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is its status as the boyhood home of El Rushbo.
    Chuck Martin is the executive director of the Visitors Bureau. “You’d be surprised how many people come in to buy Rush Limbaugh memorabilia and T-shirts here,” he told me. “It’s amazing how many people come to Cape just because they want to see where Rush grew up.” To accommodate them, the bureau offers a drive-it-yourself tour whose itinerary includes the hospital where Rush was born, his childhood home and elementary school, Central High, the Varsity Barber Shop, the KGMO studio, and the campus of Southeast Missouri State University, where he suffered through one utterly unhappy academic year.
    Rush often rails against the excesses of liberal academia, but his alma mater was (and still is) a bastion of conservatism. In the spring of 1968, just a few months before he enrolled there, a small group of students and teachers tried to form a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. The president of the university, Dr. Mark Scully, responded by firing eight members of the faculty, causing the chairman of the department of history to resign in protest. Bobby Kennedy, who was running for the Democratic nomination for president, held a campaign rally in Cape and denounced the firings. The intervention made no difference. Cape wasn’t Kennedy country; that year both Republican vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew and third-party segregationist George Wallace drew bigger audiences.
    “The college had a huge contingent of veterans then,” says Frank Nickell. “President Scully called in a group of them, handed out T-shirts, and deputized them to defend Academic Hall against the anti-Vietnam protestors.” (There are still a lot of military veterans at SEMO, and the place retains its basic outlook. But times change, even in Cape. During my visit, the university hosted a performance of The Nutcracker by the Moscow Ballet. Big Rush would not have understood.)
    Another event in the spring of 1968 shook the town: on April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, 160 miles down Highway 61. Cape remained quiet, but Cairo, Illinois, just a half hour across the Mississippi, was a powder keg. Even before the assassination it had been the scene of a long, violent racial confrontation that eventually led the governor to send in units of the Illinois National Guard. The city fathers stationed observers on the bridge to spot and report on cars with Illinois license plates and black occupants. This vigil was maintained for three years.
    While all this upheaval was taking place, Limbaugh carried on as usual, living at home, doing The Rusty Sharpe Show on KGMO, and stubbornly resisting his father’s efforts to make a professional man out of him. He didn’t attend any of the political rallies in 1968 and only dimly recalls seeing Bobby Kennedy’s motorcade pass by. After King’s death he was pressed into service helping NBC-TV and radio reporters upload reports from the station. “I remember talking to them about the broadcast business. I was seventeen, playing records on the radio, not commenting on news. I don’t recall feeling any concern,” he recounts.
    Most of all, he wanted to get out of Cape Girardeau.
    “My last three years were miserable,” Limbaugh says. In the eleventh grade his heart was broken in a secret romance he still won’t discuss. During his senior year his war with his father escalated, and Rusty formally gave in and enrolled at SEMO. He lived at home, continued to spin records, and went to class as rarely as possible. On some days, Millie Limbaugh actually drove him to college to make sure he attended.
    The most colorful site on the Limbaugh tour is the flood wall that runs for a mile along the Mississippi. In recent years Cape has, inexplicably, been struck by a passion for historical public art. A mural depicting the town’s founding adorns the side of a downtown building. The university’s Kent Library features a 38-by-21-foot painting