Rush Limbaugh dead at the age of 70

TYLER — The Rush Limbaugh Show began Wednesday with his wife, Kathryn, announcing the death of her husband. KTBB Owner and General Manager Paul Gleiser described the radio talk show legend. “You know you are seeing a master at work when it looks easy, and Rush Limbaugh made doing talk radio look easy. And let me tell you, from experience and having done it, it is anything but easy. Rush made it look easy because he was so good at it and many many people have imitated Rush, no one will ever replace him.” Limbaugh is credited with transforming talk radio and politics in his decades behind the microphone. Limbaugh died at the age of 70 following a battle with lung cancer.

Gleiser went on to say, “One of the things that fascinated me about the radio business, from the time I was a kid listening to the radio, was the fact that it had the capacity to connect one on one. It was a personal thing between you and whoever was on the air. Yet, as I came to understand the business, it did so on a mass basis. It was not one connection with a million people, it was a million connections with one person each, and nobody ever did that better than Rush Limbaugh, and that’s why he was so important to this business.

To say that Rush Limbaugh was a game-changer is not a stretch. “I started in the talk radio business in 1976 when it had not really yet been invented at WFAA in Dallas. Talk radio kind of flailed around trying to find itself until Rush Limbaugh showed up. He truly defined the genre.” Gleiser continued, “Talk radio is what it is today, in huge measure, because this guy from Sacramento showed up on the national stage and totally, totally, changed the business.”

Limbaugh’s popularity built many stations across the nation in the course of his conservative radio talk show radio career. Gleiser illustrated it like this, “You know in 1997 I paid just under a million dollars that I did not want, just so that I could get Rush Limbaugh, who I wanted very badly. He to a huge extent made KTBB what it is today, and he will be missed.”