grim Reader, Oct. 30, 2009: Soupy Sales, Jeffry Picower, and Shiloh Pepin
by Michael Schaffer
OCTOBER 30, 2009 TAGS:
If the Yankees win the World Series, teammates will surely fete the hero with a post-game pie to the face. For that tradition, thank the late Soupy Sales. Obit writers this week are all over the place on just how many times the kids’ TV host was pied: The Washington Post says 19,000, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal 20,000, and the Los Angeles Times a whopping 25,000. But according to the Los Angeles Times’s account, Sales had so elevated this old vaudeville staple “to an art form” — he had a recipe that would ensure maximal splatter upon impact, adding to the yuks — that he was once called as an expert witness in the court-martial of a sailor who pied his commanding officer.
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Predictably, most obits go heavy on the pratfalls, remembering a “cream-pie-faced comedian” who “was a hit with pies and sidekick puppets.” Chicago Tribune TV critic Robert Lloyd pens an especially sentimental piece, noting that Sales’ pies sometimes hit swaggering celebs like Frank Sinatra. “We need more Soupys in this self-important, don’t-you-dare-throw-that-pie world,” he writes. The New York Post runs a page of Soupy-related letters nostalgically recalling “a time when TV was good clean fun.” Even Sales’ biggest scandal, the time he asked kids to sneak into their parents’ wallets and send him the little green papers contained therein, seems downright innocent. How many kids know how to mail letters nowadays? Sales got a little bit of real money, a lot of monopoly money, and a suspension from ABC.
For all the nostalgia, shrewder obits also note that there was something subversive about Sales. He “became a favorite of college students and teenagers,” says the Washington Post’s Matt Schudel, popularizing Beatlemania-era dance crazes and earning one critic’s condemnation as a “phantasmagoria of Dada.” With drop-ins from Rat Pack buddies and jazz musicians, notes a New York Post appreciation, his program was actually “the hippest show on television.” “The Soupy Sales Show’s set decor said ‘clubhouse,’ but the off-camera guffaws — when Soupy made the crew laugh with his constant ad libs — introduced a generation to the idea that there were real people behind the TV cameras, that this was a show, not a fantasy-world,” concludes Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker. “Well before 'The Larry Sanders Show', Soupy was busy breaking the fourth-wall surrounding the creation of TV.”
Subversion? Clean fun? The magic of the Internet lets us see for ourselves. Via BoingBoing, here’s a video of rocker Alice Cooper getting the pie treatment. And The Daily Beast, meanwhile, starts with Sales but moves on through the years in this video slide show of famous pie-tossings.
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One person who might have explained Sales’ significance was Ray Browne, the godfather of pop-culture studies as an academic subject. According to an Associated Press obit this week, the Ohio-based scholar was credited with coining the phrase “popular culture,” although the New York Times’s Margalit Fox notes that the words actually appeared in print as early as 1854. “But it is fair, and entirely fitting, to say that Professor Browne popularized the phrase,” she writes. Browne edited scholarly works dealing with everything from Batman to the Beatles to "Beavis and Butthead" — and that’s just from the “Bs” listed in a Washington Post obit. His department at Bowling Green State University offered a course on roller-coasters.
On campuses, this has been the stuff of controversy, as antagonists in the Canon Wars call for universities to banish fluff and restore the classics. All the obits quote Browne variously wrapping himself in the idea of democracy to defend the study of the ephemeral. But an aside in the United Kingdom’s Telegraph suggests the fuss might have been avoided had Browne not used that famous phrase. “If I had called it everyday culture or democratic culture, it would not have been so sharply criticized,” the obit quotes Browne as saying. Still, contemporary Canon warriors could do worse than use the quote his daughter gives in the hometown Toledo Blade’s very sharp obit: “He might not personally have liked it, but if someone is reading it, if someone is singing it, or saying it, he believed there was value to it, or at least we should understand it.”
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The week’s most newsworthy death was Jeffry Picower, found in his swimming pool after a heart attack. Picower made billions from Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, becoming a target of lawsuits seeking to reclaim money. The news accounts are bare-bones on Picower’s life: A philanthropist and longtime Madoff pal, he was initially portrayed as a victim, but fell under suspicion for withdrawing billions just before the fraud was exposed. Plaintiffs offered generally judicious reactions to the death, speculating that, as the loot passes to heirs, “there is no longer any personal dignity or desire to settle and move on.” Not that tabloids were according the dearly departed even that measure of respect. “Bernie’s Buddy Drowns in Cash,” headlined the New York Post. And that was polite compared with user comments on news websites. “HIP, HIP, HOOORAAYY Burn in Hell you filthy Shit from a pig,” declared one representative poster.
Across the country, there’s lot of attention to the death of Lawrence Halprin. This is fitting, since Halprin designed spaces from Portland to Fort Worth to Charlottesville, Va. The reactions also show the limits of traditional obits. Well-researched and thoughtfully written, pieces like the New York Times’s send-off do a great job contextualizing his spot in landscape architecture’s history. But thundering old quotes from critics (Ada Louise Huxtable wrote that Halprin’s Portland work was “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance”) are less affecting than personal interpretations from places Halprin worked. In Washington, where Halprin’s 1996 FDR Memorial is a major attraction, Sam Smith casts his mind back to the 1960s, the age when urban planners paved entire neighborhoods with the snap of a finger. “During this whole period, I only once came across an urban plan actually designed for the people who lived in the place being planned.” Yes, it was Halprin’s. “Colorful Mexican playground equipment began appearing at local public schools and children in vest-pocket parks found turtle sculptures on which to climb. In a relatively short time, Capitol Hill became not only more attractive but more fun. It was an exception, but an instructive one: how it feels when a planner works for the citizens and not the government.”
Among those getting significant play in the Obitosphere this week is progressive education reformer Theodore Sizer, who championed a more democratic, less rote version of high school. “He was the most articulate, most forceful, and most convincing voice for American progressive education in the last decades,” a colleague remembers in the Boston Globe, though the piece does at least (briefly) point out that Sizer’s vision ran counter to that of the No Child Left Behind law and a great deal of the back-to-basics chatter of recent years. … The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, focuses on another pioneer: George Lof, who created two of the first solar-powered homes in America. The charming piece recounts how Lof, a tinkerer, experimented with his own family’s house, but was able to commercialize the technology following the oil shocks of the 1970s. The initial version, in Lof’s own house, was still going strong when he died. His design for a solar-powered cooker — the “Umbroiler,” with an umbrella-shaped apparatus to find energy — wasn’t so successful.
Also this week, there are obits for Jack Pemberton, who led the American Civil Liberties Union during the 1960s, winning cases for interracial marriage and against mandatory school Bible readings, among other things. The San Francisco Chronicle recounts an attempted shooting following his opening of the first Southern ACLU office. … Oklahoma outlets, and an oddly small number of others, remember Troy Smith, founder of the Sonic fast-food chain. In good fast-food mogul fashion, he’s remembered not for culinary innovations but for logistical ones — a parking system — that turned his drive-in restaurant into a $600 million, publicly traded behemoth. … And the Los Angeles Times notes the death of Gustavo De La Vina, the first Mexican-American chief of the U.S. Border Patrol. An unassuming passage low in the obit captures how frustrating his mission must have been: “De La Vina was credited by some for staunching the flow of illegal immigrants across the border near the urban center of San Diego in the 1990s. But others criticized the consequent diversion of human trafficking to desert and mountain terrain to the east.” If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Nearly everyone remembers Shiloh Pepin, the 10-year-old girl who lived vastly longer than anyone suspected was possible after being born with a rare condition where her legs were fused together, like a mermaid’s. Pepin was featured on Oprah and elsewhere, but Grim Reader has to admit to being a little turned off by the number of obits that refer to her Youtube stardom as if it were a suitable explanation for telling her story. Predictably, there are a lot of video tributes, too.
For a cheerier read, check out The Independent’s belated obituary for John Rudd. An heir to the De Beers diamond fortune in South Africa, Rudd never formally entered the political struggle against Apartheid on his own. But by running with a mixed-race cast of bohemians, doing jail time for an affair with a black dancer, and finding himself exiled to the firm’s overseas operations for his trouble, he may have constituted an entire front on his own.
Predictably, most obits go heavy on the pratfalls, remembering a “cream-pie-faced comedian” who “was a hit with pies and sidekick puppets.” Chicago Tribune TV critic Robert Lloyd pens an especially sentimental piece, noting that Sales’ pies sometimes hit swaggering celebs like Frank Sinatra. “We need more Soupys in this self-important, don’t-you-dare-throw-that-pie world,” he writes. The New York Post runs a page of Soupy-related letters nostalgically recalling “a time when TV was good clean fun.” Even Sales’ biggest scandal, the time he asked kids to sneak into their parents’ wallets and send him the little green papers contained therein, seems downright innocent. How many kids know how to mail letters nowadays? Sales got a little bit of real money, a lot of monopoly money, and a suspension from ABC. For all the nostalgia, shrewder obits also note that there was something subversive about Sales. He “became a favorite of college students and teenagers,” says the Washington Post’s Matt Schudel, popularizing Beatlemania-era dance crazes and earning one critic’s condemnation as a “phantasmagoria of Dada.” With drop-ins from Rat Pack buddies and jazz musicians, notes a New York Post appreciation, his program was actually “the hippest show on television.” “The Soupy Sales Show’s set decor said ‘clubhouse,’ but the off-camera guffaws — when Soupy made the crew laugh with his constant ad libs — introduced a generation to the idea that there were real people behind the TV cameras, that this was a show, not a fantasy-world,” concludes Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker. “Well before 'The Larry Sanders Show', Soupy was busy breaking the fourth-wall surrounding the creation of TV.”
Subversion? Clean fun? The magic of the Internet lets us see for ourselves. Via BoingBoing, here’s a video of rocker Alice Cooper getting the pie treatment. And The Daily Beast, meanwhile, starts with Sales but moves on through the years in this video slide show of famous pie-tossings.
--
One person who might have explained Sales’ significance was Ray Browne, the godfather of pop-culture studies as an academic subject. According to an Associated Press obit this week, the Ohio-based scholar was credited with coining the phrase “popular culture,” although the New York Times’s Margalit Fox notes that the words actually appeared in print as early as 1854. “But it is fair, and entirely fitting, to say that Professor Browne popularized the phrase,” she writes. Browne edited scholarly works dealing with everything from Batman to the Beatles to "Beavis and Butthead" — and that’s just from the “Bs” listed in a Washington Post obit. His department at Bowling Green State University offered a course on roller-coasters.
On campuses, this has been the stuff of controversy, as antagonists in the Canon Wars call for universities to banish fluff and restore the classics. All the obits quote Browne variously wrapping himself in the idea of democracy to defend the study of the ephemeral. But an aside in the United Kingdom’s Telegraph suggests the fuss might have been avoided had Browne not used that famous phrase. “If I had called it everyday culture or democratic culture, it would not have been so sharply criticized,” the obit quotes Browne as saying. Still, contemporary Canon warriors could do worse than use the quote his daughter gives in the hometown Toledo Blade’s very sharp obit: “He might not personally have liked it, but if someone is reading it, if someone is singing it, or saying it, he believed there was value to it, or at least we should understand it.”
--
The week’s most newsworthy death was Jeffry Picower, found in his swimming pool after a heart attack. Picower made billions from Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, becoming a target of lawsuits seeking to reclaim money. The news accounts are bare-bones on Picower’s life: A philanthropist and longtime Madoff pal, he was initially portrayed as a victim, but fell under suspicion for withdrawing billions just before the fraud was exposed. Plaintiffs offered generally judicious reactions to the death, speculating that, as the loot passes to heirs, “there is no longer any personal dignity or desire to settle and move on.” Not that tabloids were according the dearly departed even that measure of respect. “Bernie’s Buddy Drowns in Cash,” headlined the New York Post. And that was polite compared with user comments on news websites. “HIP, HIP, HOOORAAYY Burn in Hell you filthy Shit from a pig,” declared one representative poster.
Across the country, there’s lot of attention to the death of Lawrence Halprin. This is fitting, since Halprin designed spaces from Portland to Fort Worth to Charlottesville, Va. The reactions also show the limits of traditional obits. Well-researched and thoughtfully written, pieces like the New York Times’s send-off do a great job contextualizing his spot in landscape architecture’s history. But thundering old quotes from critics (Ada Louise Huxtable wrote that Halprin’s Portland work was “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance”) are less affecting than personal interpretations from places Halprin worked. In Washington, where Halprin’s 1996 FDR Memorial is a major attraction, Sam Smith casts his mind back to the 1960s, the age when urban planners paved entire neighborhoods with the snap of a finger. “During this whole period, I only once came across an urban plan actually designed for the people who lived in the place being planned.” Yes, it was Halprin’s. “Colorful Mexican playground equipment began appearing at local public schools and children in vest-pocket parks found turtle sculptures on which to climb. In a relatively short time, Capitol Hill became not only more attractive but more fun. It was an exception, but an instructive one: how it feels when a planner works for the citizens and not the government.”Among those getting significant play in the Obitosphere this week is progressive education reformer Theodore Sizer, who championed a more democratic, less rote version of high school. “He was the most articulate, most forceful, and most convincing voice for American progressive education in the last decades,” a colleague remembers in the Boston Globe, though the piece does at least (briefly) point out that Sizer’s vision ran counter to that of the No Child Left Behind law and a great deal of the back-to-basics chatter of recent years. … The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, focuses on another pioneer: George Lof, who created two of the first solar-powered homes in America. The charming piece recounts how Lof, a tinkerer, experimented with his own family’s house, but was able to commercialize the technology following the oil shocks of the 1970s. The initial version, in Lof’s own house, was still going strong when he died. His design for a solar-powered cooker — the “Umbroiler,” with an umbrella-shaped apparatus to find energy — wasn’t so successful.
Also this week, there are obits for Jack Pemberton, who led the American Civil Liberties Union during the 1960s, winning cases for interracial marriage and against mandatory school Bible readings, among other things. The San Francisco Chronicle recounts an attempted shooting following his opening of the first Southern ACLU office. … Oklahoma outlets, and an oddly small number of others, remember Troy Smith, founder of the Sonic fast-food chain. In good fast-food mogul fashion, he’s remembered not for culinary innovations but for logistical ones — a parking system — that turned his drive-in restaurant into a $600 million, publicly traded behemoth. … And the Los Angeles Times notes the death of Gustavo De La Vina, the first Mexican-American chief of the U.S. Border Patrol. An unassuming passage low in the obit captures how frustrating his mission must have been: “De La Vina was credited by some for staunching the flow of illegal immigrants across the border near the urban center of San Diego in the 1990s. But others criticized the consequent diversion of human trafficking to desert and mountain terrain to the east.” If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Nearly everyone remembers Shiloh Pepin, the 10-year-old girl who lived vastly longer than anyone suspected was possible after being born with a rare condition where her legs were fused together, like a mermaid’s. Pepin was featured on Oprah and elsewhere, but Grim Reader has to admit to being a little turned off by the number of obits that refer to her Youtube stardom as if it were a suitable explanation for telling her story. Predictably, there are a lot of video tributes, too.
For a cheerier read, check out The Independent’s belated obituary for John Rudd. An heir to the De Beers diamond fortune in South Africa, Rudd never formally entered the political struggle against Apartheid on his own. But by running with a mixed-race cast of bohemians, doing jail time for an affair with a black dancer, and finding himself exiled to the firm’s overseas operations for his trouble, he may have constituted an entire front on his own.
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