The author also makes clear that the Limbaugh family name features prominently on some government buildings in Cape Girardeau: as Chafets notes, "people who imagine Rush Hudson Limbaugh III is a disembodied voice or a rootless vagabond disc jockey are very much mistaken."
Even with all the local color, however, chronology is regrettably hard to come by. A few factual items slip in. Limbaugh's parents married in 1949. Limbaugh's father hosted Vice President Richard Nixon in 1956. Limbaugh enrolled at SoutheastMissouriStateUniversity in 1968, presumably in fall--going to class "as rarely as possible"--and dropped out after a year, never to complete college. In February 1971, he left Cape Girardeau to pursue a career in radio.
The saga of early radio jobs follows--first Pennsylvania, then Kansas City, then five years with the Kansas City Royals--along with brief accounts of the two first marriages. After losing several jobs, failing to get others, and moving back in with his parents--a situation many people in media could relate to--he landed in the 1980s in Sacramento, hired when shock-jock Morton Downey, Jr., was fired. Limbaugh made a considerable impression and a six-figure salary and was launched in New York City in 1988, officially hitting the big time.
Interestingly, Chafets writes that "lack of partisan engagement" is a recurring comment from people who knew Limbaugh early. "He was in his midthirties before he began giving strong, consistent voice to his conservative beliefs." (17)
Try that one on for size, Tea Partyers . . .
Limbaugh, in short, reinvented himself, and it paid off. Never faced with the expectations that Al Gore had to deal with, he got away with it as did Clarence Thomas, Richard Blumenthal, a host of neo-con Vietnam draft dodgers, etc etc. While Limbaugh never became part of New York's broadcast elite or popular in New York City--as mentioned, he is selling his house there--or even recognized on the street, still, "By 1990 Limbaugh's national audience had grown to almost twenty million listeners, and imitators were springing up on local stations around the country." (53) Rich and still growing, "his income in 1993 . . . was estimated at between fifteen and twenty million dollars." (64) A friend of Limbaugh's once told me that Clear Channel had paid Limbaugh an estimated three hundred million for his services.
Vietnam and the draft
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