with Soupy's Soda Shop, TV's first teen dance program, and Club Nothing!, a late-night comedy/variety program. Lunch with Soupy Sales Sales is best known for his daily children's television show, Lunch with Soupy Sales. It was originally called 12 O'Clock Comics, and later known as The Soupy Sales Show. Improvised and slapstick in nature, it was a rapid-fire stream of comedy sketches, gags and puns, almost all of which resulted in Sales receiving a pie in the face, which became his trademark. He developed pie-throwing into an art form: straight to the face, on top of the head, a pie to both ears from behind, moving into a stationary pie, and countless other variations. He claimed that he and his visitors had been hit by more than 20,000 pies during his career. He recounted a time when a young fan mistakenly threw a frozen pie at his neck and he "dropped like a pile of bricks". History Detroit Lunch with Soupy Sales began in 1953 from the studios of WXYZ-TV, Channel 7, in the historic Maccabees Building in Detroit. Sales occasionally took the studio cameras to the lawn of the Detroit Public Library, across the street from the studios, and talked with local students walking to and from school. Beginning no later than July 4, 1955, a Saturday version of Sales' lunch show was broadcast nationally on the ABC television network. His lunchtime program on weekdays was moved to early morning opposite Today and Captain Kangaroo. During the same period that Lunch with Soupy Sales aired in Detroit, Sales also hosted a nighttime show, Soupy's On, to compete with 11 O'Clock News programs. The guest star was always a musician, often a jazz performer, at a time when jazz was popular in Detroit and the city was home to 24 jazz clubs. Sales believed his show helped sustain jazz in Detroit, as artists regularly sold out their nightclub shows after appearing on it. Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Stan Getz were among the musicians who appeared on the show; Miles Davis made six appearances. Clifford Brown's appearance on Soupy's On, according to Sales, may be the only extant footage of Brown, and has been included in Ken Burns' Jazz and an A&E Network biography about Sales. Sales briefly had a third dinnertime show filmed largely in Detroit's Palmer Park area. His three shows were