It was an afternoon at the end of summer. I was a sixteen year old feminist, trying to get through yet another required reading book, with the radio on to KQV, the local top 40. station that played all the hits all the time.
The DJ was a guy called Geoff Christie. He wasn’t a huge hit. He was on in the afternoon, when people were mostly at work or in school.
The stars were on first thing in the morning, when everyone was getting ready for work, or in the late afternoon, when everyone was coming home from work, or making dinner.
I don’t know what Geoff looked like. Sometimes, like most Pittsburgh teens, I went downtown and watched the DJs playing records through the big window in the Chamber of Commerce building, that was home to the station.
Either I never saw Geoff, or he wasn’t that impressive.
But that afternoon I heard him ask girls to call in if they were against “Women’s Lib.”
I called in, all right, filled with sixteen year old righteous indignation. My dad was a lawyer. He trained both his daughters to be world class debaters. But talking to this guy was like talking to a rock.
I lined up my statistics, he came up with the brilliant line, “You can prove anything with statistics.”
We went back and forth for a few minutes, before I decided that talking to Geoff Christie was a waist of oxygen, and I was going to change the channel on my radio, permanently.
Geoff Christie didn’t ;last long on KQV, he wound up in California, where he lived on Welfare, for a while, before he went back om the air, this time using his real name, Rush Limbaugh.
Now he has announced he has late stage lung cancer.
People are gloating. Serves him right.
No, if he faded into obscurity, like the failed rock jock he was, that would serve him right.
I watched my mother die from a malignancy on her lungs. NOBODY deserves to go that way, not even the man Mom called “That ass, Rush Limbaugh.”
A sad, pathetic soul, the one time Geoff Christie. He could never be a hot rock jock, like Wolfman Jack. He could never be a true pundit like Bill Kristol. What he was a was a radio rabble rouser. He made a lot of money. That may prolong his life a few months. But the fact is the cancer will kill him, and his end will be painful.
Meanwhile his employers will be looking for someone even more abrasive, who can be even more offensive. Sadly, I suspect they’ll find him.
Now I learn that the president is going to award the Medal of Freedom to a third rate rock jock. Which will tarnish it for everyone who ever has, or ever will receive it. But that’s what things have come to. A draft dodger in the White House will award the medal of freedom to a man who made a name for himself as a name caller.