KC101 photo.

The Beckster in the '90s.

You may want to vomit over his tearful on-air theatrics, wild-ass libertarian conspiracy theories and über-patriotic rants. You may be enraptured by his boy-next-door smile, self-deprecating humor, spiritual enthusiasm and take-no-prisoners conservative view of government (not to mention his claim that Barack Obama has a "deep-seated hatred" for white people).

Either way, you should understand the media monstrosity known as Glenn Beck was incubated right here in little old Connecticut.

When Beck arrived at Hamden-based KC101 in early 1992, he was a semi-failed, drug-and-alcohol addicted, Top-40s radio jock desperately looking for a route to stardom.

By the time he left seven years later, Beck had figured out that talk radio was the future and the conservative shtick pioneered by Rush Limbaugh and others — including a now-obscure Connecticut guy — could be revamped to serve as his escalator to fame and fortune.

Fame, as in a recent cover story in Time Magazine, profiles on Salon.com and in The Phoenix and a host of other publications, multiple New York Times best-sellers, and thousands of devoted fans lining up to get his signature and shake his hand.

Fortune, as in $23 million raked in last year from those books, his now-internationally syndicated radio show, and his highly rated gig on Fox News.

The people who do love him do so with an almost scary intensity.

A few weeks ago, more than 700 fans showed up one rainy night in North Haven for a Glenn Beck appearance and book-signing for Arguing with Idiots. Beck arrived rockstar-style, emerging from his own special bus accompanied by roadies wearing snazzy yellow-and-black "Glenn Beck Arguing With Idiots Book Tour" shirts.

(According to one Barnes and Noble manager, Beck is "the fastest signer you'll ever see." She wasn't kidding. Once he got in gear, Beck was signing books at the rate of 15 copies per minute.)

Repeated requests for an interview with the author/TV and radio star for this story went unanswered.

Beck arrived more than 90 minutes late that night, but his fans didn't seem to mind. They were uniformly conservative, mostly older, mostly middle- and working-class, and overwhelmingly white. Their explanations of why they like Beck so much usually begin with his entertainment value and end with politics.

"He's my favorite show," gushed Kathleen Kish, 52, who showed up from Milford with her 15-year-old daughter, Kayleigh, in tow. "He delivers his message really well, and he makes you laugh. ... His show releases some of the tension if you feel angry about government."

Robert Greer, 61, is another Milford conservative who turned out to shake Beck's hand and get his signature. "If you listen to him," Greer said of Beck's show, "you start to make sense of the world."

Beck's incredible success has astonished many of the people who worked closely with him during those critical Connecticut years.

"Nobody saw that coming," said Vinnie Penn, in a recent phone interview. Penn was Beck's co-host for three years in the late 1990s on KC101's "morning zoo" show. Back then, Beck "didn't have your proverbial pot to piss in," adds Penn, who is now hosting his own show on Sirius satellite radio.

"I knew he was talented," Penn said. "I knew he was entertaining, very theatrical ... but this is mind-boggling. ... It's a goddamn empire!"

Matt Feduzi, who did the news for that morning show, told the Advocate that he figured Beck's chances to make it to the big time were maybe 50-50: "We used to say he's going to be either a cult leader or a failure."

There were, however, a lot of people connected with Beck's Connecticut radio career who were really happy to see the dude leave.

Beck had bounced around various big-time stations in markets like Houston and Baltimore before showing up at KC101, a Top-40s FM station owned by Clear Channel. Soon after his arrival, New Haven's WELI and the tiny WAVZ were also bought by Clear Channel, which would eventually turn into a media giant that helped Beck achieve national prominence after he left Connecticut.

By his own later accounts, Beck was an alcoholic and a drug user in his early days in Connecticut. But that didn't stop him from becoming operations manager for all three stations in addition to his morning show duties. His push to shake things up demonstrated just how ruthless Beck could be.

"Glenn came in like 'Gang Busters,'" said Feduzi, who believes Beck was trying to bring the stations into the new radio era. "He kept saying this place [WELI] has got to be more hip."

"He was on a mission in 1994," recalled John D'Andre, who was then the assistant news director at WELI.

And he didn't intend to let anyone stand in his way.

"For some people, he made life unbearable," said D'Andre, who now hosts a show on Quinnipiac University's WQUN-AM. "He would go on these tirades and people would cringe; they couldn't wait for it to be over."

Feduzi still has an enthusiastic memo that Beck sent out in those days. At the bottom of the memo is an unauthorized note added by one of Clear Channel's disgruntled news reporters and written as pseudo-post script. While Beck oozed corporate happy-happy bullshit, the reporter's addendum had a different tone.

It thanked staffers who were "being sacrificed for our brave new world order newsroom, a triumph of superficiality over depth, accuracy and substance." The satirical post script signed off with: "From natural born journalism killers."

Beck's drive to remake the stations wasn't limited to the newsroom. One of his favorite targets was a New Haven radio legend named Ron Rohmer, a former New Haven Blades hockey player who'd been doing a WELI morning show since 1960. Rohmer was 63 at the time, and his style was everything Beck wanted to bury: folksy humor, old-fashioned music and relaxed chatter.

Beck started using his morning show to mock Rohmer on the air. According to Salon.com's lengthy profile of Beck, making fun of fellow talk show hosts was a pattern during Beck's early radio career. But he made a mistake taking on a rough ex-hockey player.

"Ron had a temper," remembered Bud Finch, another of WELI's old-time radio stalwarts. "And he was used to confrontations."

"Ron was not happy with what they were saying [on Beck's show]," recalled Feduzi. "Ron was just pissed."

The tension between the two exploded in the parking lot of Clear Channel's Hamden studios.

"Ron bashed him in the forehead with the heel of his hand," according to Feduzi. D'Andre's memory is that Rohmer "punched him in the nose," much to the joy of others at the stations. "Ron was hailed as a hero," said D'Andre.

Beck's attempt to force Rohmer off the air ended badly. Rohmer filed an age discrimination suit against Clear Channel and eventually got back on the air at WAVZ. Rohmer died in 2005.

Feduzi said he and Penn would later tease Beck about the incident. "We used to kid Glenn, if he did something we didn't like: 'We're going to get Ron to beat you up.' "

Penn said Beck wasn't ever happy with his corporate role. "I don't think he liked management very much."

Beck has said publicly that his Connecticut years were rough in a personal sense.

According to Beck's public statements and writings, he came to grips with his drug and alcohol abuse beginning in November 1994 with a visit to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the basement of a church in Cheshire, the town where Beck was living at the time.

It was also the period when he divorced his first wife and met his second, whom he married in 1998. In 1999, Beck and his family became Mormons, and there are analysts who argue Beck's conservative brand has been heavily influenced by ultra-right-wing Mormon authors.

Then there was the public furor Beck and his morning show partner, Pat Gray, ignited when they did an on-air skit making fun of Asian Americans. (Gray had been Beck's partner on a Top 40s morning show in Baltimore and joined him when Beck came to Connecticut.) The skit eventually led to a public apology by the station's management.

Feduzi, however, doesn't believe claims by Beck's leftist critics that he's a racist. "He's not a prejudiced guy, he would just make fun of everybody."

Still, Feduzi admits Beck would say stuff on the air just to stir up controversy and get his listeners' blood boiling. "I think sometimes he did," Feduzi said. "Whether or not he really believes that stuff, I don't know."

The radio marriage between Beck and Penn came about after Pat Gray departed. Penn was doing his own show on WELI and he moved over to 'The Glenn Beck Show' on KC101 in 1997. Feduzi was also on board at that point, completing the morning zoo team that would last until Beck's departure at the end of 1999.

Ironically, Beck was never as popular in those days as Penn. In the New Haven Advocate's annual "Best of New Haven" readers' poll, the highest rank Beck ever reached in the radio personality category was third in 1999, two spots below Penn.

Beck's qualities as an entertainer were clearly on display in those years, according to his morning colleagues. He was intelligent and witty, intensely curious, his emotions always close to the surface. And he could cry on cue.

"He was very, very emotional," recalled Feduzi. "He gets so emotional it just makes you want to back off. ... I would get uncomfortable. I'd just want to leave the studio."

"I always made fun of him for crying," Penn said. "He was always crying." Often, as far as Penn could tell, his co-host's tears were genuine. "But there were definitely times it was a tactic."

Penn can remember shows when Beck would be weeping on the air. "We would go on commercial break and he'd be phoning in an order for a bacon-and-egg with cheese. Then we would come back on air and the tears would be back."

Beck's co-workers remember how intense Beck was about all kinds of issues, and it wasn't only when he was on the radio.

"We definitely partied," said Feduzi. Now 40 and a pharmaceutical representative, Feduzi looks back on his days with the Beck show with fondness. "We felt like we were rock stars," he said, explaining they would show up at New Haven bars like Humphrey's and get mobbed.

"Vinnie and I would be drinking, partying and Glenn would be over in the corner in conversation with somebody," Feduzi said, laughing at the memory. "We're like, what the hell is he talking about now? Look at that nerd."

One off-air talent Beck developed in those days was his ability to persuade. "He had such big balls!" Feduzi said. "He could get [corporate types] to do whatever he wanted," whether it was raises for the show's staff or allowing live broadcasts from Jamaica.

One of the things Beck got the corporate folks at Clear Channel to do was give a conservative talk show guy named Tom Scott a shot on WELI. Some believe that Beck studied Scott's conservative talk concept as much as he did Limbaugh's.

Scott was a conservative gadfly, a former state representative who ran as an independent candidate for governor in 1994.

In 1995, after hearing Scott do a few shows for a rival station, Beck invited him to work at WELI. (That same year, Limbaugh was featured on the cover of Time under the title: "Is Rush Limbaugh Good for America?")

"He had a lot of questions about talk radio," Scott said of their first meeting. "We talked a lot about my style. ... He wanted a show that [had] a state-of-Connecticut emphasis with a national focus."

Initially, Beck paired Scott with liberal Roger Vann, who would later become the chairman of the Connecticut NAACP, in a Point-Counterpoint format. Later, Scott would be teamed with another liberal, Paul Bass, now publisher and editor of the New Haven Independent news Web site.

Often, after he finished his own morning zoo show on KC101, Beck would cross the hall to make on-air visits with Scott. "He frequently came in and would give an on-air critique of the show," said Scott.

"I think he watched and listened to Tom Scott when Tom was doing his show," said Feduzi. "I think he was influenced by Tom's approach to radio."

(Penn scoffs at the idea that Beck developed his talk style from Scott. "That would be hilarious," he said.)

Feduzi and others say that, as the end of the decade approached, Beck was far more interested in talk radio than in doing his Top-40 show. "He was more excited to fill in for Tom than he was in doing the morning show."

"He was so frustrated with the format," Penn said of his morning zoo co-host. "Towards the end he was much more political ... which management wasn't crazy about."

"It would be increasingly difficult," Penn said, to come out of a Top-40 set and have "Glenn do 15 minutes on Monica Lewinsky."

"I'd say to myself, how do I make this rant he just went on funny?" said Penn. He wanted the show to head in the Howard Stern shock-jock comedy direction, while Beck was pushing it toward some version of Limbaugh Lite.

Scott's recollection is that Beck's politics weren't all that conservative when they first met. "My impression was that it evolved," he said, explaining Beck initially appeared to him to be what he was, a successful Top-40s radio jock.

"I don't recall Glenn being a political animal [in the beginning]," D'Andre agreed. "It wasn't that noticeable. It was more this spiritual shtick."

Bass remembers Beck somewhat differently.

"We had pretty raw arguments" about politics, said Bass, who said he always liked and got along with Beck on a personal level.

More than politics, it was Beck's ability to draw in and manipulate the emotions of the radio audience that sticks in Bass' memory.

"I was impressed at how he got his audience involved," Bass said. "I once called him a cold-hearted conservative, and he said, 'I just got my listeners to donate 10,000 turkeys for Thanksgiving. What have you done?' "

D'Andre said that, even though he didn't like Beck personally, he admired his connection with the public. "He was funny, entertaining," D'Andre said. "He always has been humble [on the air]. ... Even when he goes over the top, he always comes back humble."

Beck's quest for a spiritual connection with people included a brief stint studying theology at Yale University, a move aided by a letter of recommendation from U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman. ("Joe Lieberman was somebody he just adored," recalled Feduzi. "Every time we could get Joe on the show, we did.")

When his contract with KC101 ran out at the end of 1999, Beck moved to Florida and created his long-sought talk show at a station in Tampa. Florida's "hanging chad" presidential election nightmare in 2000 provided Beck with plenty of fodder for talk, comedy and drama. The aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack and Beck's talent to meld entertainment and right-wing populism brought him national radio syndication and set his rocket-like trajectory for the rest of the decade.

Beck's ability to connect with and manipulate the public's emotions brings another, more chilling image to mind for Bass. "He reminds me of that movie, A Face in the Crowd."

In that 1957 film, Andy Griffith starred as Lonesome Rhodes, a drunken guitar-playing drifter who gets discovered by a radio exec and becomes a media phenomenon. Griffith's character has an eerily familiar down-home style and ability to connect with his audience. But he becomes increasingly power hungry and is only brought down when someone leaves his mic on after his radio show and his listeners learn that Rhodes actually despises them as fools and dupes.

Beck's buddies from his Connecticut days don't see him much anymore, except on TV. But they also don't see him as some cynical new Lonesome Rhodes.

"I did like him," Feduzi said of Beck. "I honestly believe he feels deeply about issues." He argues Beck's success is due to his ability to touch people at an emotional level. "I think even the people who hate him want to watch because they never know what's going to happen."

"Glenn views it as a fusion of entertainment and enlightenment," said Penn, who describes himself as "much more liberal" than Beck.

Some of the liberal criticism of Beck is deserved, acknowledged Penn, but there are also some "cheap shots" being taken.

Penn thinks Beck is paying a heavy price for all his fame and the millions he's pulling in.

"I applaud his guts to say some of the things he's said about the president," Penn said. "That's pressure. ... That's risky business."

Beck is now back in Connecticut, living in a New Canaan mansion, motoring to Manhattan in his chauffeured limo to tape those TV and radio programs. But Penn doesn't think it's all just fun and games.

"He can't even take his kids to the park," said Penn. "That's a scary way to live."

Beck's critics would say just having him on the air these days is pretty scary for everybody.

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