Vic and Sade (radio program)

14th Apr 200923rd Aug 2022

"Milkman" in the Attic

“Look, sonny, we’re up here for work. We’ve put this attic off, and put this attic off. Now that we’re here, let’s make every minute count.” That was the voice of reason Rush Gook—and several million radio listeners besides—heard on the day (18 August 1942, to be precise) that mom Sade decided it was time to tackle that stuffy space under the roof of the “small house half-way up in the next block.”

Our attic, revealing the age of our house

As anyone familiar with Paul Rhymer’s Vic and Sade could guess right off, there was more room for doubt than reason that the task would be accomplished, and that, when the brief visit with the home folks was over, said space would be any more disorganized than it was before the job got underway. You could expect more order, method and sanity sticking your head into Fibber McGee’s closet.

Now, I’m not being etymologically sound here, but it is probably no coincidence that attics are just a single consonant removed from antics—and that is just what you should expect to find while up there, even if it is antiques you’re after.

Our new old house has not one but two attic spaces—and in the smaller of these we found ourselves confronted with some kind of time capsule. Only, it wasn’t quite the right time.

The graffiti on the wall suggests that construction was pretty much completed by September 1896, which was probably the last time the roof space was clutter free. Not that I want it to be barren of memories, mind.

Given the age of the house, I was kind of hoping for a family skeleton. Romantic novels of the Victorian age suggest that the darkest secrets are best kept just below the roof, rather than being crammed into the proverbial closet. Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason comes to mind, and that seminal study on the subject (Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic).

Instead, we were treated to “Benny Hill Sings ‘Ernie, the Fastest Milkman in the West.’” Not exactly a Victorian treasure—but at least Ernie’s story has the proper romantic ingredients: lust, rivalry, and premature death (a “stale pork pie caught him in the eye and Ernie bit the dust”); there is even revenge from the beyond, as the milkman’s “evil-looking” successor, Two-Ton Ted from Teddington, is denied the pleasures of his wedding night:

Was that the trees a-rustling? Or the hinges of the gate? / Or Ernie’s ghostly gold tops a-rattling in their crate?

The cleanup sure slowed down once I came across that discarded collection of vinyl, the highlight of which, to me, is a curiosity labeled “Memories of Steam.” The locomotives on the cover could not deceive anyone into expecting the tell-all record of an inveterate Lothario; but I was thrilled nonetheless, transported back to the days when, as a boy, I was given an album of collected noises that led me to stage my own audio dramas—signifying nothing to anyone else, but chock-full of sound and fury. Come to think of it, that one record may well have laid the tracks that, long and winding though they were, earned me a doctorate . . . just the kind of certificate to relegate to the space I had just visited.

Yep, even a climb up to an attic filled with the leavings of previous inhabitants leads me no further than some dim corners of my own memory. Unlike Sade and Rush, I do not have to wait for crazy Uncle Fletcher to disrupt the tasks at hand with one of his dubious recollections (“Sadie, do you remember Irma Flo Kessy there in Belvidere?” She was a “peevish woman” who “used to have a little habit of slappin’ her husband’s face in public”). I can count on my own past to traipse close behind and creep up on me.

This time, though, the detour into those mental crevices was a welcome and trouble-free one. Down below, rooms hung with ghastly wallpaper were waiting for a hand attached to my aching body . . .

29th Sep 200612th Oct 2025

On This Day in 1944: Home Folks Lose Ground to Plot Developers

Well, this will sound like a familiar story. A small house (halfway up in the next block, say) is being torn down after its long-established and well-liked owners cave in to some corporate big shots who want to get their hands on a valuable piece of property that seems just ripe for redevelopment. The transformation achieved proves agreeable enough to all; but to those who remember the neighborhood and used to stop by at the old house, there is something missing in the bright new complex that has taken its place.

No, this is not the plot of Vic and Sade, the popular American radio series that ended its run on this day, 29 September, in 1944. As discussed previously, Vic and Sade had no such socially relevant plots. In fact, it didn’t have any plot at all, which is precisely what distinguished it from the soap operas and situation comedies that came to define American storytelling on radio and television.

You might say (or let me just do it for you) that Vic and Sade was being done in by plot developers—by those who were eager to streamline dramatic storytelling into a solid row of daytime serials and evening sitcoms. In the early 1930s, soaps and comedies had been far from antithetical. Weekday serials like Amos ‘n’ Andy or Lum and Abner told continuing stories whose prevailing mood was cheerful rather than somber.

Eventually, however, savvy producers in search of reliable and lasting formulas determined to strengthen such modes of storytelling by separating the slow tease of the serial from the quick repartees of situation-derived comedy, thereby turning daytime sudsers into murky melodramas that thrived on an atmosphere of present gloom and dark forebodings.

Having no future in washboard weepers, radio vaudevillians, including long-established acts like Burns and Allen, felt compelled to revamp their comic routines to meet the demand for this new kind of zinger and laughter punctuated two-acter.

Vic and Sade, which was not performed before a live audience and which depended neither on one-liners nor on storylines for its lasting appeal, was least likely to adapt successfully to the new situation in comedy. It told stories, all right, but it did not rely on plots. It created characters by letting them go on about something or nothing at all, by reminiscing and gossiping, laughing and lamenting.

Imagine the aforementioned Golden Girls never leaving their kitchen table and forever sharing stories about St. Olaf, the Old South, about Brooklyn and Sicily. That’s pretty much what Vic and Sade Gook, son Rush (later, adopted son Russell) and Uncle Fletcher were doing, day after day, year after year.

What kept listeners coming back to the “Small House” was that writer Paul Rhymer kept on delivering anecdotes about certain colorfully named individuals who were often heard of but never heard, thereby creating the illusion, for faithful listeners, at least, of becoming part of a comfortingly stable family and their large circle of odd friends and acquaintances.

It mattered little that some of those folks Uncle Fletcher delighted in talking about sounded as if they had been brought into being in the very process of animated yarnspinning. They—and good old Uncle Fletcher along with them—came to life for the audience in that manner anyway.

When, in the summer of 1946, Rhymer did adhere to the trend and refashioned Vic and Sade into a weekly, half-hour situation comedy, the charm and wit of the small house talks was lost. Gone was the intimacy of the living room chats or porch meetings as some of those odd friends and neighbors began to step inside, filling the house with needless noise and disturbing our image of them. Equipped with the cartoonish voices of sitcom stock characters, they did not become any more real, but a great deal more irritating.

Not surprisingly, the relocated Gooks disappeared after less than three months. It was a plot that the developers of radio’s new and rigid storytelling had dug for them.

29th Jun 200619th Sep 2024

The Home Folks Are Moving In

Well, sir, it’s a few minutes or so past six o’clock in the evening as our scene opens now, and here in the garden of the small house halfway up in the Welsh hills we discover Dr. Harry Heuser setting the table for a barbecue dinner. Sorting the flatware, he still keeps an eye on Montague, his Jack Russell terrier. Meanwhile, the side dishes are being prepared in the kitchen and the telephone is ringing. Listen.

That is how my evening dinner preparations might have sounded if they had been fictionalized by Paul Rhymer, creator of radio’s Vic and Sade, a series of sketches (previously mentioned here) that had its debut on this day, 29 June, in 1932. Some sixty years before Seinfeld renovated the television sitcom, Rhymer constructed a fictive world whose four main characters could truly go on about nothing like nobody else—without as much as a situation. Like this, for instance:

UNCLE FLETCHER. [. . .] Don’t s’pose you ever knew Arnie Gupples, Vic?

VIC. Name’s not familiar.

UNCLE FLETCHER. Sadie?

SADE. Uh-uh.

UNCLE FLETCHER. Arnie Gupples worked in a shoe store there in Belvidere years ago. I’ve bought shoes off’n Arnie. Far as that goes, I could name you off a dozen parties that bought shoes off’n Arnie. Hey, Sadie, your cousin Albert Feeber bought shoes off’n Arnie Gupples.

SADE. Really?

UNCLE FLETCHER. (Stoutly) Your cousin Albert Feeber bought shoes off’n Arnie Gupples.

SADE. Um.

Don’t expect the other shoe to drop any time soon. This is as much a rumination about birthday presents as it is an occasion for one of Uncle Fletcher’s stories, yarns that became tangled as soon as he set out to spin them. For all their lazy folksiness, Rhymer’s wireless tappings of the small house have been likened to the Theater of the Absurd. In the estimation of noted storyteller Ray Bradbury, these “conversations” are “more brilliant in their pointlessness, circling around nothing, than anything written since by Pinter or Beckett.” Radio raconteur Jean Shepherd followed up this assessment by calling Rhymer’s series an “authentic picture of American life” while arguing them to be “far closer to Ionesco in spirit than [. . .] to Thornton Wilder.”

That Rhymer inspires such name dropping is due in part to his radiogenic use of the unseen and non-speaking character—the “phantom” of Mrs. Harris. In Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, Mrs. Gamp appeared to be in “constant communication” with a woman whose existence remained a “fearful mystery” and stirred “conflicting rumours,” since none had “ever seen her.”

Giving voices to only four of his creations, Rhymer managed to introduce hundreds of such talked-about “phantoms” into the small house—an imaginary dwelling fit for anyone dwelling on and dwelling in imaginings. Its architecture never changed, despite undergoing countless extensions. Like our memories, it became cluttered and crowded, familiar and bewildering, age-worn yet ever new. Here, conjured up again for our amusement, is the aforementioned Arnie Gupples.

UNCLE FLETCHER. Arnie Gupples give Gwendolyn Yowtch this fancy shoe scraper for her birthday. They were engaged to be married at the time. Well, sir, first shot outa the box Gwendolyn went to scrape some mud off her shoes with that shoe scraper, twisted her ankle, had to have the doctor, got mad, an’ give Arnie the mitten. Two months afterwards she married Art Hungle an’ moved to North Dakota. Arnie felt so bad he quit is job at the shoe store. I heard afterwards he finally married a rich woman that made him learn to play on the cornet.

VIC, SADE, and RUSH. Uh.

UNCLE FLETCHER (thoughtfully) Way the world goes, I guess.

VIC, SADE, and RUSH. Um.

Which concludes another missive from the small house halfway up in the Welsh hills.

2nd May 200623rd Aug 2024

On This Day in 1951: A Radio Sitcom Is Cited by the Chamber of Commerce

Well, I can’t say that I have been, lately. Well, I mean. My digestive system is on the fritz, and my mood is verging on the dyspeptic. So, if I am to begin this entry in the broadcastellan journal with “Well”—as I have so often done these past six or seven months—it must be a brusque and slightly contentious one, for once. My jovial, welcoming “Well,” by the way, was inspired by Paul Rhymer’s Vic and Sade, a long-running radio series whose listeners were greeted by an announcer who, as if opening the door to the imaginary home of the Gook family, ushered in each of Rhymer’s dialogues with expositions like this one:

Well, sir, it’s a few minutes or so past eleven o’clock in the morning as our scene opens now, and here in the kitchen of the small house half-way up in the next block we discover Mrs. Victor Gook industriously bending over her ironing-board. Tuesday is the time usually given over to this task, but the holidays have more or less thrown Sade off schedule. And so she irons. But there’s a newcomer approaching apparently . . . because the back door is opening. Listen.

Writing my introductions, I chose to omit the gendered address; but I hope to have retained the friendly, casual tone of the interjection.

Now, Vic and Sade was one of those shows that did not successfully transition to the radio format that became such a staple of television entertainment: the situation comedy or sitcom. Rhymer was a raconteur, not a dramatist; he allowed his characters to reveal something about themselves through their words, rather than their actions. If you, like me, enjoy the Golden Girls, imagine Rose, Blanche, Dorothy and Sophia sitting around the kitchen table, telling stories about St. Olaf, the old South, Brooklyn and Sicily—without the dramatized flashbacks. The situation comedy became popular in the mid-1940s; and it did away with the old vaudeville routines, the minstrel shows, and the quietly funny Americana in which Rhymer excelled.

On this day, 2 May, in 1951, one of the finest American radio sitcoms was being honored in Washington, where the cast performed before members of the Chamber of Commerce. The program, which had just received the prestigious Peabody Award, was the aforementioned Halls of Ivy, and the cast was led by Ronald Colman (as William Todhunter Hall, the president of an imaginary American college) and his wife, Benita Hume (as the academic’s refreshingly non-academic spouse, a former stage actress). What made The Halls of Ivy worthy of such accolades was writer-creator Don Quinn’s ability—and the sponsor’s willingness—to tackle a number of social problems, whether topical or universal.

In the spring of 1951, that problem was the Korean War and the resentment with which the draft was greeted by college students who believed to have had their future mapped out for them and now found their careers derailed, their very lives in danger. On Halls of Ivy, the resulting campus unrests were dealt with in a rather tentative and sentimental manner; but Quinn’s sophisticated prose—peppered with smart puns, metaphors, and literary allusions no other radio or television sitcom can hope to rival—make this a worthwhile entry in the annals of Ivy.

Asked to speak before the members of the Chamber of Commerce, Colman had this to say about his radio role (which he later performed on television):

I want to thank you for being such an appreciative audience and for accepting me as a college professor. Come to think of it, I can’t be too bad at that because, I believe, I am probably the only college professor in the country that can take a difficult problem and solve it in exactly half an hour. More that this, I can do it every week.

Highlighting the strength of the program, Colman was also pointing out its weakness. Today, in the post-Seinfeldian era of social irresponsibility in entertainment, the problem sitcom strikes many as simplistic and hypocritical. Of course, most of us fail to express our cynicism and anti-social rants nearly as eloquently as any of the makeshift wisdom shared by The Halls of Ivy.

Realism may lie well beyond the scope of witticisms and sentiments—but the monosyllabic insult and the actions-speak-louder-than-words approach to problem solving contribute even less in the shaping of a better reality for us all.

21st Feb 20068th Nov 2023

Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Bernadine Flynn, "Small House" Keeper

ANNOUNCER: Well, sir, it is the middle of the afternoon as we enter the small house half-way up in the Welsh hills. In the conservatory we find our friend Dr. Harry Heuser in less than scholarly pursuits as he stares out of the windows to witness the birth of the first lamb of the season. He has taken a few pictures and now picks up the phone to relate the news to his pal in the old country. Listen!

Okay, you won’t get to listen. As you may have gathered from the above imitation, I was determined to keep the old-time radio comedy Vic and Sade—but especially Sade—in my ear and on my mind this afternoon when I got distracted by the opening of an outdoors birthing center just beyond the hedge.

Being an old urbanite, the opportunity of witnessing the spectacle of a lamb being born in full view is something too fascinating to pass up. I seem to be averting my eyes too often as it is, you might think, as I rarely mention the headlines of the day, be it the rise of cartoon riots or the spread of avian flu, Holocaust denier trials or Winter Olympics scandals. Indeed, I generally have such strong opinions that it is not always easy to refrain from speaking up. Ish!

The privilege of this online journal, as I see it, is not so much to go on indiscriminately about anything, but to show the restraint that is the requisite of all artistic expression. Rather than the illusion of being altogether ungoverned, art is the reality of adhering chiefly to our own rules. So, let’s go visit Mrs. Victor Gook, shall we?

As imagined by radio writer Paul Rhymer and brought to life by former stage actress Bernadine Flynn (pictured), Sade Gook was neither a desperate housewife nor a dainty one. She was her husband’s equal, and sometimes his superior. She got along well with her adopted son, Rush, but did not always find it easy to keep her cool when confronted with the antics and outrageous anecdotes of her visiting Uncle Fletcher.

Rhymer’s imaginary small house was only occupied by those four characters; and sometimes Sade was left all to herself (something she relished, rather than dreaded). Through their exchanges and their one-sided telephone chats with others, however, listeners got to hear about a lot of different folks. Indeed, these talked-about or talked-to personages are so frequently mentioned and vividly described by Sade, Vic, Rush, and Uncle Fletcher that you might sense having heard them after all.

When the men of the menage are gone, Sade Gook enjoys settling down at last to one of her telephonic exchanges with confidante Ruthie Stembottom; never heard, always there. Unlike Uncle Fletcher’s outlandish acquaintances, recalled from the past or made up for the sole purpose of yarnspinning, Mrs. Stembottom is decidedly real.

Rhymer’s writing and Flynn’s well-timed monologue make it so. Yet, by not being imaged forth through voice, she becomes, by extension, our imaginary friend. We know her because we are her genetrix, giving birth to her in our minds.

The noisy men in Sade’s life are about to leave now. Once again we are being teased with a bit of intimacy; but, as in this conclusion to one of Rhymer’s scripts, little more than Sade’s satisfaction is conveyed. Let’s listen in as she cherishes the momentary stillness—by talking, of course:

VIC and RUSH. Telephone is ringing, telephone is ringing.

SADE. I’ll get it.

FLETCHER. (off a ways) Good-bye.

SADE. Good-bye, Uncle Fletcher. So long, fellas.

VIC. (moving off) So long, kiddo.

RUSH. (moving off) So long, Mom.

SADE. [into the imaginary telephone receiver] Hello? (warmly) Oh, yes, lady. Why, bless your old sweet heart, you did call back. (giggles affectionately) Gee, lady, I still haven’t got anything to say. It was just such a still quiet lonesome afternoon I felt like I had to talk to somebody. Isn’t it quiet though. Person runs into quiet afternoons like this every so often. Yes. (giggles) Well . . . quietness is nice sometimes. Gollies . . . I don’t think I’ve spoken to a soul all day. No. (and then briskly) Who had an operation, Ruthie? Mis’ McFreemer? Which Mis’ McFreemer? The one on South Morris Avenue or the one on West Monroe Street?

ANNOUNCER. Which concludes another interlude . . . at the small house half-way up in the Welsh hills.