Soupy Sales Gets His Pie-in-the-Sky

Soupy Sales was for me, if not an antidote to the "awkward teenage blues", an anodyne.
He came on the air with his "children's show" right after we were released from the drudgery of the high schoolMy friends and I would all bundle into one of our houses and turn to syndicated Channel 5 in New York.
. Then we were in heaven.
Of course, as many people know, the show wasn't really for kids at all----it was of the same comedy cloth of Steve Allen's anarchic Westinghouse late night show.
Its audience was primarily high school and college kids, who, as was the case with Allen, responded to the show's spontaneous, hip and free-form nuttiness--and it was live!
It was more like a show about a children's show, with Soupy knocking down the fourth wall and making not only us part of the show, but the technical crew (whose names we all came to know) as well.
They became as much a part of the show, albeit offstage, as Soupy's dogs White Fang and Black Tooth, and cute little lion Pookie.(All puppeteered by the tireless Frank Nastase, who also played Soupy's foil, through numerous characters in skits)
Half the fun was listening to them crack-up as Soupy ad-libbed hilariously or reacted to some prop malfunction or someone going up on his lines.
Soupy was the good-natured Every manchild---but, no matter how good, ultimately the joke was always on him, which point was emphasized (and, in a way, sanctified) with a reproving pie in the face.
His comic material?
Lets just say it was an introduction to the jokes of Milton Berle and Henny Youngman (or am I being redundant?)
Of course Soupy would always give his props, often following a one-liner with "Milton Berle, 1949!"or "Henny Youngman, 1953!"
We didn't care---this was the first time we may have heard them and they were funny---an education in comedic gold by way of the Borscht Belt.
Soupy's slapstick sensibilities also traced back to the Golden Age of Comedy 30 years earlier, and were informed by the greats of that era.
His show's opening where he, on a ladder tries to spell his name on a marquee, was shot like a Keaton or Chaplin silent film, complete with rinky-tink piano.
Yes, I watched the show when Soupy jokingly told the kids to take the bills out of their parents' wallets when they were asleep and send them to him--- he was suspended for two weeks and I couldn't sit down for three weeks!
Anyway, love and thanks Soupy for the joy and laughter, the comic relief, at a time when, in our adolescent angst, we needed it the most.