Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One
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
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