Soup's On

Soupy Sales

By 1952, this new world of television was really taking shape. The Auntie Dee show, the first of our children's shows, had moved to national distribution, as had Fred Wolf's Motor City Wrestling. By the end of the year, the top five shows on television were: Howdy Doody, Kate Smith, Perry Como, Auntie Dee, Strike It Rich, and the CBS News with Douglas Edwards, who also had started in Detroit.

In the decade of the 50s, Channel Seven would also launch into a series of extraordinarily popular local shows: Rita Bell on the movies; Ed McKenzie, who had been Jack The Bellboy on radio, did a nighttime show; and later Johnny Ginger, would spin records and appeal directly to teenage girls. By 1953, WXYZ was selling more advertising and making more money than any station in the ABC chain. In fact, in his book "Beating The Odds" about the history of ABC, former president Leonard Goldenson says that the network was in such bad shape that it started dipping into WXYZ's bank account almost weekly to pay bills. New York did it so often, Goldenson said, that eventually, Channel Seven General manager James Riddell just kept $50,000, the amount he needed to run the station, and sent everything else to Goldenson in New York.

In the summer of 1953, Production Chief John Pival, the man who had created most of the programs at Channel Seven, began looking for a new children's show to air across the lunch hour. He landed on a young comedian from Cleveland named Milton Supman who had been working under the name Soupy Hines. Soupy had applied at WXYZ radio and was turned down, then Pival saw him, hired him, renamed him Soupy Sales. Bill Bonds believed Soupy had a kind of magic nobody had seen before.

With the success of Soupy, Channel Seven then moved to try to keep the audience by following the show with another host. They found a stand up comic who did very raunchy shows in night clubs and whose penchant for the bottle, by his own admission, caused him to nearly melt the microphone when he said, "Good morning children!" He was Marv Welch who became Wixie Wonderland, also a Pival name. Within a year, Channel Seven's abilities and influence were being felt across the ever-growing world of the TV networks.

But the summer of 1954 was a watershed. Word began leaking to the Detroit newspapers in May that a deal was about to be cut for the Lone Ranger, which had played weekly as a WXYZ radio production for more than 20 years. Within a month, the creators of the masked man sold the entire package and rights to Hollywood and ended his radio career. That same summer, Riddell saw an opportunity to get Soupy Sales onto the network, produced from Detroit as a summer replacement for Kukla Fran & Ollie. Soupy became an instant success on the network with the Soupy Shuffle and all his little friends. Within months, Soupy was on his way to Hollywood where his more grown-up routines with custard pies later made him a national celebrity for years to come.

As success mounted, Riddell began to searching for a new home for Channel Seven. The Macabees building was too crowded. Studio space was needed for wrestling, boxing, the various shows, most of which were locally produced. ABC was doing much better but still wasn't in full swing as a network capable of sending its own programming down the pipeline to its stations and affiliates. In 1958, Riddell found what he wanted: a new home for WXYZ radio and television on a 200-acre farm owned by a doctor who had just retired from what is now Harper Hospital. It was located at 10 Mile on a piece of property almost adjacent to where plans called for the Lodge Freeway to extend someday.

Broadcast House opened in 1959, on land that was then miles outside the city's suburbs. It was the most modern and efficient television station in the country. The new location allowed Channel Seven to continue to lead the way in technology. It was the first station in the country to try to use a camera in a helicopter. The advent of video tape also brought on a lot of change in television.

John Pival saw the advantage of videotape as an advertising tool because it could instantly show advertisers what their ads would look like. They held demonstration for Campbell Ewald, Ross Roy and other ad agencies, all of whom got excited. But ABC in New York said no. It wasn't ready. In 1960, there were not many color sets in America, but RCA was developing them. NBC which was owned by RCA became the first network to move to color. At the time ABC had a deal with Disney for programs. NBC approached Disney and offered them a better one, Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. Walt Disney called ABC President Leonard Goldenson and gave him an opportunity to match it, but ABC was nowhere near ready to move toward color yet and passed. By the mid 1960s, the relationship between Pival, who liked his own brand of programming, and New York, which was developing its new line of shows, was becoming strained. But Pival was also fighting increasingly with his superiors in New York, and in early 1966 he resigned, saying that he would be forming his own production company. It never happened. Later that year, at his home in Naples, Fla., Pival apparently tripped at the end of his dock, fell into the water, hitting his head and drowned.

Pival's departure marked the end of an era at Channel Seven as the slow decline of a locally produced programs throughout television. In time, the economics would become obvious. It was cheaper to produce a show in one location and repeat it all across the country, than it is to have individual stations spending lots of money making shows that were seen only in their area. A huge change in Channel Seven was about to unfold.


This section contains information gathered from interviews with Soupy Sales, Bill Bonds, Clyde Adler, Tim Kiska and Wally Rodameer .