Rush Limbaugh died three years ago, on February 17, 2021. This is the Rush I knew: One particular afternoon he was very excited and nervous. Gingerly stepping into the river’s edge he admitted, “I’ve never been in a natural body of water, just swimming pools.”
Bob and I laughed.
“Isn’t Cape Girardeau on the Mississippi?” Bob asked.
“Yeah, but we just saw it from the car,” Rush explained. We all laughed again.
Summer days in Sacramento are long and hot. My KFBK morning show partner, Bob Nathan, and I spent many of those days in the mid-1980s after our air shift rafting on the American River as it gently meandered from Sunrise Blvd. to Goethe Park. We shared the two-hour ride this day with our 9-Noon colleague and friend, Rush Limbaugh.
We were surprised that Rush agreed to join us on the river. Picnics, backyard barbecues, and such were never his thing. He did attend my outdoor Western-themed wedding wearing a tie and sports coat. That made him stand out like a turd in a punch bowl. Somebody took his tie and slapped a cheap cowboy hat on his head. He wore it proudly. A few months earlier, when I talked him into letting me take him to the Yellow Rose honky tonk, he purchased his first-ever pair of blue jeans and wore them with his Pittsburgh Steelers jersey, which was the only shirt he owned that didn’t have buttons. It was as country as Rush ever got. While everyone else in the Rose was wearing boots, Rush sported tasseled loafers.
As we floated downstream in Bob’s four-man raft the talk turned to our radio careers. It was 1987. Rush Limbaugh was doing 9 to noon, making around $32,000 a year. On the river that day an SPF-slathered, 35-year-old Rush Limbaugh confided to Bob and me his plan to get a raise. He figured he might be worth $50,000 to KFBK. Management didn’t agree, even though he was hauling a ton of billing. Between 5 AM and Noon, the Dave & Bob morning show and Rush, KFBK were outbilling every other station in town.
Five years later he was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame and on his way to collecting five Marconi Awards while becoming the wealthiest, most famous radio personality in history.
The raft overturned in a gentle riffle of the stream that didn’t deserve to be called rapids. In that spot, the water was only four feet deep. Bob and I came up laughing, though we had lost our beer cooler. But, tossed into a Class I river, Rush was in a Class VI panic. He truly thought he was going to die. We righted the raft and hauled him back in. The next day Rush spent his entire three hours on the air talking about how Dave and Bob saved his life.
Bob and I got hate mail.
One day in Sacramento when I was the PD at KFBK, I took Rush to lunch and said, “I’m not going to tell you how to do your show. It’s your show. But, if you don’t find something else to talk about than national politics your career will go right down the toilet.”
20 years later he laughed as he thanked me for not derailing his future.
In my defense, it was 1986. Local talk radio was about local issues, events, and movie reviews. Nobody had ever gone on a single radio station to spend every day criticizing international relationships between Washington and Moscow. Rush did and, shockingly, it worked.
After he became the Rush Limbaugh the world came to know, worship, and despise, he often described himself on the air as “a lovable little fuzzball.” Bob and I hung that ironic description on him because we knew and loved the guy his audience would never get to know.
While the rest of the world was learning to deify or hate him, Rush became godfather to Bob Nathan’s daughter. In social settings, Rush was quiet and humble. He was a wallflower, really, often found quietly seated alone in a corner nursing a drink; he happily got to his feet to greet mingling guests who approached him as strangers at a party do. He enjoyed meeting new people and was genuinely interested in them, he just wasn’t good at starting the conversation.
Bob Nathan and I talked a bit about Rush recently on my podcast. I also did an episode with Kitty O’Neal, who was Rush’s producer throughout his years in Sacramento. When WABC in New York signed him, he turned to Kitty for support, inviting her to join him there. She declined but still talks of those early days with Rush lovingly yet honestly.
“In the early years, I would say he was unsure of himself and lacking in self-confidence,” she said. “But as he found his footing, he established himself as a maverick in talk radio and changed the medium as we know it.”
He left and she stayed. Now, 40 years later, Kitty is still the afternoon personality on KFBK. She shared insights into his transformation from the local star to the global phenomenon:
“Working with Rush — in the early days, before his meteoric rise — he came across as an entertainer who enjoyed poking fun at people, societal trends, and politics. I felt like the audience took him more seriously than he took himself. Much of what he said was tongue-in-cheek and he was playing the prankster. But the more political he got, the more the conservative-leaning listeners regarded him as their spokesperson. That’s the role he eventually assumed which catapulted him to fame, but I think the secret to his success was that he played it with humor and irreverence.”
There are still a lot of Rush Limbaugh copycats on talk radio and a few uniquely talented conservative talk stars who were influenced by Rush but developed their own style. Still, today’s focus on national politics, for better or worse, was Limbaugh’s creation.
The difference between Rush and the rest was, as Kitty said, his humor and irreverence. This is what his copycats don’t get: Rush started as a Top-40 disc jockey called Jeff Christie. Top-40 jocks always made the best news and talk hosts. Rush learned the craft of radio performance: timing, delivery, and how to punch a line. He was tight, he was excited; he wasn’t trying to preach to people, he was just trying to entertain them. That’s what radio does. Rush Limbaugh learned and never forgot that.
One question always comes up when people find out that I knew Rush: “Did he really believe the stuff he said or was he just putting on an act?”
My answer goes like this:
Rush was a once-in-a-lifetime radio entertainer. In that respect yes, he was performing. Did he believe the things he said? Absolutely, 100%. Why do we imagine you can’t do both? I guess because nobody else ever has.
There’s one more thing you should know about Rush Limbaugh. As Kitty O’Neal told me, “He was extremely generous and philanthropic with his fortune, but unrelentingly critical with his tongue.”
Rush quietly and often anonymously gave much of his fortune to many worthy causes. He didn’t want that soft side of him to become public – he had an image to maintain. As unbelievable as it seems to most people who only knew him by that image he was also sincerely humble, a side of himself he protected from public scrutiny.
The Rush Limbaugh I knew as a good friend was a good human being. Even his most vocal critics were surprised after meeting him by his decency and respect.
I didn’t agree with everything he said but radio and America are better today for his influence. I miss him.
