The Small House Halfway Up in the Next Block: Paul Rhymer's Vic and Sade

I got this book as a gift for my mother who grew up listening to this radio program. The gift was for no special occasion so the total surprise factor was priceless. She was delighted! A book in excellent condition that accurately reports the exact scripts from the radio shows and brings back childhood memories that arrives as an unexpected gift. It can't get much better than that.

Ray Bradbury's introduction is worth the purchase price. Still with us at the time of this writing, Bradbury briliantly identifies with the Rush character and lends us a personal link to Paul Rhymer's world. As you read the scripts in this book, your mind automatically provides the distinct voices of each character portrayed by Art Van Harvey, Bernadine Flynn and Bill Idelson. Thoroughly recommended!

Much of the current wave of interest in what now is called the "golden age of radio" is a matter of nostalgia which rarely discriminates between good or bad, real drama or soap opera, slapstick or genuine comedy. Such interest often represents merely an attempt at reliving the "good old days," so that most of the shows presently being blandly extolled have no merit other than age itself. The one radio series that almost universally is admired and remembered for its contents, its lifelike characterization and high comedy, is Paul Rhymer's Vic and Sade. Though the show began in the thirties in competition with the earliest soap operas, it soon eclipsed its rivals, until in the forties, as Time reported, "Some 7,000,000 radio fans would find life harder to bear without Vic and Sade. Those fans included such humorists and students of American folkways as Stew Allen, Ogden Nash, Hoke Norris, Richard Schickel, Cliff Arquette, Ray Bradbury, Jane Howard, Henry Morgan, and Studs Terkel - all of whom saw in Paul Rhymer a contemporary successor to Mark Twain. What is remarkable about the more than three thousand Vic and Sade shows that Paul Rhymer wrote is their timelessness and their ability to communicate without props and crutches drawn from the events of the post-depression years. And precisely because they left so much to the imagination. they can be read with almost as much delight as they were first listened to. Here in this rich selection, old fans and new ones will rediscover and appreciate a world of American life that will never tarnish with age. They will realize why James Thurber could describe the series as "truly funny," and then add that Edgar Lee Masters had said that "the Rhymer serial presented the best American humor of the day." True, Vic and Sade does evoke nostalgia; but even more it evokes an ideal which America will always harken to: the ideal of the ordinary family doing ordinary things and finding its significance in them.

Never heard of Vic and Sade? Ray Bradbury, Jean Shepherd, Edgar Guest, James Thurber, and many others praised them to the skies (or "to the collective snoots of a mountain climbing expedition" as young Rush Gook might put it). Vic and Sade was a 12 minute daily radio show that was broadcast for over a decade in the 1930's and 40's. It was 3 parts Mark Twain, 2 parts Green Acres, and 6 parts uniquely and bizarrely its own weird, wonderful sense of humor. This is very giddy, very witty stuff. When I discovered the remaining 300 shows (over a thousand shows were destroyed to save on storage space - a crime to shed tears over), I couldn't believe how hilarious, creative, zany, and breathlessly well-written these shows were. They were written 70 years ago but are so brilliantly funny and odd that I felt as if I had discovered a gold mine of humor. Surely, I thought, all of the shows can't be this good??? Yes, they are! It is difficult to explain the show in a few paragraphs. Vic is the father and a devotee of the "Kitchenware Dealers Quarterly." He has a colorful way with words and an amazing way of expressing his impatience or fondness with others. Sade is the mother and makes such puzzling dishes as "beef punkles (in season)" and is a member of the ladies thimble society. Young Rush is the son and is a big fan of such films as "You would make a most handsome husband, Chief Petty Officer Griswold" which always seem to star the same two actors and plays over at the local bi-joe (bijou). Rush never shuts up, meets the most amazing eccentrics, has odd insights into the world. It needs to be heard to be appreciated. Each line of dialogue contains amazing turns of phrase, witty flashes, and hilarious jokes. Be sure to get this old time radio series on one of th eonline auction houses. You can get many hours of the shows in mp3 format for a few bucks. Then, when you have heard them all, you will be hungry for some of the scripts that remain of the lost shows. Excellent! A great slice of the best of American humor!!