Paul Mills Rhymer was born in Fulton, Illinois, in 1905. Shortly thereafter his family moved to Bloomington, Illinois where he grew up, attended Bloomington High School and won the school's Merwin Cup award for short story writing. He was president of the Bloomington High Short Story Club and wrote for the humorous department of Aegis, the school's year book. After graduation he attended Illinois Wesleyan University, withdrawing after his junior year. At Illinois Wesleyan he was active in Sigma Chi fraternity and several literary clubs, including the Bookfellows and the Black Bookmen. While a sophomore, he sold his first story “Hen” to the magazine College Humor.
After leaving college, Rhymer held a succession of jobs, including taxi-cab driver, magazine salesman, and newspaper reporter. He was discharged from the latter position for writing fictitious news interviews rather than doing the required leg-work.
In 1929 Paul Rhymer joined the Chicago NBC continuity staff where, along with other shows, he created and wrote the radio programs Keystone Chronicle and Vic and Sade, the program that established his reputation. The assignment to write a “family show” for an audition for Proctor and Gamble resulted in the first Vic and Sade scripts in 1932. However, it was not until 1934, after Vic and Sade had had local sustaining and sponsored runs (Jelke Margarine was one) in various time slots, that Proctor and Gamble picked up the show for the daily network where it ran uninterruptedly from November of 1934 to December 7th of 1945. The author, on the occasion of the P&G sponsorship, left the staff of NBC and remained a free lance writer for the rest of his career.
Vic and Sade was one of the few humorous daytime serials to achieve popularity in a time when melodramas dominated the soap opera scene. Its plot consisted solely of the daily trials and tribulations of Victor Gook, his wife Sade, and their adopted son, Rush. The show was unusual in that although secondary characters were vividly personified, no voices were ever heard other than Vic, Sade, and Rush until the addition, many years later, of another central character, Uncle Fletcher. Art Van Harvey, Bernadine Flynn, and William Idelson became widely known for their roles as Vic, Sade and Rush. Clarence Hartzell played the role of Uncle Fletcher.
During his career, Mr. Rhymer won many awards for Vic and Sade. In 1936 it was voted the best-written program on radio. In 1938 radio artists voted Rhymer as best script writer and the Hearst radio editors' poll showed Vic and Sade in first place for daytime serials. In 1940 the Motion Picture Daily called it the best daytime serial.
In 1933 Paul Rhymer married Mary Frances Murray whom he had met at Illinois Wesleyan. A son, Paul Parke Rhymer, was born in 1937.
