Vic and Sade: The Best Radio Plays of Paul Rhymer

Paul Rhymer was not merely one of the great American humorists, but perhaps one of the most important dramatic chroniclers of American folkways in the post-Depression years. In his characters, in his settings and plots, he captured the moods, the interests, the conflicts and concerns of small-town life in mid-America. Ogden Nash once compared him to Mark Twain. What the latter did for Hannibal, Missouri, Nash said, Rhymer did for Bloomington, Illinois and the entire Middle West. When the first collection of Rhymer's Vic and Sade radio plays was published a few years ago, it touched something in the memories of readers everywhere. Time found the plays "gentle, funny, low-key, and as timeless as the telephone poles on U.S. 20"; The New Yorker welcomed "a most rare thing"; and the Chicago Daily News, close to Vic and Sade Country, called it "a very lovely and lovable book." This is the second volume of verbatim scripts for Vic and Sade the radio series for which Rhymer and the cast won national recognition. Paul Mills Rhymer (1905-1964) who grew up in Bloomington, Illinois and attended Illinois Wesleyan University, spent his adult years in Chicago as a freelance writer. In the 1930s Chicago was the proving ground for radio dramas, and Paul Rhymer was in the right place at the right time to assist at the birth of script radio, as it was called. He quickly developed and became the foremost practitioner of what can be termed "pure radio," using one set (the small house), three voices (Vic, Sade, Rush - and later, Uncle Fletcher), and the imagination of his listeners to create a family, a neighborhood, a town, a world, and a time. Never was a community so magnificently peopled by verbal reference alone. The vitality, accuracy, and vibrancy of Rhymer's portraits make Vic and Sade, their life and times, universally appealing to fans old and new. To dip into Vic and Sade, is not merely to take a nostalgic trip to a bygone era - it is to recognize that the people and pastimes of small-town America are flourishing today. They may be transplanted to new places and adapted to new circumstances, but still they flourish. Paul Rhymer's Vic and Sade scripts rescue them from the glass case of nostalgia and put them right smack where they belong - in that small house half-way up in the next block. If you listen, you can hear them now....