No Painted Portrait (Aired January 2, 1940) and Sade Tells Gossip (Aired January 9, 1940)
This classic work of American humor was first broadcast on June 29, 1932, and by December, 1943 had a listening audience estimated to number over 7 million by Time magazine. No one knows for certain exactly how many scripts were written, but they had to number in excess of three thousand, and every single script was written by one man; Paul Rhymer. In contributing this vast body of work, Mr. Rhymer used sophisticated humor to chronical life for the working middle-class white family in the 30's and 40's in a style that can legitimately be compared with Mark Twain. Long before Bob Newhart, Shelly Berman, et al, Paul Rhymer demonstrated the art of humor through one-sided telephone conversations with characters we never hear, yet feel as if we know them.(It is my guess that Rhymer was one of the very first to use this technique, and none has done it better.) Not too surprisingly, there are still many hundreds...maybe thousands of Vic and Sade fans today. Some will admit to being old enough to remember listening to the series when it originally aired , but many others (like myself) discovered this diamond in the sea of cubic zirconium that was "Old Time Radio" long after the original series left the air on September 29, 1944.
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