20th Anniversary Flashback: Remembering the Farding Bit

RUSH: — and one of these little confetti bombs that you see at the Super Bowl are now going off and being launched. Look, it’s Veuve Clicquot. It’s excellent. And I happen to know it was already in the refrigerator so none of you tightwads bought it.

STAFF: (laughing)

RUSH: Am I allowed to consume adult beverages while hosting broadcast excellence?

KRAIG KITCHIN: You are.

RUSH: Really? (laughing)

KITCHIN: You are. Absolutely. From all of us at the EIB — every single employee, all of your friends, your family, your listeners — you are a friend to all, and an inspiration to every last one of us. Thank you for 20 fantastic years of friendship, leadership, inspiration, and outright fun. Thank you.

RUSH: Thank you, guys. Thank you. You lied to me again. You said there would be no surprises. Who said that? From New York, who said that? Oh. Ohhhh, that’s right! New York told me there were no surprises. New York did not lie to me, but you people did.

STAFF: (laughing)

RUSH: (slurping) When you drink something on the radio, you have to slurp it so people know that you’re doing it, otherwise you have dead air. All right, that is good. Thank you, guys. Thanks. Thanks very much. We’ve been sitting here reminiscing, ladies and gentlemen, at some of the things that have happened in the past over the course of this program, and one of the — we didn’t find the tape of this, I wish we had. But there was an incident early on, shortly after we had secured WLS Chicago as our Chicago affiliate, which to me was huge. I grew up listening to WLS and KXOK in St. Louis, and KMOX as well, and to be on WLS was a real, real, real big deal. I mean, that was major.

Shortly after the clearance on WLS, I was just playing around, horsing around here. I’d found a word in the dictionary that I found fascinating, and after I looked up this word, I said, ‘You know what we’ve found, ladies and gentlemen?’ They were worried about high safety back then, something had happened, and highway safety was a problem, and I said, ‘One of the things we can do to really clean up highway safety is to get women to stop farding in their cars. If you get that stopped, we’ll be safer. You can see it every time it happens. If you get that stopped, get women to stop farding in their cars, then they’ll be paying attention to driving, and it will be a lot safer out on the roads.’

Well, all these people started calling. ‘I can’t believe what you’re saying!’

‘What am I saying? What are you talking about?’

‘Well, how do you know that somebody is doing what you said when they’re driving?’

‘Because you can see it! And I’ll tell you something else: Men don’t do it. You will not see men farding in their cars when they’re driving,’ and this went on and on.

Finally Tom Tradup, who was running WLS, pulled me off the air, canceled me for 45 minutes and called Ed McLaughlin to say, ‘This is not what we signed up for. This is not the kind of garbage we signed up for,’ and then Tom said, ‘By the way, I’m sick and tired and hearing that Ted Kennedy song, too. The Philanderer.’ I don’t think Ed was even aware of what we were doing. He didn’t monitor every minute of the show. But I knew exactly when I heard this, I said, ‘This is great.’ Of course, the word was fard: f-a-r-d. And you just run that pronunciation real quickly, and people think you’re saying the other word, and it means ‘to apply makeup.’ It’s a French word to apply makeup. So I was on solid ground. I had not uttered an obscenity. I had not even said anything off color. But people thought so, including Tom Tradup.