”…radio’s home folks…”

In the 1991 comedy What About Bob? Bill Murray explains that there are two types of people in the world: those who like Neil Diamond—and those who do not. (For the record, I would count myself among the “those” who do not—although if I apply the Blind Squirrel Theory™, I will grudgingly admit that I’m fond of “Solitary Man.” It’s a very flexible theory, applicable to music, film, television, etc.) I’ll use Murray’s thesis as a starting point to describe the two types of old-time radio fans: those who like Vic and Sade—and those who do not.

It’s often difficult to describe the sublime joys of Paul Rhymer’s landmark series to anyone unfamiliar—or familiar, for that matter—with old-time radio. For most of its nearly fifteen-year run, the show was relegated to radio’s daytime ghetto, sandwiched between soap operas and music shows—and though it was broadcast five days a week, it was not a serial. (Vic and Sade’s longtime announcer, Bob Brown, once aptly described the program as “an island of delight in a sea of tears.”)

You can classify Vic and Sade as a comedy, though it doesn’t quite meet the typical criteria expected of such programs, as historian Elizabeth McLeod illustrates:

There’s really no way to properly explain what made Vic and Sade such a unique experience. There were many other fifteen minute comedy-dialogue shows in its time, and Vic and Sade was nothing like any of them, It never had the compelling, dramatic plots of Amos ‘n’ Andy, or the urbane wit of Easy Aces, or the broad comedy of Lum and Abner. You didn’t tune in Vic and Sade to find out how the characters would get themselves out of a difficult plot wrinkle—Rush was never put on trial for murder, for example, or sued for breach of promise—and you never fell on the floor laughing at the Gook family’s wacky antics.

Vic and Sade wasn’t really about any of these things. In fact, when you really think about it, Vic and Sade wasn’t about anything. It was the original show about nothing.

To me, Vic and Sade was essentially a humorous slice of life—a rambling, funny stream-of-consciousness featuring a down-to-earth Midwestern family and their authentically odd—but nevertheless endearing—assortment of friends, neighbors, and relatives.

Paul Rhymer (b. 1905) started out as a newspaper reporter, but that career came to an abrupt end after it was discovered that he was writing feature stories about people he had neglected to interview. (Jayson Blair, call your office.) In 1929, he joined the NBC continuity staff at the network’s Chicago studios, spending the next three years in a glass cubicle churning out copy for NBC shows when program director Clarence Menser assigned him to write a family skit that was to be auditioned before potential sponsor Procter & Gamble. What Rhymer created was Vic and Sade, and although P&G passed on the show (initially, that is—they signed on as sponsor in the fall of 1934, allowing Rhymer to quit NBC and be a freelancer from then on) Menser liked it well enough to schedule it over NBC’s Blue network beginning June 29, 1932.

Mr. and Mrs. Victor Gook were an average, unassuming couple residing in an unnamed rural town located somewhere in Illinois. (Rhymer had spent his youth in Bloomington, which is believed to be the blueprint for the anonymous hamlet on the show.) Vic worked as a bookkeeper for Consolidated Kitchenware Company’s Plant Number Fourteen—and had married Sade after meeting her in her hometown in Dixon, Illinois. The part of Vic was played throughout the show’s run by a former grain salesman named Art Van Harvey, with actress Bernardine Flynn—lured to radio by its career stability—essaying the role of Sade. What was so remarkable about the show is that the Gooks’ entire town was established without ever leaving the confines of “the small house halfway up the next block.” The characters—and they were characters—in Vic and Sade’s world rarely appeared on-mike, but instead listeners learned all about them from anecdotes, letters and phone calls—such as Vic’s boss J.K. Ruebush (pronounced “Old Rubbish”) or Sade’s best bud Ruthie Stembottom (the two of them never missed a washrag sale at Yamilton’s Department Store).

Rhymer discovered early on that Vic and Sade’s concept might prove a little too limiting, and he decided to add a third character to the program in the form of the Gook’s son, Rush (played by Billy Idelson). He was first mentioned on July 8, 1932—but it wasn’t one of those oh-we’ve-always-had-a-son-but-we-never-mentioned-him-before deals; Rush was the nine-year-old son of an old school friend of Sade’s whom the couple adopted because his mother was unable to take care of him. The boy made his first on-mike appearance on July 15, and before long, listeners forgot that he was anything but their own son.

Vic came across as a curmudgeonly, bark-worse-than-his-bite sort, who deep down possessed a rather genial nature. Sade was his devoted, though put-upon, wife—sometimes a bit of a scold but with a wonderful Jane Ace-like quality (“You could have cut off my nose with a pound of butter”). The eternally cheerful Rush had a wonderful deadpan innocence, and referred to his father as “Gov.” To Vic, Sade was “Kiddo,” and he had an endless series of comical nicknames for his son, including “Pocketwatch,” “Paperweight,” and “Horse Chestnut.” (Sade affectionately called Rush “Willie.”) As with his parents, Rush’s circle of friends—like Smelly Clark and Blue-Tooth Johnson—were strictly referenced in the humdrum conversations between the three characters, the only voices heard on the program for the next eight years.

When Art Van Harvey suffered a heart attack in 1940, Paul Rhymer was forced to add another character to the program to compensate for the temporary absence of Vic. He decided to bring aboard the oft-talked-about Uncle Fletcher, played by actor Clarence Hartzell. Uncle Fletcher was beyond a doubt the loopiest of the Vic and Sade quartet, a half-deaf old codger who lived in his own little world, often rambling on at length about old acquaintances from places like Sweet Esther, Wisconsin and Dismal Seepage, Ohio. (Any anecdote related by Uncle Fletcher usually ended up with the elderly relative curtly remarking that the story’s subject “later died.”) Oblivious to any conversation, he would talk right through people and respond to any question asked of him with “Fine.” Uncle Fletcher soon became indispensable to the show, and the character stayed on even after Van Harvey’s return until Vic and Sade left the air in 1946. (Hartzell later recycled Uncle Fletcher as Benjamin Franklin Withers on radio’s Lum and Abner.)

The series suffered another major cast upheaval in 1942 when Billy Idelson entered the Navy—Rhymer, who steadfastly believed that all four cast members were irreplaceable, compensated for Idelson’s absence—Van Harvey also disappeared from the proceedings a short time due to illness—by fleshing out the show with some previous off-mike characters, like Dottie and Chuck Brainfeeble (Ruth Perrott, Carl Kroenke). A more permanent voice debuted on June 3, 1943 when another son-figure in the personage of Russell Miller (David Whitehouse, Johnny Coons), the orphaned nephew of one of Vic’s co-workers at Consolidated Kitchenware, served as sort of a Rush-surrogate.

Vic and Sade took a temporary vacation from the airwaves on September 29, 1944, but the program returned to CBS August 21, 1945 for a brief run sponsored by Oxydol. In this version, the Gook family shared the show with singer Jack Smith. Idelson returned to the fold by this time, though Russell Miller stayed around for a short period as well. The final incarnation of Vic and Sade appeared on Mutual from June 27-September 19, 1946—as a thirty-minute situation comedy sponsored by Fitch Shampoo.

Many critics have been unkind to the half-hour Vic and Sade shows, arguing that Rhymer was out of his element and that his best work resided in the program’s 15-minute format. I’m not certain I agree with this, and the reason is that I was first introduced to the series in its thirty-minute form; a memorable August 15, 1946 broadcast (released on LP by Radiola in the 1970s) in which the closing of the sidewalk outside the Gooks’ residence brings on an endless parade of idiots tromping through the family’s living room in search of a suitable detour. Many of the intruders mistake the house for a department store, my favorite being Mervyn S. Sprawl—who’s anxious to buy “some of them peanuts with the chocolate smeared on the outside.” Naturally, the absurdity of this situation begins to take its toll on Vic, who’s unfortunately chosen this particular day to bring home some work from the office. My admiration for the talents of Paul Rhymer soon emerged after listening to this show, much in the way that I discovered the absolute joys of Buster Keaton by watching his Columbia two-reelers (considered to be the nadir of his career) as a kid. (It wouldn’t be until my early 30s that I experienced his classic silent shorts and feature films, thus illustrating that the genius of both men existed even in what people consider their poorest work.)

Admirers of Rhymer have often compared and contrasted his scripts to the classic works of Charles Dickens, and I think that is borne out from the memorable names Rhymer concocted for his motley cast of unseen characters: Jake Gumpox, Hank Gutstop, and the classic Rishigan Fishigan of Sishigan, Michigan (he married Jane Bayne from Paine, Maine, by the way). Among the notables who considered themselves fans of the show: Ray Bradbury, James Thurber, Ogden Nash, Jean Shepherd, Sherwood Anderson, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Fibber McGee & Molly’s Jim and Marian Jordan—two individuals who knew a thing or two about life in Illinois—and Lum and Abner’s Chet Lauck and Norris Goff were also among the program’s devotees; legend even has it that I Love a Mystery creator Carlton E. Morse kept a Radio Life interviewer waiting for 15 minutes one time while he and his crew finished listening to Rhymer’s program.

This evening, I reveled in a CD containing four 15-minute episodes of Vic and Sade, the first show having been originally heard October 27, 1942. Rhymer, in this broadcast, manages to mine laughs out of such a simple thing as Vic reading some of the suggestions for the boss’ Christmas gift to Sade. Following that was a December 7, 1942 episode in which Rush asks his parents for permission to skip school:

RUSH: My Sunday school teacher is gonna tear up the street…
SADE: What’s this now…???
RUSH: My Sunday school teacher, Miss Nagle, is going to tear up Lee Street—alone and single-handed…
SADE: Well, the trash you come home with…a person wouldn’t believe the wild nonsense…
RUSH: It’s not trash, and it’s not wild nonsense…it’s the absolute truth, or I don’t stand seven feet high...you know where Miss Nagel lives there, on Lee Street…
SADE: Yeah…
RUSH: The block between Market and Monroe…
SADE: Uh-huh…
RUSH: Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, Miss Nagle starts to work, tearin’ up that block…
VIC: She’s a destructive lady…
RUSH: As far as I know, she’s the only lady in the history of the world that ever tore up a city street…and single-handed! (Pause) I see you people have got skeptical expressions on your faces…but in a minute, you’ll realize that…
(SFX: phone rings)
SADE (in a sing-song voice) Telephone’s ringing…telephone’s ringing…
RUSH: More likely it’s Blue-Tooth Johnson…
SADE: Or Ruthie…I haven’t seen or heard from her all day…
VIC: It might be some beautiful woman, heavily veiled and greatly agitated, that yearns for the love of ol’ Vic Gook…
RUSH (answering the phone): Hello? Ah yes, Blue-Tooth (to his parents) Blue-Tooth Johnson…

During his conversation, Sade mentions to Vic that she has a craving for apples, providing a wacky counterpoint to Rush’s conversation with his friend. In fact, Rush will talk to Blue-Tooth three times during the episode’s short time-span, while continuing to convince his parents to let him skip school to watch his Sunday school teacher’s amazing feat (“She’s all beef, you know…strictly all beef.”)

The third episode (from January 7, 1943) is equally loopy, as Vic rants about Fred Stembottom (Ruthie’s husband and the bane of Vic’s existence) when Fred expresses an interest in joining Vic’s lodge (Vic belonged to the Sacred Stars of the Milky Way, Drowsy Venus Chapter—he was the Exalted Big Dipper). Uncle Fletcher attempts to hijack the conversation by rambling on about an old friend who was accused of marrying a 35-year-old woman. Finally, in the last episode I previewed (July 23, 1943), Russell Miller makes an appearance as he, Vic, and Uncle Fletcher sit around on the Gooks’ front porch; Vic inquiring as to where he could go to get his lodge robe altered. I know many of you are thinking right now—what in blue blazes is entertaining about that? I love listening to the rhythms in the characters’ speeches and the way Rhymer is able to capture how real individuals talk (many times, the characters are unable to finish their sentences, just as in real life).

There are, as of this post, more than 200 recordings of Vic and Sade available for modern-day OTR listeners, although many are in questionable sound quality and often have no openings or closings. (For a log on just which shows are available, Dick Judge has the particulars here.) Procter & Gamble destroyed close to 3,000 discs shortly after World War II, a true act of jaw-dropping stupidity that defies forgiveness. (Historian John Dunning cheekily remarked: “All we can do at this late date is hope that the space formerly used to house those wonderful transcriptions made some indifferent company bureaucrat a comfortable office.”) But OTR fans are indeed fortunate in that the written record of Rhymer’s work still stands, thanks both to his and his wife’s efforts (two collections of his scripts were released in the 1970s, with forwards by Ray Bradbury and Jean Shepherd) in getting it placed. Until then, we must make do with what we have—which is to be continually entertained by one of the most unique programs ever to appear during the Golden Age of Radio.