That’s how it started. A caller to Rush’s syndicated show tried to get Rush to give him a free subscription to Rush’s Newsletter. Rather than just giving “Dan” a freebie, Rush decided on the spur of the moment to turn this into a “learning experience”. Rush’s page on the event.
Rush suggested that Dan do something to earn money so he could buy his own subscription, and learn something about being a capitalist. After some back and forth over several days with Dan and his girlfriend(wife?), they decided that Dan should hold a “bake sale” in his home town of Fort Collins, Colorado. Rush would fly out to Fort Collins and help Dan raise the money to earn his subscription. How could that possibly go wrong?
It was 1993 – the country had just elected a brand new President – William Jefferson Blythe Clinton. Bill Clinton started off by declaring that Americans had not paid enough taxes in the 1980s, and he was going to correct that. The time was ripe for an public reaction to the drastic change the New President was announcing and proposing.
Having just had a very good year doing consulting work in Chicago and paying a huge amount in Federal Income taxes the prior year, I made a conscious choice to stop working and drop out a few months earlier. (my John Galt moment)
“RushStock” was the informal name for Dan’s Bake Sale – a play on Woodstock, the 1969 event that became the iconic gathering of Baby Boomers at the height of opposition to the Vietnam war and young people “dropping out” and “fighting the establishment”. I decided immediately that I was going to drive from Michigan to Colorado and attend this “Right Wing Woodstock” – not being sure what the outcome would be – but that it was an important moment in time and I needed to be there.
The first sign that “something big” was happening was when I was approaching North Platte, Nebraska. The local Rush affiliate AM station was offering free Dan’s Bake Sale bumper stickers if you came in to the station. It took a little doing to find the station, but I went into their store front studio and picked one up. The station was having a steady stream of people coming into town pulling off from the interstate and the staff were amazed and somewhat amused at the response and realizing this wasn’t going to be just a typical radio promotion.
With the bumper sticker now on the car, people in rest stops started to notice each other and talk about what was going on. It became more and more apparent this was going to be more than just a couple people buying Dan’s cookies.
I arrived in Denver and decided to rent a motel room there in the early afternoon the day before, figuring things in Fort Collins would probably be booked up and I should pin down a place to stay while I had a chance.
Fort Collins is about an hour north of Denver, a straight shot up the interstate. Fort Collins is the home of Colorado State University, which is the town’s main employer and dominates the culture of the town. I got a very early start in the morning to get to Fort Collins in plenty of time. After noticing the traffic was getting very heavy on the Interstate, I decided to get off the freeway and take the parallel old road. That turned out to a very good decision. Hours before the event was to start, a massive traffic jam had already begun to block the interstate.
The radio station in Fort Collins was providing emergency travel information to people coming to town and directed people to not try to drive into downtown, but to go instead to the parking lots out at the University out on the edge of town – and shuttle buses would take you into town. That seemed reasonable. Still hours before the event, there was a steady stream of school buses shuttling people to downtown as fast as they could be loaded. The city realized how big of a “problem” they now had on their hands, and were scrambling to cope..
Arriving at downtown, there is a plaza where the event was to be held, and some booths had been set up to sell merchandise in addition to Dan’s actual cookies. One of Rush’s favorite restaurants – Brennan’s in New Orleans sold food.
As the time of the show approached, it started to rain – hard. People scrambled to get out of the rain. One of the places many people ducked into was the City’s parking garage. Spontaneous music sprouted up and entertained people until the storm passed. It was a brief shower, and when the rain stopped, the crowd moved back to the plaza. Most of the people going to Dan’s Bake sale were now stuck in their cars out on the Interstate, and never made it to downtown.
Rush was flying in on a helicopter and seeing a 20 mile long traffic jam on the interstate and really wondering what he had created. He was driven into town, and gave a speech from a small stage to the assembled crowd packed into the city plaza. The speech itself was not terribly memorable, but the crowd was appreciative of the event. Dan’s cookies lasted about 3 seconds.
After the speech was over, people dispersed and wandered around downtown visiting local merchants, eating lunch, and the like. The police and local officials were stunned that not only were there no problems with people, but visitors were actually cleaning up the area – rather than the normal concert crowds who would dump tons of garbage that had to be cleaned up.
Because people had arrived over a period of hours, but all dispersed at the same time, the buses taking people back to the parking lot were overwhelmed. People tried to organize themselves to fill up the buses, but it didn’t work very well. No fist fights broke out, but there was a lot of frustration.
The local radio station had its phone lines open for people to call in. The reaction from the city was the most interesting aspect of the entire event. The University Professor types were in total shock. They were not even aware this was going to happen, and suddenly their town was drowned in 20,000 ordinary law abiding Americans descending on their sanctuary to see that evil right wing wacko Rush Limbaugh. “How did the city allow this to happen in our town?” was a common reaction from the locals. First Amendment and the right for the people to assemble – sucks when you don’t agree with them.
Rush never followed up the success of Dan’s Bake Sale and it was the last public appearance of open to the public that I’m aware of. Dan vanished into obscurity, but probably never asked a celebrity for Free Stuff again.
Back in the 1960s, a fellow named Rege Cordic – the morning show on KDKA in Pittsburgh – decided one day that he was going to walk to Washington, PA – a town about 20 miles South of Pittsburgh. Rege was a streetcar enthusiast, and Washington had been the destination of one of the last interurban streetcar lines. He and a few friends were going to retrace the route by walking there on a Sunday morning, and he invited his listeners to come along.
He had ratings as high as an 80% share in the late 50s and early 60s – FM was brand new, and AM radio still dominated the airwaves and KDKA was *the* station in town.
Since this event happened ‘before the internet’, the description of what happened next is from only my memory. My older brother decided to join the walk – I was not old enough to go along, so my memories could be inaccurate. If you know or remember the details better, feel free to add them in or correct my account.
Well, the day came and KDKA had chartered a bus in Washington to bring the walkers back to Pittsburgh. Then the crowds started to show up…. and more and more people continued to gather. Somewhere in the vicinity of 20,000 people showed up to join the walk. US Route 19 was the main road to Washington (4 lanes wide). Interstate 79 did not exist yet. On Sunday morning, Route 19 would be pretty empty, but a crowd of 20,000 people walking at different speeds was a bit of an obstruction to traffic.
But the big problem was that 20,000 people wound up 20 miles from home in the late afternoon (or where they got tired and dropped out), and there was only a single bus to take them all “back home”. It was a huge mess – panicky calls went out for volunteers to drive the route and pick up people along the way to help them get back home to Pittsburgh – it was now after dark. It was a huge mess for KDKA, and Rege ended up leaving Pittsburgh and moved to California.
So if you’re a host on a very popular radio show – remember the consequences if you decide one day on a whim to “let’s all get together“. Glenn Beck probably doesn’t know the Rege Cordic story, even with his 30 years in the radio business.