THINGS HAVE CHANGED IN CAPE Girardeau, Mo., since the days when Rush Limbaugh was just a carefree boy growing up there. The Wimpy's burger joint—where the 15-year-old Rush, or Rusty, as he was known then, fell through the glass door and cut his arms so badly he had to have 20 stitches—has moved to another part of town, and the building is now the Boatmen's Bank. Pfister's Drive-In, another popular teenage hangout, is gone too, replaced by the Brangus Feed Lot. But for the faithful Limbaugh "dittoheads" who make the pilgrimage to this historic Mississippi River town, which bills itself as the only inland cape in the world, the scenes of Rush's youth are hallowed places. Now, thanks to the Rush Limbaugh Hometown Tour map, which the town began distributing in January, it is possible to walk in the master's fledgling footsteps. The maps are available free at the Chamber of Commerce, the Convention and Visitors Bureau and Esicar's Old Hickory Smokehouse. Several thousand have already been snatched up.

The map features such Limbaugh landmarks as Southeast Missouri Hospital, where he was born on Jan. 12, 1951, and the Varsity Barber Shop, where Rusty got his first job as a shoeshine boy at 13. Then there's Central High School, where he once soldered the front doors shut as a prank; KGMO Radio, where at age 16 he made his on-air debut as disc jockey Rusty Sharpe; and Southeast Missouri State University, the alma mater from which he never graduated.

Folks in Cape Girardeau, where Rush's mother, Millie, 69, still lives(his father, Rush Limbaugh Jr., a lawyer, died in 1990 at age 72), are generally proud of their homegrown conservative hero, but the idea of a publicly funded Rush Limbaugh tour map didn't sit well with everybody. The Visitors Bureau is spending $18,400 for the promotional material, an ad campaign and a billboard on Interstate 55. When the Kansas City Star published a poll showing that most of its readers disapproved of this use of taxpayer money, the local Southeast Missourian pointed out that Hannibal, Mo., is spending $30,878 to promote the boyhood home of Mark Twain. "Why shouldn't we promote [Rush] if it'll bring in tourists?" wrote Sam Blackwell, a staff writer for the paper. "By that logic, of course, Milwaukee has a gold mine in Jeffrey Dahmer." Rush, uncharacteristically, has nothing to say about the mini-controversy, but Mary Miller, director of the Visitors Bureau, thinks people are making too much of a fuss. "We're promoting Cape Girardeau," she says. "We're not pushing Rush on anybody."