Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One Read Online Free PDF

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 grown 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