38-xx-xx Sade Thinks Baseball is Just a Game

STARRING: ART VAN HARVEY, BERNARDINE FLYNN AND BILL IDELSON

Sade and Rush witness Vic in the alley arguing with Mr. Drummond.  Without hearing the argument, Rush surmises the argument is about baseball.

Sade doesn't understand why two grown men would put all that energy into arguing about baseball.  They both want to buy gloves so they can play catch - but they both want to pitch.

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Rarely does anyone want to play catcher.  In the 1930's, the catcher was usually the worst hitter and the slowest, fattest guy on the team. The catcher's equipment has always been known as the tools of ignorance. Technically, the catcher isn't even in fair territory - he's behind home plate in foul territory.

The pitcher on the other hand, is usually your best or second best athlete on the field.  The pitcher is the one with the ball - he controls everything out there on the field.

We know Vic played baseball on a team in Normal, Illinois.  In this episode, he seems to claim he was at his pitching peak when he played in Dixon. In another episode, he claims to have played in the Yukon (Canada.)

When Vic and Rush say that "baseball is science" - it really is.  There's a whole field of mathematics associated it with it now, called Sabermetrics.  Thanks to the internet, Sabermetrics has taken off and even junior high school kids today know some frighteningly long math formulas that have to do with baseball.

Aside from that, a baseball diamond itself is a mathematical hodge-podge of such precision, you wonder if it wasn't built by Masons.  Perhaps this is why Vic, the lodge member, loves the game so much.

Baseball is science.

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.

34-11-21 Washing Machine on the Blink

STARRING: ART VAN HARVEY, BERNADINE FLYNN AND BILL IDELSON

Sade has trouble with the washing machine - it keeps shocking her - and so she calls Vic (and Rush) to have a look at it.

Vic and Rush, who probably don't really know how to fix the machine, decide instead to have fun shocking each other and Sade.

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This one is lots of fun because there just happens to be a video where CBN University's student film department recreated the script!

A little Sadism and Masochism from Paul Rhymer.

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37-03-15 Is Charley Dead?

STARRING: ART VAN HARVEY, BERNARDINE FLYNN AND BILL IDELSON 

Sade comes home with a rumor that Charlie Razorscum is dead of a heart problem on the second floor of Yamilton's!  Mis' Appelrot wouldn't lie!

But wait!  Rush just saw him minutes ago out changing his tire.  Talked to him, even.

SEE THE SCRIPT

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This is a perfect example of Sade and her gossiping ways possibly causing a chaotic event.  Fortunately for her, Rush had just seen Charlie Razorscum outside on his way home from school or Sade would have surely phoned Ruthie and told her and the situation might have gotten totally out of control.

Perhaps a man did die on the second floor of Yamilton's this day but it doesn't appear it was Charlie Razorscum.

At the beginning of the episode, Rush is reading from a book where Captain Charles Chalmers - rather than Third Lieutenant Clinton J. Stanley - is the hero.  His exploits are similar to the stalwart Third Lieutenant Stanley; he hides inside the skin of a dead elephant and in another scene from the book, trips over a boa constrictor and falls in a lagoon filled with crocodiles.