Chapter Three

Marcus David Limbaugh

August 28, 1936 — August 26, 1972

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Friday, August 28, 1936. Chase, Alabama.

It was a Friday. Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House, running for his second term. The Great Depression still had its hands around the country’s throat — unemployment stood near seventeen percent. In Alabama, the cotton mills that defined life for thousands of families were beginning, slowly, to recover from the wreckage of the failed General Textile Strike of 1934. The scars were fresh. The looms were running again, but the people running them had not forgotten what it cost to ask for better.

Twenty-seven days earlier, the 1936 Summer Olympics had opened in Berlin under the presiding eye of Adolf Hitler, staged as a showcase of Nazi power and the supposed superiority of the Aryan race. The Games were the first in history broadcast on live television. They are remembered most for what happened to Hitler’s theory: a young man from Oakville, Alabama — sixty miles from Chase — named Jesse Owens won four gold medals and humiliated the ideology in front of the world.

On the very day Marcus David Limbaugh was born, German authorities were conducting mass arrests of Jehovah’s Witnesses across Germany, sending most to concentration camps. The machinery of the Holocaust was already turning. That same year, Fortune magazine sent writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans to Alabama to document what the Depression had done to the people who lived closest to the ground. Their work would become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

In Huntsville, Lowe Mill — one of the city’s five great cotton mills — was in its final months of textile production. It would go silent the following spring, its looms stilled, its village workers left to find another world.

He did not know any of that yet. He was a newborn. Nobody told him.

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Chase, Alabama

Chase was not Huntsville and it was not the mill villages. It was its own place, shaped by its own particular industry. The community had grown up in the long shadow of Chase Nursery, founded in 1882 by a man from Maine named Henry Bellows Chase, who had come south by rail, looked at the land east of Monte Sano Mountain, and decided it was exactly right for growing things. By the time Papa Joe walked its rows, Chase Nursery covered more than fifteen hundred acres and shipped flowers and live plants in refrigerated railway cars to customers across the eastern United States, departing from its own company siding on the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway. The entire northeast quarter of modern Huntsville still carries the founder’s name: Chase. Chase Gardens. Streets and neighborhoods named for a man from Maine who came south to grow flowers.

Marcus David Limbaugh grew up in that world. His father, Joseph Wheeler Limbaugh — Papa Joe — worked the nursery rows and knew the name of everything that grew. Marcus learned what his father knew: the patience required to tend living things, the satisfaction of work measured in seasons rather than hours. It was careful work, and it made a careful man.

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Riverton High School

Riverton High School served the communities on the northeast side of Huntsville — Chase among them. Marcus David Limbaugh went there. On the other side of the city, at Joe Bradley High School, a girl named Daisy Ann Oldfield — daughter of the mill district, little sister of Harold Lloyd “Buddy” Oldfield who had died on her second birthday — was growing up in her own world.

They met at a dance.

That is the whole of the courtship story as it has come down: a boy from the nursery side of town and a girl from the mill village side of town, and a dance somewhere in between where Huntsville’s young people found each other across the invisible lines their neighborhoods had drawn. Whatever was said that night, whatever was noticed, it was enough. Marcus Limbaugh and Ann Oldfield found each other, and they did not let go.

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Korea

The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea. The United States entered under a United Nations mandate, and what followed was three years of combat on a peninsula most Americans could not have found on a map. The war ended in armistice on July 27, 1953 — not in victory, not in defeat, but in a ceasefire that holds, technically, to this day. The men who fought it came home to a country that was already moving on to other things. It would come to be called the Forgotten War.

Marcus David Limbaugh, Private, United States Army, Alabama, was among those men. A boy from Chase who grew up learning the names of flowers went to a war on the other side of the world. He came home. He married Ann Oldfield. He went back to work.

He did not talk about it much. The men who went did not, as a rule. They came home and built their lives and let the war be something that had happened, not something that was still happening. But it was in him. It is always in them.

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The George Bailey of Huntsville, Alabama

There is a scene in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life — made in 1946, the decade Marcus came of age — where the angel Clarence shows George Bailey what the town of Bedford Falls would have looked like if George had never been born. Every life he had touched, gone dark. Every kindness, undelivered. The town itself a colder, smaller, meaner place.

The son who worshipped Marcus David Limbaugh calls his father the George Bailey of Huntsville, Alabama. That is not a small thing to say about a man who died at thirty-five.

His late father passed away when David was 12 years old. He was always helping the neighbors, from weeding an older lady’s garden, to painting, pouring concrete, trimming branches or wrapping water pipes under their house for the winter. He never expected payment. He did it for the simple reason of wanting to do it. One of David’s first life lessons of “Do Your Job!” was helping others.

David learned at an early age, growing up in the Jim Crow era in Alabama, to have empathy for others, by witnessing first-hand the ugliness some had towards others. The next time you are stuck in traffic because of an automobile accident, instead of being upset, stop and think of the persons in the accident, and their family and friends. You might be late, their lives may be changed forever.

On January 3, 1960, his son David was born at Huntsville Hospital — the hospital that Dr. Carl Grote Sr. had raised the money to build, where Dr. Carl Grote Jr. now practiced. David was the first person introduced to Marcus Limbaugh that Marcus had not chosen. He chose him anyway, completely, and did not stop.

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The Summer of 1972

In the summer of 1972, Marcus David Limbaugh was thirty-five years old. Dr. Carl Grote Jr. — the son of the man who had built the hospital, the Limbaugh family’s physician for as long as David could remember — made the call that every doctor dreads making and every patient dreads receiving.

Lung cancer.

Grote Jr. had known Marcus since before David was old enough to walk. He had been there for the births, the fevers, the ordinary maintenance of ordinary lives. He knew the family. He delivered the news.

Marcus David Limbaugh died on August 26, 1972 — two days before his thirty-sixth birthday. David was twelve years old.

The gravestone is small and white and standard-issue, the kind the government provides for veterans. It says everything it needs to say and nothing more: Private. Army. Korea. The dates. A cross at the top.

After his dad died, his mom bought him a little sign that sits in his classroom today. It states “We create our tomorrows by what we dream today.” Have a dream. Create goals. Create a plan to achieve that dream. It took David fifty-two years to achieve his dream of being a teacher.

And then David grows up without him — and begins meeting the world.

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Advice to Graduates

One year a Riverdale High School yearbook student writer asked David Limbaugh what his advice to graduating seniors would be. He told her he would go home that night and write something for her. Here is what he wrote.

Based on Mr. Limbaugh’s Life

“Do Your Job!”

My oldest son will tell you he still hears that in his sleep every night. Why? His High School football coach said that every day. So my first word of advice to you is “Do Your Job!”

For me, “Do Your Job!” was engrained into my brain by my late father, who passed away when I was 12 years old. He was always helping our neighbors, from weeding an older lady’s garden, to painting, pouring concrete, trimming branches or wrapping water pipes under their house for the winter. He never expected payment. He did it for the simple reason of wanting to do it. One of my first life lessons of “Do Your Job!” was helping others.

My second word of advice is “Be a Service to Others.”

Another influence on my life was my second ‘father’, Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, who came on TV every Sunday during football season talking about the previous day’s Alabama football game, commenting on highlights and giving life lessons to me as a young man without a dad. He spoke of the importance of doing the little things right. If you do the fundamentals correctly, the big things take care of themselves. Famous Coach John Wooden’s first lesson to his incoming freshmen basketball players was how to put their socks on. Coach Tim Corbin’s first lesson to his incoming freshmen baseball players is how to stand at attention to the National Anthem.

My third word of advice is “Do the little things right.”

When I was going to college to be a teacher, one of my assignments in an education class was write a paper on my philosophy of teaching. I wrote one sentence, “Kids can not pick their parents.” The professor gave me an A. I learned at an early age, growing up in the Jim Crow era in Alabama, to have empathy for others, by witnessing first-hand the ugliness some had towards others. The next time you are stuck in traffic because of an automobile accident, instead of being upset, stop and think of the persons in the accident, and their family and friends. You might be late, their lives may be changed forever.

My fourth word of advice is “Have empathy for others.”

After my dad died my mom bought me a little sign that sits in my classroom today. It states “We create our tomorrows by what we dream today.” Have a dream. Create goals. Create a plan to achieve that dream. It took me fifty two years to achieve my dream of being a teacher. My fifth word of advice is “Have a dream and never give up on that dream.”

I love quotes. I try to live by two of them,

“Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

and

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt.

My sixth word of advice is “Do everything with all your heart and never let anyone stand in your way of being who you are, and becoming what you want to become, or stand in the way of your dream.”

I mentioned Coach Bryant earlier. He kept a poem in his pocket that his mother gave him and read it every day. I made a poster of it and placed it on my podium in my classroom because I read it every day. Here is the poem:

This is the beginning of a new day.
God has given me this day to use as I will.
I can waste it or use it for good.

What I do today is important as I am
exchanging a day of my life for it.

When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever.

Leaving something in its place I have traded for it.

I want it to be a gain, not loss–good, not evil.

Success, not failure,
in order that I shall not forget the price I paid for it.

W. Heartsill Wilson

My final word of advice is “Never waste a day. Today is called present for a reason, it is truly a gift.”

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A Note on Sources

United States & World, 1936

The People History. “What Happened in 1936.” Accessed March 2026. thepeoplehistory.com

Encyclopedia of Alabama. “General Textile Strike of 1934.” Accessed March 2026. encyclopediaofalabama.org

Wikipedia. “1936 Summer Olympics.” Accessed March 2026. en.wikipedia.org

History.com. “Jesse Owens.” Accessed March 2026. history.com

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “1936: Key Dates.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Accessed March 2026. encyclopedia.ushmm.org

Encyclopedia of Alabama. “Great Depression in Alabama.” Accessed March 2026. encyclopediaofalabama.org

Huntsville & Alabama

Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment. “History of Lowe Mill.” Accessed March 2026. lowemill.art

Encyclopedia of Alabama. “Ornamental Nursery Crops Production” (Henry B. Chase / Chase Nursery). Accessed March 2026. encyclopediaofalabama.org

Military Service

History.com. “Korean War.” Accessed March 2026. history.com

Limbaugh, Marcus David. Gravestone. Chase, Alabama. Private, United States Army. Korea. August 28, 1936 – August 26, 1972.

Author’s Own Account

Limbaugh, David. “Dad – And My Advice to Graduates.” Coach Limbaugh’s Classroom. July 28, 2019. coachlimbaughsclassroom.com

Film & Literary References

Capra, Frank, dir. It’s a Wonderful Life. Liberty Films, 1946.

Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.

Wilson, W. Heartsill. “This Is the Beginning of a New Day.” Poem. Cited in: Limbaugh, David. “Dad – And My Advice to Graduates.” Coach Limbaugh’s Classroom. July 28, 2019.