RUSH HUDSON LIMBAUGH, III
A Legacy, a Presence, a Monumental Contribution to America
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We join in these moments with the many who included Rush in their orbit of life. He was a pleasant family presence during his early years, born of a good line…fathered by a heroic World War II combat pilot father and an ancestry of distinction and accomplishment dating back many generations. It is well that we consider his place of birth, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a place that is distinctive because of its setting of profound normalcy.
Rush's people were always given to service and sacrifice. Interestingly enough, during the War Between the States, his family took the Confederate side, although they were decidedly anti-slavery. Their cause was to protect the local control and self-reliance that is commonly encountered to this day among many people of the South.
More on this will be recounted as we revere and contemplate the reality of this magnificent presence in the American panoply.
We could easily drone on about Rush's ancestry and family, and certainly we should touch on those things, but we must remember the seemingly awkward social movement of Rush in his younger days. While his family was and is an historical fixture in Cape Girardeau and elsewhere, and while they were well-to-do and comely and accomplished in many, many ways…Rush was not the prettiest face or figure in town. Intelligent, yes. Good deportment, pretty much. Great student? When it was necessary.
His daddy, beyond being a combat was an accomplished attorney,was also a P-51 combat fighter pilot during the Second War, was a famous attorney in Missouri. Judges and all nature of accomplished relatives abounded among his his kith and kin. But Rush was always that guy who looked at a different horizon all during his "growing up years". He had a "pace-car brother" in the sense that David was serious and goal oriented like the rest of the family. He was also a "looker" and socially adept person. He has become quite the author among other accomplishments…but such is a hallmark of the Limbaugh lines since their arrival to Pennsylvania Colony from eastern Germany in the 1730s.
Rush, at a very early age, began to take seriously something already becoming outdated…something called "AM radio". He was, according to all who commented, an affable boy and one who caused few problems, if any. His biggest problem when growing up was his weight. David was slender and comely, while Rush was…shall we say "big". Still a nice looking boy, but…big...and round.
But, he kept on fiddling with silly AM radios.
He tried his hand at University, and lost interest in the first year. He actually landed jobs at places of his first interest, radio stations! He became a platter-master and did the whole microphone thing, but he frequently left the owners consternated about his helter-skelter programming performance. It is said by some that the audiences liked Rush's "off-the-wall" microphone routines, but the bosses were not impressed. Unfortunately for them, they would lament letting Rush walk out the door.
He did a stint as in sales and other stand-up jobs for the Kansas City baseball team, and then one day the Sun broke through the fog…but before Kansas City, Rush landed behind a microphone where he could do social and political commentary. He found his correct place in the field of giving ulcers and curing sociopolitical despondence. He was behind a microphone speaking to a large audience, every weekday…taking calls, and generally hobnobbing with the real world. In Cape Girardeau he warmed a microphone after leaving college.
Then, he went on to bigger and better things at WIXZ in McKeesport, Missouri and later to Pittsburg with the big audience on KQV radio. These venues were rewarding but Rush always seemed to wrinkle the brows of his bosses…and his services at the two stations were relatively short. He went back to the homestead, muttered and kicked cans, and then one day picked up a job at the Kansas City Royals operation.
Sales, even hobnobbing and public relations with fans was a wonderful fit for his gregarious ways. He might have been the fellow you saw adjusting the microphone by the mound for the singer of the National Anthem in about fifteen minutes. And…after football…Rush loved baseball, especially good baseball, and big crowds at the ball game.
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Many are familiar with these notes about Rush and how he swam against the current to finally be able to do what his calling had required. There have been and still are numerous excellent radio announcers and commentators. But it must be stated that when the Rushmore of Radio Luminaries is carved into some important mountainside, Rush Limbaugh will have to be the first one and Paul Harvey will be the other first one.
My venture with Rush began in the later 1980s. I informed my middle brother( El Gringo was the last born 1947, Norman the second 1942, a truly iconic mover and shaker in the Republican Party of the Republic of Texas, and Milton was the firstborn - 1936) that he (Norman) needed to come down to McAllen because the greatest personality in Radio in America had agreed to a full scale rally as the "Rush to Excellence" at the McAllen Civic Centre known as the "Rush to Excellence" rally. His show was pure Republican cavalry charge and folksy humour.
My wife and I had, perhaps overly energised, gone in with three other sponsors to pay everything up front, and provide a gay old time for the Faithful in the McAllen and Rio Grande Valley area. At the very latest moment, my brother who had been the AA to Sen. John G. Tower, and who had been the executive director of the Republican Party of Texas for several years declared that he wasn't going down to McAllen to listen to a nobody from Nowhere, Missouri.
This was the brush off that caused a schism that never actually healed.
This was the brother who had founded the Associated Republicans of Texas…a grassroots mobilisation organisation geared to the election of local and county level Republicans across Texas. It became the Death of Democrat Hegemony in Texas.
One can imagine my grumpiness and haughty sense of being abused, but at least the rally was massively successful. A convention hall that could hold 1,800 seated people wound up with standing room only and people in the back, and hundreds gathered in standing room only, outside listening to Rush's jokes and lectures via loudspeakers.
It took about 40 minutes for all the vehicles to manage their way out of the very large parking lot. My mother and my Godmother attended and were truly stunned at the size of the crowd and the grandeur Rush Limbaugh had brought to the Republican effort deep in Democrat territory.
My wife and mother had gone earlier as guests of honour to the special mid-day luncheon at the fancy penthouse level of McAllen's tallest building (16 stories of the McAllen State Bank building), and passed a very pleasant time. During those moments pictures were taken, and the ones with Rush, Diana, and my mother were interesting because it revealed that Rush bore a distinct resemblance to my mother's youngest brother, William Grant Neal. We still have that photograph somewhere in our heaps of paper in some storage facility somewhere.
My mother was stunned, in any regard, having come down for the event from Austin…and to see her grandchildren in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. She would divulge to her other son in Austin that he had missed a chance to have seen the man…"who will become the most important conservative commentator in a America…mark my words." As was normal, my mother was largely correct about this and most everything else.
So, from 1989 on until recent days, 24 February 2021, my wife and I, and several million other Rushies have been left without our voice of reason. Our bulwark of willingness to stand for the common law and to fight against the scourge of socialism just left at an age far too young.
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| The portals of the Quinta Tesoro de la Sierra Madre
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The setting, the myriad numbers of birds and species of birds, a crystal river 125 yards away lined by 1,000 year old Sabinos (150 feet high cypress trees)…maybe a cold beer with my neighbour with the lime Hacienda next door…and Rush railing on the radio, nailing every dumbo Democrat failure and lapse of character and/or moral fibre…it was and is an amazing experience.
The reader has endured a considerable amount of the tales of the Quinta Tesoro de la Sierra Madre our little hideaway in the Santa Engracia area of central Tamaulipas State. We have suffered few pins and needles and our accomplishments have been many enjoyed. We relished the large and forceful of these times with Rush Limbaugh seemingly always present in the background. Our businesses, with our families' losses and gains…has all been very interesting.
During all of this commotion several years back, your humble servant was winnowing through some papers my mother had left behind. Among some of the letters was a lengthy note from a first cousin of my mother. Although he was living in Alabama, he was actually in the cultural orbit of southeastern Tennessee, around Winchester and such places. This letter had been shown to me once or twice and it was of some interest concerning the Chisolm, Chisholm, Chism, and Chisms dilemma. My mother's mother was a Chism or a Chisum depending on the cousin who was testifying.
It was and is all very interesting and complicated. There was a lot of begetting and begetting.
For instance my maternal grandfather was one of 12 who survived, and such was the nature of things in the area around Winchester, Tennessee in those times. My mother was one of four, one girl and three boys being birthed from 1913 through to 1941…by the same couple. Imagine…southeastern Tennessee is a strange place…lots of anti-alcohol people, but some of the best whiskey produced in the world. Substantially anti-slave, but ferocious Confederates in battle.
But steadily my research, along with a very distant cousin in Connecticut, began to fill in a lot of blanks concerning my descent from the Ancestors of the Old World and the New World. This relative was the brother of my Newton grandfather from back in the early 1860s. A lot of my father's line began to really reach back into the really distant past, and then my mother's genealogy gurus piled in as well. Lo and behold…we found a nice German girl…in Franklin County, Tennessee who told her daddy that she had a nice Anglo (English-speaking) boy who was interested in meeting her family. This would be around 1830.
The boy was named Asa Grant…a cousin of a guy who would later wind up wearing a blue uniform and always having a scruffy beard. The girl's nickname was 'Meli', short for "Amelia". And her surname was…...Limbaugh, essentially drawn from the blood of many generations of people from Saxony, in deep eastern Germany.
Peter Limbaugh, the father, was third generation American, but still very German. He had brothers and a father who had continued to the west and settled at a place that would come to be named Cape Girardeau, Missouri. All lines of that family were competent people, prosperous, and hard-working.
And so, according to my genealogical advisor, Rush Limbaugh and I are Ist cousins, three times removed. And finally, sparing all in the audience any further anti-climactic or pointless conjecture, you know why my Uncle Billy looked very much like his kin, a fellow named Rush Hudson Limbaugh, III…
My Uncle Billy left at a very young age…51, from pneumonia. My eldest brother left at the same age, nearly the same time.
Not long ago, my middle brother left to be with the Angels, and I was given the honour of having delivered the Eulogy at the elegant Austin Club, block or two from the impressive and imposing Capitol building in downtown Austin, Texas. Several hundred gathered to hear three other friends and me remind the folks of my brother's legacy of establishing much of what became the Republican Engine in Texas, and the subsequent "Republicanisation of Texas" during these times.
And now Rush is gone…along with all forbearers of the Newton, Christian, Neal, and Chism (Chisholm) tribes as they relate to me. It has been quite a ride.
Thanks one and all for putting up with this recounting…but it was an interesting episode in the panoply provided by Texas, and our little place in NoWhere, Mexico.
EL GRINGO VIEJO
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