Vic and Sade

About Vic and Sade

174 complete radio episodes (34 hours) from 1937 to 1957, across 1 series:

• Vic and Sade: 174 episodes, 1937–1957

Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.

Vic and Sade on the radio

NBC / CBS / Mutual, 1932-1946. With Bernardine Flynn, Bill Idelson.

• Paul Rhymer created Vic and Sade and wrote every episode; it ran regularly on radio from 1932 to 1944, then on and off until 1946.
• The series premiered on June 29, 1932, carried by just 15 NBC stations.
• Vic and Sade began on NBC's Blue network and was broadcast from Chicago.
• At the height of its popularity the show aired on all three major networks, sometimes as many as six times in a single day.
• In 1943 Time magazine counted seven million devoted listeners.
• With an audience of seven million, Vic and Sade was voted the top daytime radio series of 1942.
• A poll of 600 radio editors once named Vic and Sade the best radio serial on the air.
• The Gook family were billed as "radio's home folks": accountant Victor Rodney Gook, his wife Sade, and their adopted son Rush.
• The Gooks lived in what the show called "the little house halfway up in the next block."
• Unlike the soap operas around it, each episode was a complete little story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
• Announcer Bob Brown described the show as an island of delight in the sea of tears, a nod to the weepy serials surrounding it.
• Radio historian John Dunning insisted the show was no soap opera, but thousands of short, self-contained sketches that stood alone like fine short stories.

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