I'm sure we can sort this out, Mr Mark." On the other side of the glass, while I was droning on, Kit had Johnny Donovan's show intro re-edited so that, when we came back from the next break, it went: "And now, ladies and gentlemen, filling in for Rush Limbaugh, here's Steyn Mark!" It makes a world of difference to have someone running the program who knows how to make even the smallest aside just a little better and sharper. On one show I was grumbling that I'd flown down from Burlington, Vermont and, when I got to the airport, US Airways had me booked on the flight as "Steyn Mark", which, under the strictures of the Patriot Act or whatever, had taken forever to straighten out - a process not aided by the supervisor, who kept assuring me "Don't worry, Mr Mark. ![]() He was a funny guy, and had a droll view of life. On air, if you said something funny, or semi-funny, or just a tweak away from being funny, he'd say something through your headphones that just nudged it along and took it to the next level: one time, I was picturing a colonial-era edition of "Meet Ye Press", which is the germ of a half-decent comic premise, and Kit laughed and said something funnier over the talkback that I cheerfully purloined, and the running joke was finally off and trotting. He had a knack for ideas, and, as Rush said earlier today, he didn't care who got the credit: it was all about the show. But he still managed to send through his stack of the morning's stories: He had a gift for taking an ostensibly dull Associated Press report and finding the one significant line deep in paragraph 27 - the carelessly formulated wording on which he'd hang a shrewd insight or a funny line, both ready to use should an ill-prepared guest-host find himself lost for words. When I guest-hosted last month, Kit was "working from home" that day - which was something of a euphemism by that stage of his illness. And after the show he asked Kit, "Do you have any more stuff like that?" Kit's "stack of stuff" was a big part of the show for the next quarter-century. So Kit came on board to deal with Rush's mail, and one day he handed Rush a couple of news stories with a very slender connection between them, and Rush riffed off it for a few minutes on air. But 27 years ago he accepted a job with a guy whose radio show was growing a little faster than he could handle. ![]() ![]() He had been an actor, dreaming of Broadway, not talk radio. After thinking about it, I figured I must have confused H R with R F, the studio boss of "Monumental Pictures" in Singin' In The Rain. The dramatis personae of the Nixon White House aren't quite as reflexively familiar to an unassimilated foreign guest-host such as myself, and it took me awhile to get on top of it: on one early show, I referred to him as "R F", which bemused him. Kit Carson was Rush Limbaugh's Chief of Staff, so Rush dubbed him "H R" - as in H R Haldeman, who fulfilled the same role for Richard Nixon.
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