35-04-01 Lodge Robe Is Missing

STARRING: ART VAN HARVEY, BERNARDINE FLYNN AND BILL IDELSON

• Sade's on the phone, anxious and distressed.  Rush arrives home.  She swears him to secrecy – she lent out Vic's star-spangled lodge robe to Mr. Gumpox, who needed a costume for a masquerade party last Saturday night.  She gave it to him Saturday morning, never dreaming Vic would need it before the middle of the month.  Vic had phoned Sade to say he'd be home at about 4:45 to pick up his robe.  She's been trying, with no luck, to get Gumpox on the phone.
• Vic arrives home in a foul mood because on the way home he ran into Mr. Drummond ("the fathead!") who claims "a guy can hit harder with his arm than a guy can kick with his leg."
• Rush continues to try to connect with Mr. Gumpox while Vic rattles on about Drummond.
• Sade asks why the lodge fellas are dressing up tonight.  Vic says he told her last Wednesday – they're puttin' on the works for Clemmy Shoemaker and C.J. Ferris.
• Rush enters, telling Sade, "Everything's Jake."  Then he begins to tell Vic an anecdote about an event at the corner of Main and Jefferson Streets.  Vic goes off to look for his robe.  Rush tells Sade that Mr. Gumpox is coming by taxi, and he'll come to the back door and Sade will need to stall off Vic.
• Vic begins to get suspicious. The doorbell rings and Rush goes to answer it.  He calls to Sade that he found Vic's robe in the ice-box.
• Vic wants to know what it was doin' in the ice-box.  Sade makes a feeble excuse.  The robe is wrapped up, and inside it is a raspberry pie and a card.
• Vic reads: "Am sending you this pie to show my thanks.  The costume worked out fine, an' I was the funniest-looking man at the party."
• Vic wants an explanation.  Sade tries, but fails, to come up with a plausible reason.  Rush tries to help explain.  Vic cuts him off.
• Vic: "Sade, how come the doorbell rings an' Rush comes back with my lodge robe all wrapped up with a raspberry pie an' says they been in the ice-box?  How come there's a card in somebody else's handwritin' about a funny-lookin' costume?  How come this ice-box business?  How come this pie?  How come this card?  How come everybody been stallin' me off for twenty minutes?  How come… (fades out)"
  - compiled by Barbara Schwarz, edited by Jimbo Mason 

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I wonder if writer Paul Rhymer realized what a gold mine he had opened up when he put Vic in the lodge?  There's no telling how many dozens or even hundreds of scripts were devoted to the lodge and lodge activities.

To date, all things that involve the lodge have gone wrong for Vic, save the fact that he was elected the "big muck-an-muck" (Exalted Big Dipper) and his friend Hank Gutstop was elected Little Dipper.

The shenanigans with the lodge started in 1934: he's had his picture in the paper and it was all blurred (and his name was wrong), he and his lodge brothers got thrown in jail for singing Christmas carols, when his Big Dipper robe arrived he had no place to wear it but a horse's funeral, he gets his sword in the mail and it's way too big and heavy to be of any use to him and now his robe has been borrowed and it's been found in the ice box.  (There was another episode in 1939 where all of Vic's lodge regalia - including his robe [but not his heavy sword] - was lent out. )

When Rush yells to Sade, "Everything's Jake!", he said this because Mr. Gumpox's first name happens to be 'Jake' - something that was never revealed in the audio episodes.

While Mr. Drummond is a source of irritation to Vic, I have found in the notes I have that his son 'Bulldog' is Rush's number one enemy.

Mr. Gumpox seems to enjoy wearing lodge regalia as he and Howard once wore Ike Kneesuffer's discarded regalia that he had picked up on his garbage route.