Vic and Sade

Classic old time radio family serial (1932- 46)

"An island of delight in the sea of tears..."

Vic and Sade were a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Victor Gook, who lived a quiet life in a mid-western town. Sounds like Fibber McGee and Molly? No. Vic and Sade were much quieter. For the entire run of this wonderful show, Art Van Harvey played Vic, and Bernadine Flynn was Sade. One man was creator and writer, Paul Rhymer. He was likened to Norman Rockewell in the way he created a magically simple, perfect and heartwarming image of a typical American day-to-day life. The oddest normal things seem to happen all the time. And the names of everybody are like W.C. Fields not to mention what everybody says. The talk is golden.

Their adopted son, Rush, played by Bill Idelson and Vic and Sade were the only voices on the show for years. The action, what there was of it, always took place in their house. The sounds in the house, especially the phone, were the only things heard other than their conversations.

In 1940, a new character, Uncle Fletcher, was forced on the scene, as Art Van Harvey had a heart attack, so Vic was unavailable. He is an odd-duck, and his conversations are unlike any other in modern fiction. For Vic and Sade was considered by some of the finest writers of the time as classic literature so said Ray Bradbury, James Thurber, and Ogden Nash. Nash compared the writer, Paul Rhymer with Mark Twain. The show was a favorite of the Jordans, who did Fibber McGee and Molly, and Carlton E. Morse and his team who did I Love a Mystery. In fact, One Man's Family is probably the great classic of family serial drama, and Carlton Morse created that show.

Billy Idelson, Art Van Harvey,
Bernadine Flynn (broadcasting) John Dunning, in his On the Air, The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, gives a wonderfully in-depth study of Vic and Sade's characters and their proclivities. Many wondrous ideas are bound up in such normal neighbors.

Dunning writes, "Vic and Sade, "radio's home folks," was (though its scheduling would suggest otherwise) in no way a soap opera. It was not even a serial in the usual definition of the word. Its story was told in thousands of 12-minute sketches without dramatic continuity, the best of them standing alone like fine short stories. Each was a little slice of life, an American original, in a category of its own making, as inimitable as its author's fingerprint. In the words of announcer Bob Brown (and with a passing nod at the daytime competition) Vic and Sade immediately became "an island of delight in the sea of tears."