![]() Low-income Californians to receive $600 checks under COVID-19 economic package: Gov. The remark was delivered “with a grin, followed by what could have been a wink.”Īnd now, here’s what’s happening across California: “Tell Sacramento that it won’t be long before I own New York the way I did Sacramento,” Limbaugh told a Bee reporter shortly after launching his national show. The first episode of the nationally syndicated “Rush Limbaugh Show” aired from New York City on Aug. That same year, a shrewd former ABC Radio chief got a whiff of what was happening on the Sacramento airwaves and signed Limbaugh to a national syndication partnership, which included several times his Sacramento salary and a move to the Big Apple. I'm a Sacramento native, and my very first memory of Limbaugh was passing a billboard downtown that said, "Don't you just want to punch Rush Limbaugh?" I asked my dad, "Why would someone want to punch him?" - Kevin Yamamura February 18, 2021 The Gospel of Rush would soon reach the rest of the country. The sentiment could perhaps be summed up by a billboard that hung over the city in 1988, emblazoned with the words “Don’t You Just Want To Punch Rush Limbaugh?” KFBK’s advertisers clearly understood the brand, and what made people tune in. Men in the newsroom didn’t like it when I called them ‘flaming libs.’ They gave me my own office, but it was clear to me that they wanted me out of the newsroom,” Limbaugh told the Bee in 1988, saying many of his KFBK colleagues were upset “that no one in management tried to stop me when they thought I went too far.” “Women in Sacramento took my feminist jokes seriously and thought I was a fat, sexist piglet. The reception in his “adopted hometown,” as he often affectionately called it on-air in the years to come, was not always positive. He also made his debut as TV regular while in Sacramento, with a local news segment in which he faced off against the liberal mayor of Davis. Patrick’s Day parade and his popularity was “virtually unparalleled in Sacramento talk show history,” according to a 1987 Sacramento Bee story. Three years later, he was serving as the grand marshal of the local St. When Limbaugh began his nearly four-year stint at the station, few in the city knew his name. One can only wonder how differently the last few decades of American political history might have played out had Limbaugh not found the initial audience needed to propel his career into the stratosphere. But he couldn’t have done it without the commuters of Sacramento, who helped build his national launchpad with their radio dials. ![]() One could argue that Limbaugh would ultimately reshape the Republican Party in his own image. It was at KFBK that Limbaugh “began to develop his format: music wacky, sometimes savage, humor and conservative politics in a town thought to be dominated by liberals,” as The Times reflected in 1991.Įven his signature music, the instrumental opening of the Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone,” dates to his Sacramento show, as do trademark lines like “on the cutting edge of societal evolution” and his decades-long riff about disliking Rio Linda. The “crackpot” voice was coming from the host’s chair. ![]() I thought, ‘Oh, this guy’s got a crackpot guest.’ ” But even in its nascent form, the Rush Limbaugh show rarely did guests. He could hear someone “going on and on about Teddy Kennedy and Chappaquiddick. “I stopped cold in my tracks,” Hall recalled to The Times in 2003. Hall - then a new reporter at the station - heard a voice blaring from a speaker as he made his way through an office hallway. The week that Limbaugh made his Sacramento debut, talk radio veteran David G. “In Kansas City I had some doubts that I could do it well, but here - this is the way it should be,” he told the Sacramento Bee a few weeks after taking the job. Limbaugh found an undeniably fertile audience in liberal California’s capital, where the average listener was “familiar with the workings of government,” as Limbaugh put it, and didn’t need to be cajoled into calling in. (The station’s previous morning conservative talk radio host had resigned after a brouhaha over said “joke.”) But the KFBK position was newly vacant and offered Limbaugh one last shot at trying to make it on-air. The 9-a.m.-to-noon slot at a middle-of-the-pack AM radio station in Sacramento was no aspirant’s idea of a dream job. ![]()
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