Yesterday the news hit that Soupy Sales passed away. He was 83. In my mind, it will always be 1964, or 1959, depending on which Soupy TV show I happen to be remembering.
Soupy first premiered on NY television in 1959. He came on at 12 noon on Saturdays on channel 7-ABC. I loved him immediately when he did his initial "First one here gets a box of Jello" bit, followed by old film footage with a cast of thousands of people, or even an elephant stampede, all racing to get the Jello. Something abhout him just cried out, "SMART ALEC"--but in the nicest way. The bit above is most likely from the show that was on channel 5 in NY, WNEW, which debuted in 1964. Watching it I realized that Soupy was even edgier than I realized.
Here is a link to a great blog post by Dan Brockway, which excellent shots of the show actually in production. The fact that the show was shot and that Soupy was always relating to the crew, is what made the show as much fun as it was. Soupy was making himself and his crew laugh more than anyone, and we all got to be in on the joke. My favorite skits always had WHITE FANG or BLACK TOOTH. Here is a great one with White Fang.
Found this wonderful stand-up bit by Soupy as he tells the story of the famous "Green pieces of paper" scandal, in which he asked kids to raid their mothers' and father wallets and send him money. And, yes, he really did do that:
When I was watching the movie, The Conspiracy Theory, with Mel Gibson, some years back, I kept having this sense of recognition. Mel reminded me of someone during the entire film, and I had this sense of watching someone else. It took me a spell before I finally identified who the familiar face was: Soupy Sales! I'll post some pictures and you tell me there is no resemblance!
Honestly, I really like Soupy More.
Do yourself a favor and go on Youtube and watch several clips. Then you'll be in on the joke, too.
RIP, Soupy. Seems like just yesterday I was laughing on weekday evenings in 7th grade....
If you read this blog, you already know that I obsess about the passing of time. You know that I wish I could time travel. You know that I love antiques and Ken Burns and the Oxford Project and anything that allows me a glimpse into the past.
Now that I have discovered Google Street View, I even take trips to old neighborhoods of my past so I can "walk around" a see what those places now look like compared to years ago. Let me tell you that can be fun, but also depressing. Sometimes places look very much like they did when I was living there, like my old street and house in Stony Point, New York (but the town itself is totally different) or the house my husband and I lived in in Buffalo, NY, as newlyweds. Most of the time, however, things have changed so much, I don't recognize the neighborhood at all, or, in the worst case scenario, they don't even exist, which is the case with both of the apartment buildings I lived in as a child with my grandparents in Newark, New Jersey. Gone. Empty lots. Rubble.
The discovery of Google Street View is just one of the wonderful things I came upon when I discovered my absolute favorite, MUST VISIT EVERYDAY blog: SHORPY.
To quote from the site:
THE 100-YEAR-OLD PHOTO BLOG
Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photography blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.
The blog is run by Dave, who posts the most magnificent high resolution pictures of years gone by. I do not know any personal information about Dave, except that he has some facinating looking family members whose mid century pictures he occasionally puts up on the site.
Each day, he shares several pictures, most scanned from glass negatives. Because of this, when you click the link to view the images at their full sizes, the clarity is astounding. Often, I feel as though I am right there, standing in place, a hundred years ago, or more, in real time. I look for small details of every day life, like clothing, furniture, signs, etc. I look for things that give me an idea of what even the most mundane aspects of living were like so very long ago. The size and sharpness of the posted photos allows the viewer to linger over the images like a detective looking for clues to a crime. I do that, only I am looking for clues to the past. Is the shirt soft looking? Is that a package of gum? What did they buy in the drugstore? I am less interested in the specifics of who the people were or where the shot is taken. I want small details. I am looking for that feeling of being transported over time into the spot where the picture was shot, imagining that I am there, and the time is now. I want to capture that very moment.
My favorite shots are those that are street scenes or store interiors or average neighborhoods with average people milling around. It is those scenes that really transport me back and allow me to pretend I was truly there. Perhaps it has something to do with actually having lived a childhood in the 1950s where much evidence of the early 20th century was still very much around and a part of my everyday experience. A lot of the places I frequented as a kid in 1958 still looked as they did 50 years before, so much of this imagery takes me back to my own childhood. Like now. Think about it: many things around us now also look the same now as they did 50 years ago. And now, what was common or familiar to me in the 50s, is officially one hundred years old. Time flies, doesn't it?
Make sure to read the story about the kid, Shorpy, the namesake of the blog, who was a child laborer from Alabama in 1910, and whose picture I have put above. Check out the pictures of Shorpy taken by Lewis Wickes Hine (a photographer who took a great many wonderful pictures in the early 20th century and who sadly died in poverty, unappreciated in his last years for his great photographs) and read what little is know about this little worker.
Aside from the pleasure of the time travel experience I have when I linger over the wonderful pictures, I enjoy the comments left by people who visit the blog and who have plenty to say about the photos. The comments are almost as much fun as the pictures. And a lot of these people are doing the same as I: looking for clues to the past hidden in the details.
You can become a member of the site ( which I have been meaning to do, and will make myself do today!), which makes leaving comments easier, and also allows you to post your own pictures.
The real danger of visiting Shorpy? You can lose yourself for hours and hours, going over all the wonderful pictures archived on the site. I did that several times this past summer. I lost myself in the pictures and in time. It really is the closest thing to a time machine I have found for a long time. Hey, I think I'll go grocery shopping, circa 1964. Wonder what wonderful junk food I'll find...
For those of you who have not heard read about it, this complex of performing arts center and museum is built on the site of the famous music festival held exactly 40 years ago this summer, which was not actually held in Woodstock, NY, but in Bethel, New York.
Forty years ago, I had just finished my junior year in high school in good old Haverstraw, New York. In that year I was still very immature, but I managed to see Hair on Broadway--and survive even tho I thought I would faint at the end of Act I. Here is a clip from the Smothers Brothers and some of the original cast.This song from that show played on WABC for half the year. That summer of 1969 was the summer of my seventeenth year-- a great and worry free time in my life. It was a wonderful summer, full of long hair, lake time, and lifeguards ( I dated an awful lot of lifeguards that summer, because that was when a casual "date" was just that--a date--and nothing more). It was a summer about getting excited thinking of my last year of high school and getting ready to go away to college and wondering and talking about where that college would be. Naturally, it was a summer of great music (actually it was a decade of great music, but that is another long post altogether).
Unfortunately for me, even though I grew up not too far from the location of the event, it was not a summer of great music at the Woodstock festival because I came from an old fashioned family that needed to know where I was at night and with whom. I had curfews, doncha know. Heading off for three days to listen to music and sleep somewhere other than my own bedroom? Ha! Sadly not in the realm of my growing up experience; my mother would have had the state police out looking for me, and I was not a good liar at making up plausible "where I was going" stories. So, even though I know there were plenty of kids there even younger than I who had the ultimate rock and roll experience in the summer of 1969, I
was not one of them.
Fortunately I have had the pleasure of f a) living through that whole time and b) visiting the Museum at Bethel Woods.
If you have not yet done so, you make a point of visiting this museum. This museum is not just about Woodstock, even though that event and this property were the driving force behind the creation of the entire Center for the Arts. This museum is really about the 1960s, a decade that started out like "American Grafiti" and "Back to the Future" and ended up like Gimme Shelter. To use yet another movie reference for those of you not yet alive or too young to know, think--"Hairspray" is set in 1962. That is a heck of a lot different from the whole hippie/love-in/flower children/ ambience of Woodstock just seven years later.
Our dear friend Micahel Egan was the person in charge of bringing this museum into existence and overseeing the project working with the multi-talented designers at Gallagher and Associates. The whole project was made possible by the generous upstate NY businessman, Alan Gerry, who purchased the land and funded the work with the very idea of creating the magnificent site that is there today.
Heading to Bethel Woods is well worth a trip. The museum does a great job of presenting the picture of 1960-1969 in a way that everyone will understand and will be able to grasp, no matter what point of reference is brought to the table. With a great many interactive displays it is a great hands-on experience for young and old alike, so bring the family.
Needless to say, it was a fun time machine adventure for me. I left wishing I had braved the wrath of my parents and lived life a little more dangerously in that summer of 1969. Ah, well, it would not have been who I really was back then, which was very young in so many ways--maybe even "younger" than the fourteen year olds who did indeed manage to sneak up there for three wonderful days.
Well, back to work for me. Lately, while I work I have been listening to a sixties music feed. My head is stuck somewhere between big giant rollers and Dippity-do. I must be trying to conjure up the summer of '69 once again. Not too hard when one is lost in thought and art and music of the time.
Part of me will be glad when the summer is over. I think it will be a welcome relief when I will return to 2009, which I expect to do with more energy once I step out of this endless summer of time travel.
But, until I do, I'm revving up the jukebox and thinking about Coppertone, Saturday nights, and Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida.
Edited to add: I did forget to add that 1969 was also the summer of the Moon Landing, of course. Where was I? I was in the Kopper Kettle in New City, NY on a date (probably with one of those lifeguards) watching it on TV. Thank you, Carol, for reminding me about that special summer event!
For a wonderful movie that captures that summer, the moon landing and Woodstock, check out "A Walk on the Moon" with Diane Lane, Viggo Mortensen, and Liev Schrieber (with lovely additional performances by Anna Paquin and Tovah Feldshuh).
I'm gonna make this my annual Thanksgiving image. It is the first color illustration assignment I ever got--a piece on Turkey farms for Boston Magazine back in the 80s. Again, thanks to the late Stan McCray, the art director of the magazine when I was doing art for them and when I was just starting out as an illustrator. Stan was sweet, handsome and fun to work with. Because of Stan I have had the pleasure of being able to be a professional illustrator for more than 25 years.
And that's a good segue to the purpose of blogging today. To remind myself and everyone else to be thankful for all the good that we have.
Good health for my husband and children. Family and friends. Being able to spend time writing and making art.
To the powers that be: thank you, thank you, thank you.
Been a while since I blogged. That is because I was tied up. Tied up with family and work. The family part made me get behind in the work part. And the work part was a very detailed illustration job--the latest Bones book by David Adler. Don't get me wrong. I LOVED doing this book. I love doing all his books. But THIS one was very detailed and full of lots of things and people.
One thing I have managed to sneak in is my reading, so I thought I would share some of my thoughts about the wonderful books I have read lately. Click on the thumbnails for easier reading of the book covers.
To start with, the last book I mentioned was American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White: The Birth of the "It" Girl and the Crime of the Century by Paula Uruburu. This was a wonderfully told story of Evelyn Nesbit, her life and times, and her affair with Stanford White. Get it and read it. Not sure? To whet your appetite, check out book related postings over at YouTube. First there is a great podcast of an interview of the author by Bob Edwards, in three parts. Here is the first part. Then there are some nice book trailers to music that will entice you even more, like this one, this one, this one, and this one, my favorite. All of them are a little different with with reagrd to the music chosen. but they will all make you want to read the book. Make sure to watch the videos in high quality.
Here is also another nice interview with Paula Uruburu on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC.
For me, the story has also started a bit of an obsession, in that I now search for Evelyn Nesbit ephemera on eBay, and if it's one thing I do NOT need, it is yet another obsession to hunt obsessively for on Ebay.
It also made me want to rewatch the movie Ragtime, based on E.L. Doctorow's novel which I read in the 80's. That movie is an extremely pleasurable experience not only for it's success as a film, but for it's music, which was wonderfully written by Randy Newman. I just bought the soundtrack and it has inspired my husband to learn to play several of the numbers from the film on the piano. Now that wonderfully evocative Randy Newman music is being played over and over again by my other half, Phil Newman. The spirit of Evelyn and the era is taking over the house and our summer in many ways, and the notes are on my mind when I wake up in the morning and the postcards and images of Evelyn from all my eBay purchases arrive regularly in the mail. Here is a link to the movie trailer. And here is a link to some of the wonderful music by Randy Newman, although it is linked with a video about Edward Hopper.
In addition, a good part of that movie is shot in our old home town, Haverstraw, NY, with the back of my husband's family's old 19th century house and garage in plain view throughout most of the Willy Conklin scenes. So what am I buying on eBay now? Yup, you betcha. Old postcards of Haverstraw, NY.
But back to books. Of course, reading one book was not enough. I then turned to The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family by Suzannah Lessard, who happens to be the great Granddaughter of Stanford White. It was a haunting memoir and it gave me an added perspective to the Nesbit/White saga. And so I lost myself in that.
But for some reason I next turned to a book about contemporaries of Evelyn Nesbit, but unrelated. And that was the story of Sara nnd Gerald Murphy. Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story by Amanda Vaill, is the story oft two people who happened to find themselves in France at the center of the artistic universe in the 1920's. Surrounded by people like F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and his wives, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, Dorthy Parker, and Archibald MacLeish, just to mention a few.
And that led to even more books about the Murphys and their crowd, that I have gotten my hands on but not yet read.
In reading about the Murphy's and their wonderful years in France surrounded by creative people of all sorts, I found myself thinking about the fleeting nature of the moment, or the era. For Evelyn Nesbit it must have been standing at the top of the tower of Madison Square Garden, under the statue of Diana, holding the hand of Stanford White looking over the rooftops of the wonderfully exciting city of New York during a golden time. For the Murphy's it was the south of France in the 20's, before life turned tragic for them.
This is not the first time this has happened to me--where I have been obsessed with a period of time and the people who lived it. Thirty years ago I first became obsessed with the turn of the last century when I read Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company by James R. Mellow, followed by several biographies of Collette--the most recent not too long ago, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman.
I don't obsess about that period of time--1900-1930--in England. Nor any other countries or even cities. Just New York and France. And I like to read almost anything I can get my hands on about the time.
Now here is something. I just now discovered that an image of none other than Ms. Evelyn Nesbit was used on the cover of a collection of stories by Colette. Which is a fitting discovery to end this post. Now there is a connection between two people who have fascinated me and who lived the time, albeit a connection made today, quite by accident. Maybe. Or maybe not by accident. I could get a little flakey about this and say it has some cosmic meaning. A sign. A sign of what, I have no idea. I have had this obsession for close to 35 years. I like to look for things like that--signs, cosmic coincidences, connections.
Gee. Maybe I need to make an appointment with Dr. Brian Weiss, to revisit my stored memories of past lives.
Well, more about his books on my next installment.....
Thanks to a link on Fuse 8 to a post on Children's Illustration, I discovered a lovely mention of Bil Baird, along with pictures. Boy, did THAT bring back memories.
I studied with Bil Baird in NYC in the early 70's. The building housing the theatre was in the village and it was glorious--filled with about 6 floors that included not only a wonderful performance area, but floors of workshops, practice areas, and thousands of puppets. Really. Thousands.
My classmates that summer? Lois Bohevesky and Frieda Gates. The three of us commuted into the city about three times a week to learn the art of puppetry. Lois still performs as the head of the Husdon Vagabond Puppets. Here is a shot of one of Lois' productions:
Frieda Gates, as you know, is involved with SCBWI and an illustrators event every spring.
One little known fact is that Bil Baird was the protege of Tony Sarg, puppeteer and children's book illustrator. It was the two of them who worked together in 1928 to create the wonderful helium filled balloons from Tony's designs, that millions of people have come to enjoy every Thanksgiving Day as part of the Macy's Parade in New York City.
Bil Baird's son Peter --who passed away in 2004-- was young when I was taking the class (as was I!) and he also perfromed with the group. Many of the old guard were still on board like Frank Sullivan, who operated the marionettes along with Bil in many of the old films one saw in the fifties using the Baird puppets. It was Frank and his wife who actually taught most of the classes and gave us a real understanding of great puppetry. Bil's wife Cora had already died in 1967, just a few years before I was in the class in New York.
It was a time and experience I will remember for the rest of my life. We got to handle the marionettes up on the "The Bridge." The Bridge consisted of two planks, each about a foot wide, covered with rubber and those planks were about 12 feet above the stage area. You stood on the bridge, one leg on each plank, to manipulate the marionettes that hung below. Let me tell you, it was a challenge to get up there and walk along holding a fairly large marionette, with nothing on either side of me, and to make that character on strings walk like a real person. I am afraid of heights! There is truely an art to handling a marionette that was tough enough--try doing it 12 feet up, looking down the whole time. I get butterflies in my legs just thinking about it....
My husband and I went on to work as puppeteers in the Buffalo area with our troupe,"Moonberry Puppet Theater" for about 4 years, until I started making puppets and dolls for sale, more than performance (he was always the better actor anyway). Here is a picture of many of our puppets on display during a craft show we performed at (notice the marionette heavily influenced by my time with Baird):
And here is what I ended up doing for ten years:
On a strange aside: when I was pregnant with my youngest son, I had a dream about Bil Baird and the puppets. I awoke very early with a determination that I HAD to have a Baird puppet, and I wanted to find out how to buy one. What can I say? It was the weird state known as "late pregnancy." Anyway, I went on line and eventually found contact information for Bil's son, Peter. I called. It was early, but I figured I would explain myself and see if he could help. Much to his credit, he did not belittle the yearnings of a woman about 8 months pregnant with raging hormones, although he should have. I called from Boston at about 8 AM. He lived in California, I think.
I never got a Baird puppet, although I long for one still. Have one for sale? Email me, please.
