Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One by Zev Chafets Read Free Book Online Page A

moment and then I thanked him for his time and left. If there’s one thing I have learned in a long career it is that when you can’t get a haircut in an empty barbershop at eleven in the morning, you’ve been in town long enough.
    Which is, I think, more or less the way Rusty Limbaugh felt in February 1971 when he left Cape at the wheel of his ’69 Pontiac Le Mans.

CHAPTER THREE
    FROM RUSTY TO CHRISTIE TO RUSH
    I n McKeesport, Pennsylvania, twelve miles from Pittsburgh, at the confluence of the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers, Rush Limbaugh shed his alter ego, Rusty Sharpe, and was reborn as “Bachelor Jeff ” Christie, morning drive-time disc jockey on station WIXZ-AM. McKeesport was smaller than Cape but it was in the Pittsburgh listening area, and for Rush it was a large step up, proof that he could get a serious radio gig outside the orbit of the Limbaugh family influence. Except for the six-week engineering course in Dallas, which had been closely supervised, long-distance, by his mother, this was his first venture into the adult world. He was on his own, earning a living, discovering a new part of the country, and, best of all, permanently paroled from academia.
    At WIXZ he hosted the Solid Rockin’ Gold Show . Here and there on the Internet you can find snippets of these shows. Even at a remove of more than thirty years, the timbre and timing of his voice is instantly recognizable. His job was to play music and deliver traffic reports, but he couldn’t repress the urge to make his audience laugh.
    “Seven minutes after six in the morning . . . As you know I am a bachelor, I live in a dinky little apartment, and all I have is a lamp and a TV set, but I’m going to play a little joke on the electrical department.” Rush dialed the phone and an unsuspecting employee of the electric company answered.
    “I just moved here from Florida,” said Rush. “I have a thing for palm trees and I have a big backyard, so I thought I might start a palm tree orchard.”
    “A palm tree orchard?”
    “I need heat lamps for that,” Rush said. “About fifteen or twenty thousand heat lamps. And I was wondering what it would cost me.”
    “How many watts?”
    Rush said, “About six hundred watts apiece, twenty hours a day. What will that run me?”
    The electric company clerk took a minute to calculate. “That would cost you three thousand, six hundred and forty-eight dollars a day,” he said.
    Rush feigned shock. “ A day! I could move back to Florida cheaper than that!”
    Bits like this were an echo of the crank calls and fake pizza orders from Flo’s Taxi, and they signaled that Jeff Christie aspired to something bigger than record spinning. Like all beginning comics, he used the materials he had garnered from his own experience. “The Friar Shuck Radio Ministry of the Air,” for example, leaned on his contempt for the radio preachers he had met at the studio on Sunday mornings in Cape, as well as showcased Limbaugh’s gift for mimicry.
    “Before the show I had the divine joy of talking with the Almighty,” Shuck intoned in a fruity Southern accent. “It was in my garage and I got right straight through to Him and I got talking about some real heavy subjects. He told me that there are those of you out there with afflictions and terrible troubles. He said there’s a lady out there who believes her daughter is in terrible trouble. I don’t know if it’s you. Do you believe that your daughter’s in trouble? Don’t despair, the Almighty told me it could be taken care of. Simply send a hundred dollars. Now if you don’t have a hundred dollars, hawk something or borrow it and send it. Get it and send it to Friar Shuck!”
    Sometimes Bachelor Jeff gave out faux advice. “Bunch of requests for the Christie quickie DJ course,” he said one morning. “Had a letter from a girl who desired to become a radio pronouncer, and she thought it would be a drawback because she’s a girl. Not so. You really just