Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One Read Online Free PDF Page A

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