A 32-year habit comes to an end By Dave Simpson It was September of 1988 when I first started listening, which makes me a “lifer.” It was at a riverfront park in Pekin and the voice I heard on an FM radio station from Morton was something new and different – a conservative. For the next 32 years I would tune in to the Rush Limbaugh Show just about every weekday. Finally, someone was saying things I believed. Finally, there was another viewpoint being voiced than those of Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings. In all the years I've been listening, I have never written in this column that I was a regular listener to Rush Limbaugh. I was making enough enemies on my own with my newspaper columns without running off the folks who couldn't stand Rush. So I never mentioned it.