Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One by Zev Chafets

intellectuals.
    Limbaugh put out job feelers, but he got only one offer, from Neenah, Wisconsin. After having been in a top-10 national radio market, even Cape sounded better than Neenah. He hitched a U-Haul trailer to his Buick Riviera and drove home. For the next seven months he lived with his parents, umpired Little League for five dollars a game, sunbathed in the backyard, and cruised Broadway in search of action that didn’t materialize (“I felt like I was Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate except for the mother and the girlfriend he was banging”). He also spent a good part of his time in the family rumpus room playing Strat-O-Matic baseball. Some of his friends thought he was sulking down there, but to Limbaugh it was a time of reflection and relaxation.
    “I did not hibernate in the basement,” he wrote to me. “The basement in that house was the greatest room in the house!! And mine was the only bedroom on that floor. It was an above-ground basement with a dumbwaiter right up to the kitchen.”
    Surprisingly, Big Rush didn’t give his son a hard time about his misadventure in Pittsburgh. The old man was approaching sixty. The country he loved and had fought for seemed to be falling apart. Richard Nixon, whom he once hosted in Cape, was forced to resign the presidency in disgrace. The Communists were winning in Vietnam. David was away at college, and it was lonely at home. “I think he liked having me around,” says Rush. “He and my mom and I went out to dinner a lot. He told me he knew I’d get my ass in gear eventually.”
    Limbaugh sent tapes of his work to stations around the country. Joey Reynolds, who hosts a late-night show on WOR in New York City, was at KQV then, and he tried to help Rush get his job back. “My dad gave me the money to go to Pittsburgh to try, but it only lasted a few days,” Limbaugh recalls. “When I got back to Cape again I was depressed and frustrated. I always had a sense I would succeed but nothing was coming through. I can remember taking a baseball bat out to the backyard and just beating a tree, over and over.”
    He was especially stung by a rejection from John Rook. “Rook,” he told me, “was a legend in the broadcast business. He had been the program director at WLS in Chicago, which is the station that carried Larry Lujack. By 1974 he had gone to Denver. I sent him a tape and he called me. For one hour he basically told me that the only difference between me and a bag of shit was the bag. He just ripped me to shreds. To this day I have no idea why he did that to me.”
    Big Rush’s reaction was characteristic: “Why,” he asked his son, “do you want to stay in the radio business? Nobody has a sense of honor.” But he refrained from pushing. It was Millie who grew impatient with her son’s indolence. One day Jim Carnegie, who had been program director at KQV in Pittsburgh and was now in Kansas City at KUDL, called Rush to sound out about possibly coming to work there. Rush wasn’t sure he wanted to live in Kansas City, but his mother was. She said, “You are going, and if they offer you a job you are going to take it.”
    Which he did.

    Kansas City is 350 miles west of Cape Girardeau, and while it wasn’t Limbaugh’s dream destination, it was, like Pittsburgh, a real city with major league franchises in baseball, football, and (temporarily) basketball to prove it. His new employer, KUDL, had both AM and FM bands. Limbaugh, still “Jeff Christie,” started out playing oldies and bantering with callers on the AM dial. That changed when NBC bought the station and turned AM into an all-talk format. Oddly, it didn’t occur to anyone that Limbaugh would make a good fit. Instead he was switched to FM, where he was basically required to supervise the automated and computerized music programs the station ran, make public-service announcements, and take calls from listeners. Insult comedy was coming into its own on the radio, and Jeff Christie decided to try