Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One

by Zev Chafets

  On my first morning in Cape Girardeau I took a drive through the town. “It hasn’t changed at all,” Limbaugh told me later. “Some of the business streets have declined but mostly it looks like it did when I was a kid.” It’s easy to imagine Rush there, driving down Broadway from the river, the Stars and Stripes flapping over the courthouse on the hill, passing the editorial office of the Southeast Missourian, a robust, Republican family-owned newspaper still full of ads and local stories and a daily prayer on the editorial page.

  Across the street from the Missourian is radio station KZIM-960, which carries Rush’s show. An entrepreneur named Oscar Hirsch brought radio to this part of the country in 1924, opening station KFVS. Its inaugural broadcast featured live music by the Pig Meyer Orchestra emanating from the Marquette Hotel, a fine Spanish Revival building that later fell into disuse but has been restored and now houses a fancy continental restaurant.

  Cape, like many Midwestern river towns, has maintained an uneasy equilibrium between propriety and pleasure. Sophisticated nightspots like the Marquette Hotel made some local folks uneasy. In the winter of 1926, the Reverend Billy Sunday, the greatest evangelist of Prohibition-era America, came to town for a five-week revival. He raised his own tabernacle and preached against the evils of cards, strong drink, and licentious-ness. “It’s a damnable insult, some of the rigs a lot of fool women are wearing up and down our streets,” the Reverend Sunday thundered. “No man with good rich blood in his veins can look at them with prayer-meeting thoughts.” Sunday drew an estimated 250,000 people over the five weeks, probably more than the total population of southeast Missouri at the time. At the end of the crusade they totaled up the results: 1,319 sinners converted and 1,482 church members reconsecrated. The town fathers pronounced themselves satisfied.

  The Great Depression hit Cape, but because of the town’s economic diversity, it got off rather lightly. But World War II was devastating. The sons of southeast Missouri joined up in large numbers. Eighty boys from Cape Girardeau County were killed and many more were wounded. But the sacrifice didn’t dim the area’s patriotism or its fighting spirit. After the war, Cape was, like the rest of Missouri, a bastion of anti-Communism. In 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, a three-hour drive from Cape Girardeau, Winston Churchill delivered his famous warning about the Soviet Iron Curtain falling across Europe. Democratic President Harry Truman, a son of Missouri, took the country to war in Korea, declaring that, “the effort of the evil forces of communism to reach out and dominate the world confronts our Nation and our civilization with the greatest challenge in our history.”

  Big Rush shared the president’s sentiments, but there was no way he could support him politically. The Limbaughs had long since become the town’s Republican law firm (just as the rival Oliver family law firm represented the Democrats). For twenty years the Limbaughs led the loyal local opposition to FDR and Truman. It wasn’t until Ike beat Stevenson in 1952 that the balance of power shifted to the Republicans.

  The Eisenhower years—the years of Rusty Limbaugh’s childhood—were sweet ones for Cape Girardeau and for the Limbaughs. Rush Sr. was honored with an appointment as special ambassador to the Indian legal system. Rush Jr. built a family and prospered. Television arrived in 1954, courtesy of the enterprising Oscar Hirsch. Southeast Missouri State University, a backwater, was flush with students matriculating thanks to the G.I. Bill. In 1956, the Army Corps of Engineers began work on what became a mile-long, sixteen-foot-high floodwall that protects the low-lying downtown district from the river and provides Cape with a greater sense of security.

  Still, some tides couldn’t be walled off. It was Harry Truman himself who integrated the U.S. Armed Forces, signaling a new era in race relations. And in 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in neighboring Kansas, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional.

  Race had always been a difficult issue in Cape. During the Civil War, the town and its families had been divided between the Yankees and the Confederates, and its identity—Midwestern or Southern—was never completely settled. Even today there are monuments to both Rebel and Union soldiers on the grounds of the old Common Pleas Courthouse. In the great black northern migration of World War I, hundreds of thousands of African Americans traveled up Highway 61 from Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas bound for St. Louis, but very few stopped in Cape Girardeau. Those who did encountered a pronounced lack of hospitality.

  In 1952 Cape built its white students a new school, Central High. Blacks continued to attend Cobb High School. But the Supreme Court—and basketball—changed that.

  Cape Girardeau took its high school basketball very seriously and sometimes contended for the state title. The 1953 team was expected to be a powerhouse, but word got around that the kids from Cobb were even better. “An informal game was arranged between Central and Cobb High,” says historian Frank Nickell. “Cobb won. Shortly thereafter, Cobb mysteriously burned down.” Black students went to school in churches and private homes that year, but a more permanent solution was required. The U.S. Supreme Court had called for desegregation “with all deliberate speed,” but even the most deliberate pace couldn’t justify building a new black school.

  A compromise was reached. Black kids would attend Central High, but virtually all of them would be put in special classes and taught by the former members of the Cobb faculty. It was an inequitable but formally legal scheme, and it succeeded in defusing tension. It was in place by the time Rusty Limbaugh started school.

  Rusty had the standard upbringing of a well-born kid of his time and place. He played ball with the neighborhood gang, mowed the family lawn, took piano lessons with no discernible result, dutifully joined the Cub Scouts for one year (during which he received no merit badges), and attended the Methodist Sunday School. From the very beginning he dreaded school, which he considered prison.

  The Limbaughs had a large basement rumpus room with a pinball machine and a pool table, and the house became a neighborhood hang-out. “There were always half a dozen kids there, and Rush was the leader,” says Frank Kinder. “We shot pool, talked sports, and made a lot of prank calls, which he thought up. One time we convinced the radio station to announce a bogus American history contest. We ordered pizzas and watched as Flo’s Taxi delivered them to the neighbors. Pranks. Most of Rush’s friends were a year older than him. I’m two years younger, David’s friend basically, but Rush was always really nice to me, too.”

  At thirteen Limbaugh got a job at the Varsity Barber Shop on Broadway, shining shoes. He liked it because it gave him a chance to talk with adults. “I always preferred adults to kids,” he told me. “I didn’t think kids were interesting.”

  Rusty loved sports but he wasn’t much of an athlete. “We played sandlot baseball,” says Kinder, “and one summer he worked on a knuckle-ball, but it didn’t amount to much. Basically, he had an aversion to physical exercise.” Rusty had a weight problem even then. In high school his beefy physique caught the eye of the football coach, who tried to turn him into a lineman. At first, making the team was a great thrill, but after one season he dropped out. His single moment of glory came when he kicked a game-winning extra point against Illinois’s Carbondale High School. But his heart was never in it. “I played to be popular,” he told me. “But it didn’t work.”

  Not that Rusty was a social outcast. Limbaughs belonged to the in-crowd by definition. But by the time he reached high school he was awkward around girls. One of the foundational tales of his teenage years, recounted in Paul Colford’s very thorough 1993 biography, The Rush Limbaugh Story, is how the prettiest girl at a spin-the-bottle party refused to kiss Rusty. “She looked at him and gasped,” Colford writes. “Couldn’t do it. Not with him, that is. And everyone in the room witnessed his humiliation. It was a wound he would nurse forever.”

  Jan Seebaugh is fairly sure that she was the girl in the story. Today she is a doctor and the divorced mother of a grow
n son, but back in high school she had a wild side. “I was the kind of girl who dated the lead guitar player in the rock band,” she told me over lunch at the Marquette Hotel. She was also an honor roll student, a cheerleader, and, inevitably, the prom queen, a superstar. Her father was a prominent physician and her family moved in the same social circle as the Limbaughs. In fact, they were distantly related. Maybe that’s why she didn’t want to kiss Rusty. She doesn’t remember. But she does recall liking him, and she merits at least an asterisk in his career as the first to write an article about him—in their high school newspaper. Rush wasn’t her type.

  Seebaugh also merits an asterisk in Limbaugh’s professional biography. As a reporter for the high school newspaper, she wrote the first article about a new young disc jockey on the local radio station:FANS FIND RUSTY “SHARPE”

  “Here’s a song for a sweet little thing named Susie!” comes a deep, masculine voice out of the speaker of the radio. Who would ever guess it belongs to a Central student known to his teachers as Rusty Limbaugh but known to his thousands of admiring fans as RUSTY SHARPE . . .

  When asked why “Rusty Sharpe” was chosen for his “radio personality” Rusty stated, “I wanted an adjective that had a double meaning—you know, a pun type thing. I just looked in the phone book and came up with ‘Sharpe.’ ”

  Seabaugh asked Rusty whether he was planning a radio career, to which he replied, “Oh, I dunno. Depends on how successful I become. . . . Everything is ad lib and just starting out I sometimes find that hard to do. I’ve found that if you can’t find something to say, keep your mouth shut and run a commercial or something.”

  Not only was Rusty winningly modest in his Sharpe incarnation, he was also, at least by Cape standards, cutting edge cool. The profile concludes: “Where can I hear this Sharpe guy?” asks one of those poor souls who doesn’t know where the action is. All you “unhippies” can “get with it” every weekday afternoon from 3:00 to 6:15, and week-end afternoons from 12 noon to 6:15 on the Rusty Sharpe Show, 1550 on the dial.

  “Even when I was a little boy, I dreamed of being on the radio,” Limbaugh told me the first time we met. “In the mornings getting ready for school I’d hear the guy on the radio, and he just sounded free and happy, like he was having a wonderful time. That’s what I wanted, too.” Rusty listened avidly to Harry Caray and Jack Buck, the radio voices of the St. Louis Cardinals (he actually rooted for the L.A. Dodgers, an eccentric choice for that part of the country; his favorite player was Maury Wills). He also played endless hours of Strat-O-Matic, a baseball board game, calling the contests out loud, even when he was all alone.

  At first his parents encouraged him. At fourteen they bought him a Remco Caravelle radio set that allowed him to broadcast on any AM channel, within the confines of his house. He played records and did DJ chatter, usually to an audience consisting of his mother. It was such a thrilling experience that Limbaugh never forgot it and sometimes talked with nostalgia about the lost Remco Caravelle of his boyhood. One day a listener sent Rush his own Remco. Limbaugh established his cyber-museum in 2008, and the Remco Caravelle is one of its featured icons.

  Rusty’s greatest ambition was to expand his audience and become a real top-40 jock—an AM jock, of course; there was no FM to speak of back then. In small towns like Cape Girardeau, radio was the quickest broadcasting route to glamour. Local TV offered only dull opportunities—who wanted to read the news about the Kiwanis Club bake sale or weather predictions? A rock-and-roll disc jockey was in show business, a single dropped needle away from partnership with Elvis and the Beatles. You didn’t have to be cool looking or thin to be a radio celebrity. And radio was mysterious. If you lived in the middle of nowhere, you could hear distant voices from the big city and dream about greater vistas. Rusty’s favorite was Larry “Superjock” Lujack, a sardonic, creative radio star who broadcast on Chicago’s WLS-AM, a brash, comic radio innovator from whom Rush borrowed some of his early attitude and technique. After Limbaugh became famous, he gave his old mentor public credit for influencing him, but Lujack returned the favor with some nasty remarks about Limbaugh, a slight Rush has neither forgotten nor forgiven.

  Rusty Limbaugh was a lazy and indifferent student, much to the chagrin of his father. Limbaughs were expected to be professional men, preferably lawyers, and that meant buckling down, getting good grades, and going to college. But Rusty kept insisting that his future was on the radio, not in an office or a courtroom, and certainly not in a classroom. As it happened, his father owned a small piece of a local station, KGMO-AM. Despite Big Rush’s reservations about rock and roll and show biz, he helped his son get an after-school job there spinning records.

  In the summer before Rusty’s senior year, Big Rush reluctantly gave his son permission (and the tuition) to attend a six-week radio-engineering course at the Elkins Institute of Radio Electronics in Dallas. Rusty lived in a rooming house, started smoking cigarettes, and got a license that permitted him to run the radio without supervision. The management of KGMO was happy enough to leave him there all alone, playing music and wisecracking not just on weekdays after school but weekends, too. A lot of sixteen-year-olds would have been very happy with the way life was going. Rusty had his high school dream job and a degree of celebrity (some of his classmates remember him signing autographs at record hops, although he says that never happened). He was also having fun on the air. The Associated Press used to send out a daily beauty tip, which Limbaugh read with mock solemnity. “I thought it was absurd, getting beauty tips from a wire service,” he told me. “A lot of teachers did, too. We used to laugh about it at school.”

  His father wasn’t amused or impressed. He didn’t see his son’s broadcasting talent, and he didn’t get the point of a career dedicated to playing dumb songs for teenagers, anyway. Rusty was going in the wrong direction, and Big Rush let him know it in dinner table harangues that became loud, acrimonious, and painful.

  The Cape Girardeau Convention and Visitors Bureau, housed in a small downtown office, is a first stop for the Civil War buffs who come to see the site of a famous battle and the headquarters of General U. S. Grant, and antique hunters in search of local treasures (the PBS series Antiques Roadshow was there during my visit). But Cape’s biggest attraction is its status as the boyhood home of El Rushbo.

  Chuck Martin is the executive director of the Visitors Bureau. “You’d be surprised how many people come in to buy Rush Limbaugh memorabilia and T-shirts here,” he told me. “It’s amazing how many people come to Cape just because they want to see where Rush grew up.” To accommodate them, the bureau offers a drive-it-yourself tour whose itinerary includes the hospital where Rush was born, his childhood home and elementary school, Central High, the Varsity Barber Shop, the KGMO studio, and the campus of Southeast Missouri State University, where he suffered through one utterly unhappy academic year.

  Rush often rails against the excesses of liberal academia, but his alma mater was (and still is) a bastion of conservatism. In the spring of 1968, just a few months before he enrolled there, a small group of students and teachers tried to form a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. The president of the university, Dr. Mark Scully, responded by firing eight members of the faculty, causing the chairman of the department of history to resign in protest. Bobby Kennedy, who was running for the Democratic nomination for president, held a campaign rally in Cape and denounced the firings. The intervention made no difference. Cape wasn’t Kennedy country; that year both Republican vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew and third-party segregationist George Wallace drew bigger audiences.

  “The college had a huge contingent of veterans then,” says Frank Nickell. “President Scully called in a group of them, handed out T-shirts, and deputized them to defend Academic Hall against the anti-Vietnam protestors.” (There are still a lot of military veterans at SEMO, and the place retains its basic outlook. But times change, even in Cape. During my visit, the university hosted a performance of The Nutcracker by the M
oscow Ballet. Big Rush would not have understood.)

  Another event in the spring of 1968 shook the town: on April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, 160 miles down Highway 61. Cape remained quiet, but Cairo, Illinois, just a half hour across the Mississippi, was a powder keg. Even before the assassination it had been the scene of a long, violent racial confrontation that eventually led the governor to send in units of the Illinois National Guard. The city fathers stationed observers on the bridge to spot and report on cars with Illinois license plates and black occupants. This vigil was maintained for three years.

  While all this upheaval was taking place, Limbaugh carried on as usual, living at home, doing The Rusty Sharpe Show on KGMO, and stubbornly resisting his father’s efforts to make a professional man out of him. He didn’t attend any of the political rallies in 1968 and only dimly recalls seeing Bobby Kennedy’s motorcade pass by. After King’s death he was pressed into service helping NBC-TV and radio reporters upload reports from the station. “I remember talking to them about the broadcast business. I was seventeen, playing records on the radio, not commenting on news. I don’t recall feeling any concern,” he recounts.

  Most of all, he wanted to get out of Cape Girardeau.

  “My last three years were miserable,” Limbaugh says. In the eleventh grade his heart was broken in a secret romance he still won’t discuss. During his senior year his war with his father escalated, and Rusty formally gave in and enrolled at SEMO. He lived at home, continued to spin records, and went to class as rarely as possible. On some days, Millie Limbaugh actually drove him to college to make sure he attended.

  The most colorful site on the Limbaugh tour is the flood wall that runs for a mile along the Mississippi. In recent years Cape has, inexplicably, been struck by a passion for historical public art. A mural depicting the town’s founding adorns the side of a downtown building. The university’s Kent Library features a 38-by-21-foot painting celebrating the pioneers and citizens of southeast Missouri. The grandest project is Mississippi River Tales, the 24-panel, 18,000-square-foot graphic narrative on the flood wall. These panels include the Missouri Wall of Fame, forty-six portraits of the greatest sons and daughters, native and adopted, of the Show-Me State, as decided by a panel of Cape’s leading citizens. Some are obvious choices: Harry S. Truman, Mark Twain, and Stan “the Man” Musial, for example. Many are Missourians who, like Limbaugh, found fame in distant places—T. S. Eliot, Burt Bacharach, Redd Foxx, General John J. Pershing, Yogi Berra, Walter Cronkite, George Washington Carver, and Ginger Rogers. Dred Scott, America’s most famous runaway, was caught and dragged back to Missouri in chains. He is also one of the few members of the Wall of Fame actually buried in the state.