— I can’t take the loss of many more of my childhood icons; Captain Kangaroo has passed on, and now also Soupy Sales at age 83. Soupy in my opinion has never gotten the credit or recognition that he deserved; a comedian of television, radio, and film born Milton Supman, Soupy drew heavily from slapstick and also used word play and improvisation. His comedy wasn’t always sophisticated, but it could be clever and was always funny; taking a pie in the face was a stock in trade, and Soupy estimated that he and his visitors took 20,000 pies in the course of his career. Soupy was big at the time in the New York area where I grew up in to the extent that kids would imitate him and do his routines.
Soupy had furry elements; two of the visitors to his shows were dogs called White Fang and Black Tooth, who appeared at his door as giant shaggy paws with felt triangular claws. White Fang spoke with unintelligible growls and grunts which Soupy repeated back to his audience in English; Black Tooth was also unintelligible, but was into giving loud and sloppy kisses to Soupy off-camera. Then there was Pookie the Lion, a hip character prone to appearing in Soupy’s window who you could understand. – -Soupy even had a novelty dance record and song called The Mouse which was wildly popular in the mid-1960’s!- –Hey!–Do the Mouse, Yeah! I last saw Soupy on game shows, those last retreats of celebrities past their popularity prime. Even then, he was funny, using his improv talents to transcend the medium and material that he had to work with.
As Soupy was influenced by the Marx Brothers, so he also influenced other comedians including Andy Kaufman and Paul Reubens; if you twist and press Soupy’s persona, you get Pee-wee Herman! Soupy was an earlier prototype of the cheerfully demented childrens’ TV show host, filled with manic energy. All of these comics realized that much comic inspiration can be drawn from childhood, which can be darker and more twisted than many realize…
Thank you, Soupy, for all the laughter and the furry undertones! To quote lyrics from The Mouse, “every cat in the neighborhood will be in shock.”
Cats, you see, loved Soupy Sales, and will miss him as will I…
– -You don’t often hear about blue whales washing ashore, but one did on the Northern California coast near Fort Bragg Monday night. 
– -A bear walked into a beer department in Wisconsin…no, it really happened last Thursday! The 125-pound black bear wandered into a Hayward grocery store, went up and down the aisles, and then decided to check out the bruin, going into the beer cooler in the liquor department, and climbing twelve feet up onto a shelf! No other customers were in the store at the time, and the single store clerk just kind of blocked things off and summoned authorities.
– – Goats are going through a bit of a renaissance lately…there’s a wonderful new Thera-gesic arthritis commercial with an old woman extolling the virtue of goat tears 
— Jazz musicians have often been called cats, and Nora is literally that. This gray tabby cat was adopted from a shelter in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and when a year old climbed up onto the bench in front of a Yamaha piano in the middle of the night and began to play! She has continued to tickle the ivories on a daily basis, at times playing duets with her owner and her owner’s students; she also plays alone, gravitating towards the D-E-F range on the keyboard, and including the black keys in her playing. 
– – A rare vegetarian spider has been found in Central America! Most spiders are strictly predators, living on insects and other animals. Bagheera kiplingi is about the size of a person’s pinky nail, and is a jumping spider who lives on acacia shrubs.
— A 27-year-old Canadian man was mauled early last Monday by a Siberian tiger after he and a friend broke into the Calgary Zoo and scaled an outer perimeter fence around the animal’s exhibit. While seriously injured, the man is expected to recover, and his friend was not hurt.
— In Sacramento, California animal control officers seized 77 cats from a home in one of the worst animal hoarding cases seen in that county. Cat cages were stacked floor to ceiling with animals roaming everywhere and feces caked around the home…the homeowners say that they were taking good care of the cats…right!
– – Warning: Some Adult Topic Matter. The Supreme Court has been asked to rule on a law with furry 
– – Hope you weren’t eating department: A farmer in Bangladesh won a 14″ color television awarded by the government for killing the most rats; 83,000. He didn’t kill that many in pursuit of the TV prize; that was an unexpected ‘bonus.” Most of the rats were killed by poisoning; he collected their tails as proof… 
FOXSYLVANIA 
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