You know who that man is? Probably not…not by his face, anyway. But you might know his voice and hands. That's the late, great Clyde Adler, a very funny gent whose main line of work at one point was chopping up old movies for TV at the ABC affiliate in Detroit. But Clyde had another career: He was also an actor and he was the other half of the cast of the various shows that Soupy Sales did in Motown and in Los Angeles in the late fifties/early sixties. Soupy's was (usually) the only on-camera face. You only saw Clyde's hands and arms as he played White Fang, Black Tooth, Pookie, Hippie and all those weird people who'd come to Soupy's door and, as often as not, hit him in the face with a pie. Clyde was the Sandy Koufax of meringue-hurling, and he was also very funny.
When Soupy relocated to New York in 1964, Clyde elected not to make the move and, instead, returned to the editing room in Detroit. Frank Nastasi assumed the role of Soupy's off-camera confederate but when Soupy briefly resurrected his program in '80, he persuaded Clyde to recreate his old roles. Some of this is covered in an article available on this site which can be reached via this link.
In our previous "news item," I plugged a new Soupy CD which is available from www.rhinohandmade.com and which contains the contents of his first two record albums. I neglected to mention that Clyde was also heard on those albums, playing the perfect Abbott to Soupy's Costello. I'm almost glad I forgot to mention him because it gives me an excuse to run this photo, which was e-mailed to me by Ed Golick. Pictures of Clyde are extremely rare and I'm grateful to Ed for sharing. (It's from an unsold pilot that Soupy made called Where There's Smokey, in which he played an inept fireman and Clyde played his superior.)