GIFT OF GAB IS IN THE GENES

It’s easy to spot where Rush Limbaugh got his gift of gab. The whole family loves to talk.

“Don’t get me off on a tangent,” said Limbaugh’s kid brother David, a lawyer who hardly needed help in a rambling 90-minute interview.

Rush Limbaugh Sr., 101, patriarch of the family and the talk-show host’s grandfather, is a living history book.

The oldest practicing lawyer in Missouri--perhaps in the nation, although the American Bar Assn. doesn’t track attorneys past age 80--he wistfully recalls the good old days of Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party.

“I’m going to tell you something that you don’t know and that very few people know,” he said and started to spin another tale.

Millie, young Rush’s mother, thinks nothing of interrupting a bridge party to talk to a reporter on the phone.

“It’s no bother. I like this,” she said.

Yak, yak, yak. On and on and on.

It’s the Limbaugh legacy.

Even without Rush, the Limbaughs are one of the most successful families in Missouri. One of Rush Sr.’s sons, Stephen, is a U.S. District Court judge in St. Louis. His grandson, Stephen Jr., sits on the Missouri Supreme Court.

David, at 40 two years younger than Rush, handles his brother’s affairs and talks with Rush daily, mostly about business matters, but not always, he said.

“My brother has a reputation among the cultural elite as being hateful to the real extreme, but they watch him, or when they hear him, a lot of people are softened up,” said. “They find he’s not as big an ogre as they’ve heard he was. I think he attempts to lampoon the left and just point out hypocrisies. Sometimes he’ll push the envelope a little bit in his tweaking, I won’t deny that.”

Rush Sr. knows where his celebrated grandson picked up his knack for talking: heredity. “I liked to speak,” said Rush Sr., “and my son (Rush Jr., who’s deceased) liked to speak, too. Now, this boy has followed that bent for public speaking. He’s developed a following that I never thought anybody would do from this area. He’s phenomenal.”

Rush Sr. says he was never as outspoken as his grandson, though: “He says some things sometimes that I wouldn’t say. But I don’t pay any attention to the things that I dislike about it. I marvel at what he’s done. I’m exceedingly proud of him.”