Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One

by Zev Chafets

  WIXZ was a starter job, and Limbaugh acquitted himself well enough to take the next step. In 1973 he was hired by station KQV, known as 14K, as a nighttime disc jockey. KQV was an ABC affiliate, the second-most-popular AM station in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately for him, ABC quickly sold the station to Taft Broadcasting. There were different bosses, different expectations, and by 1974 Jeff Christie was out of a job and temporarily unable to find a new one.

  The economy was against him—the stock market crashed in 1973, and by the end of ’74 it had lost more than 45 percent of its value. Rust Belt cities like Pittsburgh were especially bad places to be. The record industry was changing, too. Singles were being replaced by albums. Billboard reported that FM had established dominance in “market after market . . . in the younger demographics”—that was Jeff Christie’s demographic. But he had no interest in FM, which he considered a radio band for hippies and phony intellectuals.

  Limbaugh put out job feelers, but he got only one offer, from Neenah, Wisconsin. After having been in a top-10 national radio market, even Cape sounded better than Neenah. He hitched a U-Haul trailer to his Buick Riviera and drove home. For the next seven months he lived with his parents, umpired Little League for five dollars a game, sunbathed in the backyard, and cruised Broadway in search of action that didn’t materialize (“I felt like I was Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate except for the mother and the girlfriend he was banging”). He also spent a good part of his time in the family rumpus room playing Strat-O-Matic baseball. Some of his friends thought he was sulking down there, but to Limbaugh it was a time of reflection and relaxation.

  “I did not hibernate in the basement,” he wrote to me. “The basement in that house was the greatest room in the house!! And mine was the only bedroom on that floor. It was an above-ground basement with a dumbwaiter right up to the kitchen.”

  Surprisingly, Big Rush didn’t give his son a hard time about his misadventure in Pittsburgh. The old man was approaching sixty. The country he loved and had fought for seemed to be falling apart. Richard Nixon, whom he once hosted in Cape, was forced to resign the presidency in disgrace. The Communists were winning in Vietnam. David was away at college, and it was lonely at home. “I think he liked having me around,” says Rush. “He and my mom and I went out to dinner a lot. He told me he knew I’d get my ass in gear eventually.”

  Limbaugh sent tapes of his work to stations around the country. Joey Reynolds, who hosts a late-night show on WOR in New York City, was at KQV then, and he tried to help Rush get his job back. “My dad gave me the money to go to Pittsburgh to try, but it only lasted a few days,” Limbaugh recalls. “When I got back to Cape again I was depressed and frustrated. I always had a sense I would succeed but nothing was coming through. I can remember taking a baseball bat out to the backyard and just beating a tree, over and over.”

  He was especially stung by a rejection from John Rook. “Rook,” he told me, “was a legend in the broadcast business. He had been the program director at WLS in Chicago, which is the station that carried Larry Lujack. By 1974 he had gone to Denver. I sent him a tape and he called me. For one hour he basically told me that the only difference between me and a bag of shit was the bag. He just ripped me to shreds. To this day I have no idea why he did that to me.”

  Big Rush’s reaction was characteristic: “Why,” he asked his son, “do you want to stay in the radio business? Nobody has a sense of honor.” But he refrained from pushing. It was Millie who grew impatient with her son’s indolence. One day Jim Carnegie, who had been program director at KQV in Pittsburgh and was now in Kansas City at KUDL, called Rush to sound out about possibly coming to work there. Rush wasn’t sure he wanted to live in Kansas City, but his mother was. She said, “You are going, and if they offer you a job you are going to take it.”

  Which he did.

  Kansas City is 350 miles west of Cape Girardeau, and while it wasn’t Limbaugh’s dream destination, it was, like Pittsburgh, a real city with major league franchises in baseball, football, and (temporarily) basketball to prove it. His new employer, KUDL, had both AM and FM bands. Limbaugh, still “Jeff Christie,” started out playing oldies and bantering with callers on the AM dial. That changed when NBC bought the station and turned AM into an all-talk format. Oddly, it didn’t occur to anyone that Limbaugh would make a good fit. Instead he was switched to FM, where he was basically required to supervise the automated and computerized music programs the station ran, make public-service announcements, and take calls from listeners. Insult comedy was coming into its own on the radio, and Jeff Christie decided to try it. He describes the result in his book, See, I Told You So:I found out something about myself . . . something that was quite disturbing. I found out I was really, really good at insulting people. For example, the topic one day was. “When you die, how do you want to go?”

  “I want to go the cheapest and most natural way I can,” one nice lady caller from Independence, Missouri, said.

  My response was: “Easy. Have your husband throw you in a trash bag and then in the Missouri River with the rest of the garbage.”

  When I went home after a day of this, I didn’t like myself.

  The lesson stayed with him. To this day, Limbaugh is polite to his callers who are, in any case, prescreened. He is still insulting, but his targets tend to be institutions, causes, and public figures who can defend themselves.

  In time, Limbaugh developed a modest fan base. One of his listeners was George Brett, the Hall of Fame third baseman of the Kansas City Royals. “I liked listening to him,” Brett says. “He was funny. I had no idea he knew anything about politics.”

  Limbaugh had another Kansas City Royals connection, Bryan Burns, a young guy who worked in the team’s marketing department. The two men met at the intersection of ticket sales and media, and struck up a friendship. Burns was from a small town in southeast Missouri about ninety miles from Cape. Like Rush, he was single. They both had apartment leases that were expiring and decided to pool their resources and rent a place together in Overland Park, a Kansas City suburb.

  “We weren’t wild and crazy guys,” says Burns, who is now a vice president at ESPN. “On Sundays Rush would put on his Pittsburgh Steelers jersey and we’d watch football. Sometimes a few other guys would join us. Or he’d play music—he was into George Benson, what was called back then contemporary jazz. But it was far from a party atmosphere.”

  Burns, like Bill Figenshu, had no idea his roommate was a political thinker. “He was scary smart about everything, but I can’t recall us talking much about current events. He was funny, though. I was an audience of one. Now his audience is millions, but I don’t really hear a difference. The Rush I knew in Kansas City is the same guy I hear on the radio. If I had to choose a word to describe him, I’d say ‘real.’ ”

  Soon after moving in with Burns, Rush met Roxy Maxine McNeely, a secretary at one of the other radio stations in town. “Roxy didn’t move in with us, but she spent a lot of time at our place,” says Burns. “She was a very fun-loving girl. She used to write notes to Rush on the bathroom mirror in lipstick. I liked her a lot.” Rush did, too, and in short order he moved in with her, although he continued to pay his share of the Overland Park lease. In 1977 he and Roxy were married in Cape at the Centenary United Methodist Church. It was a large wedding, and for once Rush basked in his father’s approval. Perhaps Roxy wasn’t quite the wife a real professional man could have snagged, but she was lovely and had a good head on her shoulders. Rush, at twenty-six, was now gainfully employed in Kansas City, plausibly successful, and conventionally coupled.

  Like a lot of first marriages, this was a youthful experiment that didn’t work out. Rush was focused on his career and he was a homebody; when he wasn’t at the studio he wanted to stay home, snack, and watch sports on TV, or tinker with electronic equipment. Roxy liked going out and she felt unappreciated. After two years she filed for divorce on grounds of mutual incompatibility, and Rush didn’t object. There were no hard feelings, no
kids, and not much in the way of mutual property to distribute—a clean break.

  Jeff Christie was doing no better professionally than Rush Limbaugh was doing matrimonially. He was fired twice in 1978, first by KUDL and then by KFIX. The radio business was in flux, and disc jockeys rarely lasted long. Besides, Limbaugh had personality conflicts with superiors who found him argumentative.

  Luckily for Rush, Bryan Burns had moved up in the Royals front office. He offered his old roommate a part-time job in the marketing department, and Rush took it. Even when the position went to full-time, Limbaugh was still making far less than he had earned in Pittsburgh a decade earlier. Not only was he broke, he was treated like a nobody.

  “On a baseball franchise there are some guys with real important jobs, but Rush wasn’t one of them. He did group sales and odd jobs, like finding singers for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ There was no aura about him,” says Burns.

  As a teenager, Rush had been accepted by the jocks because he hung out with John Rueseler, a star athlete who went on to play college football at Memphis State. George Brett filled a similar role in Limbaugh’s life. They formed a highly improbable friendship—baseball stars seldom pal around with front-office flunkies—and suddenly Limbaugh was a part of the Royals in-crowd.

  “Rush didn’t have a lot of friends,” says Brett. “I don’t think he felt very good about himself. But I thought he was smart and funny. On Sundays after games we’d go out for fried chicken dinner at Stroud’s, or he’d come over to the house and help me hook up electronic equipment. We talked about personal things, sports trivia, whatever, but I can’t recall ever talking about politics. When he left Kansas City and went on to his new career, I was surprised to find out he knew anything about it.”

  In the off-season Brett included Rush in touch football games with professional athletes and other jocks. “Sam Lacey, the NBA player, was in the games, and a lot of Royals employees, too,” Brett told me. “When we chose up sides, Rush was always the last one taken—he was overweight and not very athletic, an old guy. But you know what? He always came up with the play that won the game.”

  Limbaugh worked for the Royals for five years. In addition to working in group sales he “produced” the scoreboard during games. “Back then baseball teams didn’t really believe in marketing themselves,” says Burns. “It was looked down on. A team might have a bat day or hold some kind of promotion, but actually putting on a show during the game was considered inappropriate.” Putting on a show was what Limbaugh loved. “He played Michael Jackson songs between innings. Nobody was doing anything like that back then. He bought a cart-machine and played sound effects over the scoreboard. I think he was the first one in baseball to produce games that way.”

  Limbaugh was good at his job, but he rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. “For one thing, they didn’t like it when I played Michael Jackson,” he told me. “They used to say, ‘Where do you think we are, Oakland?’ ” Rush Limbaugh, racial pioneer.

  In 1983 Bryan Burns left the team for a senior role in the office of the commissioner of Major League Baseball. That was the beginning of the end for Rush’s career in the Majors. “He had an edgy attitude,” says Burns. “He tended to be frank and honest, and when he thought people in the organization were wrong he said so. I was more or less his protector, but after I left he lost his job.”

  Rush left the Royals and eventually went on to stardom, but he never forgot George Brett’s friendship. In 1992 at Brett’s wedding reception, he sang a sentimental song (he says he can’t recall which one) and handed Brett a letter thanking him and offering to treat the newlyweds to a honeymoon anywhere in the world for as long as they cared to go. When Brett reached his three-thousandth career hit, Limbaugh flew to Kansas City and hosted a large celebratory dinner party at Stroud’s. And they are still golfing buddies.

  “We were sitting around talking one day, and I suggested to Rush that I come down to Palm Beach to play with him,” Brett told me. “He seemed surprised by that. ‘You’d want to come all the way down there to play with me?’ he said. After all his success, he’s still a little bit insecure.”

  Just before Rush was fired by the Royals he got married for the second time. His bride was Michelle Sixta, a student at Central Missouri State University who was working her way through school as a stadium usher. They were married in a small ceremony at the Stadium Club.

  Out of work once more, Limbaugh caught on at KMBZ in Kansas City, where, for the first time, he began openly expressing his conservative opinions on the air and engaging in right-wing satire. This was controversial, and the owner of the station, Bonneville International, a company controlled by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was uncomfortable with controversy. Limbaugh drew a crowd but he also upset a lot of people.

  Shock radio, rude and irreverent, was catching on around the country at the time. Less than a decade earlier, Larry Lujack had been forced to publicly apologize for telling a listener that he would play more Jim Croce songs when Croce (who had been killed a few months earlier in a plane crash) went back into the studio and recorded some. Now, in New York, at WNBC, Don Imus and Howard Stern scored gigantic ratings with tasteless, offensive, often topical humor.

  Sacramento’s version was Morton Downey Jr., who was drawing big audiences and national attention for his show, broadcast on KFBK. Downey was a ranter with a taste for pushing boundaries. He reached his boundary when he told a joke about “a Chinaman,” an ethnic term that offended many, especially City Councilman Tom Chinn, who thought it had been aimed at him personally. Chinn complained to the owner of the station, C. K. McClatchy, who fired Downey. As luck would have it, Limbaugh was fired again right around the same time. He was done in by football. Unbeknownst to him, KMBZ was trying to get the rights to broadcast the Kansas City Chiefs games. Limbaugh, a fanatical football fan, had taken to blasting the team and its executives as price-gouging, incompetent cheapskates. That made him a liability, and he was canned. The pink slip came with a curt note. “Unfortunately,” the station manager wrote to him, “I cannot share your enthusiasm for your performance.”

  Norm Woodruff, who met Limbaugh while working as a consultant to KMBZ, was now the acting program director of Sacramento’s KFBK. He knew Limbaugh’s show, and he thought Rush would be an ideal replacement for Downey. Limbaugh had too much attitude for Kansas City, but compared with Downey he was a model of easy listening and good humor. Woodruff hired Limbaugh and gave him marching orders that Rush described in a speech in the summer of 2009: “We want controversy, but don’t make it up. If you actually think something—if you actually believe it, and you can tell people why—we’ll back you up. But if you’re going to say stuff just to make people mad—if all you want to do is rabble-rouse, if all you want to do is offend and get noticed—that’s not what we’re interested in, and we won’t back you up.”

  Limbaugh was a hit in Sacramento. He was using his real name now. The station let him go on the air solo, unencumbered by sidekicks or guests, and encouraged his highly personal, right-wing monologues. For the first time in his career he was marketed heavily and aggressively. There were billboards around town showing a finger hitting a button, captioned: “How Would You Like to Punch Rush Limbaugh?” Rush was so pleased by these that he sent Bryan a snapshot. Morton Downey Jr. had been a big star in Sacramento, with a 5 share of the market—5 percent of people listening to the radio in a given fifteen-minute segment. Limbaugh tripled that. He was sharp edged but good humored. “The new morning host espouses many of the same beliefs of his predecessor, Morton Downey Jr.,” reported the Sacramento Bee, “but he skates a little farther from the edge of the hole in the ice.”

  Rush was rewarded for his success with a six-figure salary, an estimable income in the mid-1980s, even by his father’s standards. More important, for the first time in his life he really mattered. He was invited to deliver speeches, just like Big Rush. He was an occasional commentator on television and wrote newspaper columns.
Politicians and celebrities sought him out. He and Michelle bought a new house and furnished it with products he endorsed on the air.

  The audience in Sacramento was more sophisticated than the one he had had in Kansas City, and more liberal. Jerry Brown, known as “Governor Moonbeam,” had just finished his years in the statehouse, and California was swinging to the right, but it was still a long way from Kansas. I was in Sacramento in the mid-’80s, and I vividly recall boarding a bus bound for San Francisco on which the driver nonchalantly announced that smoking cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and joints was prohibited.

  Marijuana wasn’t Rush’s thing. (In 1993 he told an interviewer for Playboy that he had only tried it twice, inhaled but hadn’t liked it.) Hippies smoked marijuana. Rush wanted to belong to the square adult world, and in Sacramento he had that chance. “For the first time in my life I actively appreciated where I lived,” he wrote in The Way Things Ought to Be. “I was no longer a passing personality but rather a functioning, practicing, and participating member of my community—aspects of life that were new to me. And I loved it.”

  Michelle loved it less. She had a job at a printing company but quit to become her husband’s assistant, and she found the job boring and tedious. She was an outdoors type; he hated nature. When he did venture out he was a klutz. One day fellow disc jockeys Bob Nathan and Dave Williams convinced him to go rafting on the American River, which runs through Sacramento. “It’s a very, very mild ride,” Williams later wrote. “Bob gave Rush an oar and told him to absorb the blow of the canyon wall to give us a little spring back into the current . . . Rush panicked, stuck the oar out, his arms stiff as a board, and upon impact he fell overboard . . . We got Rush back in the raft and the next day he spent the entire three hours of his show talking about his horrendous whitewater grapple with the grim reaper.”