Paul Rhymer’s Universe: A Map to Vic & Sade’s Small House Halfway Up in the Next Block

Valerie Thompson
Oct 14, 2016
2 min read

Maps will be a theme on this site, I suspect. They’re graphic, use beautiful coloring, and freeze history in time. Even without country borders offering clues in the art, the design usually provides hints regarding when one was printed. For me, this 1930s map is the best of both worlds: It’s fun to look at as well as to read and was used as a promotional piece for my favorite radio show, Vic & Sade. The Golden Age of (American) Radio (from the 1930s to the early 1960s) was theater of the mind. You didn’t have to watch a screen to know what was happening, and a skilled sound-effects artist conveyed the impossible. Although I’m Gen X, in the 1970s, I listened to a variety of Old Time Radio shows duped from reel-to-reel to cassette by my uncle. Suspense, X-Minus One, and Jack Benny were family favorites, but it was “radio’s home folks” Vic & Sade (1932–1944) that occupied the most treasured spot in my heart. I played episodes of V&S on my Walkman throughout college, frantically and frequently rewinding snagged tape back into the cassettes. As an adult, I laid out interiors for three books by Bill Idelson, who played Rush Gook on the show and admired the show’s creator, Paul Rhymer, considering him to be one of the finest humorists of the 20th century. Fortunately, a passionate fan base, many of whose members lovingly put together the linked blog, shares that opinion, and I’m grateful to them for doing all the hard work. If I’d foreseen a time when every available episode would be only a couple of clicks away, I wouldn’t have cried quite so loudly, when a squished banana somehow managed to invade and destroy one of my few remaining audiotapes back in the late 1980s.