Soupy Sales and the Detroit Experience: Manufacturing a Television Personality by Francis Shor (review)

Reviewed by: Soupy Sales and the Detroit Experience: Manufacturing a Television Personality by Francis Shor Maggie Carlton Francis Shor. Soupy Sales and the Detroit Experience: Manufacturing a Television Personality. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021. Pp. 334. Appendix. Bibliography. Photographs. Paperback: $29.95. Francis Shor's Soupy Sales and the Detroit Experience is an example of transforming something we childishly loved into an intellectual project that sheds light on historical impact it had outside of one's own childhood. Shor uses Soupy Sales, real name Milton Supman, as an entrance to discuss Detroit history in the 1950s, the rise of televised commercialism pushed on children, and the history of Jewish humor and the influence it had on comedy. Shor begins with Supman's life before he became Soupy Sales. In the first chapter, Shor exposes ahistorical memories Supman has presented as biographical toward the end of his life through his own memoir, Soupy Sez: My Life and Zany Times. Shor does not completely dismiss these memories but instead provides a more historically accurate narrative of Supman's misremembering. Born in 1926 to Eastern European Jewish immigrants in a [End Page 97] small town in North Carolina, Supman most likely experienced anti-Semitism, but the way he expressed his encounter with anti-Semitism was ahistorical. In his memoir, he stated members of the Ku Klux Klan would buy their white sheets from his parents' dry goods business, but Francis Shor historically corrects Supman's "memory" through noting "KKK members were required to purchase their outfits through the organization." Additionally, North Carolina had "no evident chapters of the KKK" at the time the Supmans lived there. Shor's book is not without flaws. In one retelling of a Black man's lynching, Supman presented his neighbor, "Mr. Brown", as a victim of a "violent altercation" offended by the Black man. When this neighbor was unintentionally killed by the "violent altercation," the Black "alleged perpetrator was arrested, the KKK snatched him and lynched him from the telephone pole in the center of town." Supman used this story to communicate the trauma of living in the South during the 1930s, but the lynching he referenced happened seven years before he was born in 1919. Historical record recounted the lynching of the Black man, Powell Green, quite differently, which Shor fails to fully analyze. In Supman's account, Green was placed more as an offender instead of a defender. Through historical record, Shor found there was an altercation between Green and Brown which resulted in the arrest of the Green. After Green was handcuffed, Brown physically attacked Green and seemingly in self-defense, Green was able to commandeer a gun from one of the policemen and shoot Brown. Shor missed an opportunity to discuss Supman's perception of racial unrest when it came to African Americans and whites that could have been connected to his later chapter on Detroit in 1950s. After Supman's service in the Navy during War World II, Supman entered entertainment through stand-up and eventually moved onto radio. During his disc jockey era, Supman would become Soupy. Soupy's career evolution from radio to television is contextualized by Shor, who notes how televisions became "more than half of the total sales in the U.S. electronic industry." Shor also explains how "children's television programming went from 2.5 hours per week to a high of 37 hours per week in 1956," which opened a lucrative career for Soupy as he advertised Jell-O and Faygo to his young audience. He carefully threaded comedy with advertisement. Shor argues Soupy was part of the 1950s Jewish comedian cohort that majorly shaped "television programing and comic variety shows." Once in Detroit, Soupy began to rise in fame—first locally, then achieving some fame when his show was nationally syndicated, and eventually reaching Shor's television in Pittsburgh. Shor takes a moment to historicize 1950s Detroit. He gives a good overview of a city rife with racial inequality through [End Page 98] highlighting activists, but the chapter feels disjointed as Shor excuses Soupy's inaction to social justice as innocent ignorance. Again, Shor does not analyze the reasons why Soupy would...