RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I knew this was going to happen. We have a lot of archival items that I’m not going to possibly be able to squeeze in in our remaining moments, and no reason to stop, we could throw a couple of them in next week on a day or two because they’re fun. The gurgling cod was the one I had coming up next that I received on my first trip to Boston, but its length is too much, it won’t squeeze in.
I wanted to spend a little bit more time on the whole appreciation. You know, every Thanksgiving and Christmas, I get very sentimental about all the good things that have happened, probably more so at Christmas than I do at Thanksgiving. I don’t know why, it just happens that way. But I get very sentimental about the blessed life that I have. I try to do as much as I can to share it with as many people as I can in any number of ways, and I get to do that with all of you, each and every day, telling some of the stories, some things that I’m doing, the people I’m getting to meet and so forth, and I’m enjoying sharing it with you. You’re like family. You all are really the ones that are responsible for it as a result of your listenership and patronage of the program and that will never, ever be something I take for granted. I do not take it for granted every day. I have yet to, as the term goes, phone in a show. I still work as hard preparing the radio show today as I ever did, at least as many hours. But it’s gotten so large now. I mean back when this show started, 1988, basically there was a CompuServ service and you could get the AP wire but there was nothing like the Internet. So basically I prepared the show with five newspapers every day.
There’s no way you could prepare the show with five newspapers a day because the news in newspapers is old, by the time it gets printed and there’s just too much on the Internet for one person to keep up with. So there are a number of people who have joined the effort of research and news gathering, and we’re all working at it 24/7 and sending things to the printer all night long and all morning long, and it’s in the morning I come in here and look through it all and decide what I want to use and what I don’t. But it’s become a rather large operation, from the newsletter to the website to the radio program, and it’s much more than just one person. It’s a whole lot of people who are all very happy. We haven’t had anybody leave this staff. Maybe a couple secretaries, nobody’s left in these 20 years. Some may have wanted to, we didn’t let ’em. Well, Snerdley left, but he came back. So I want to thank all of you on the staff for helping make all of this possible, too.