A voice from my adolescence died Wednesday night.

About this time throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Larry Lujack went on the air to start his morning show on WLS radio in Chicago. Like nearly every one of my middle and high school classmates, I woke up to a clock-radio, but it wasn’t set to WISM, or Z104, or WIBA-FM; it was set to WLS.

Lujack died of cancer Wednesday. The fact he died wasn’t that surprising, though at 73. There were many unusual facets to Lujack, as Robert Feder shows:

“Larry didn’t want an obituary filled with people saying what a great guy he was and how talented he was,” his wife, Judith, told me after confirming his passing at age 73. “He was more than that. He was more than a jock. He was more than an employee of WLS. He was a truly amazing, caring, wonderful human being. He didn’t want to be known by the awards he won. He just wanted to be remembered as a person who cared about people — about children — and really tried to do things to help them.”

Though pretty much out of the limelight for more than 25 years and enjoying retirement in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Lujack left an impression on Chicago that endures to this day. Mere mention of “Ol’ Uncle Lar” from the “Animal Stories” bit he played to perfection with Tommy Edwards still conjures fond memories for hundreds of thousands of loyal fans.

His legacy also lives on among the countless broadcasters he influenced and inspired. The next time you hear Rush Limbaugh rustle a paper on the air or puff himself up with mock grandiosity, remember who did it first — and did it better. …

A genuine original, Lujack perfected a world-weary, sarcastic style that was in stark contrast to the cheery and effervescent DJs of the era. If he was in a foul mood — which seemed to be the case most of the time — he didn’t try to hide it. Audiences found his dark, edgy humor real, relatable and unlike anything they’d ever heard on the radio before. …

In moving up to mornings on WLS, he became a radio superstar of the first magnitude, dominating listenership among 18-to-49-year-olds and making millions for parent company ABC. In 1984 he was rewarded with an unprecedented 12-year, $6 million contract in order to keep him from jumping to WGN.

“It ain’t no big deal,” a typically nonchalant Lujack told me at the time. “I can honestly say — and my wife even finds this astounding — that I am not the least bit excited. Trite as it may sound, you can’t take it with you.”

Ratings declined with his ill-timed move to afternoons in 1986, and Lujack signed off from WLS a year later when ABC bought out the remainder of his contract and sent him into much-too-early retirement at age 47. He made a couple of Chicago radio comebacks on WUBT and WRLL by remote from his home in Santa Fe, but he never commanded center stage as he had in his heyday.

Practically every industry honor imaginable followed, including induction in the National Radio Hall of Fame, the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame and the Illinois Broadcasters Association’s Hall of Fame. He took them all in stride. …

In a Sun-Times interview published 30 years ago this week, a 43-year-old Lujack told me he had two main goals in life. Neither one had anything to do with radio.

“First and foremost is to make it to heaven when I die,” he said. “If I do that, then my life was a ragingsuccess, no matter what the Arbitron ratings say. My only other goal — and this is a far, far, far, far, far, far distant second — is to one day shoot 72 on the golf course.

“On the first one, I try to be a good person, an honest person and, in the crude vernacular of the rock ’n’ roll world, I don’t fuck over people. On the other thing, I hit zillions of practice balls. But if I achieve the first one, I’ll be quite satisfied even if I don’t come close to the other one.”

I heard Lujack on his second WLS iteration. He started at WLS doing its afternoon show and then its morning show …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl_Q9dMHxjY

… after and before stints at WLS’ main rock and roll competitor, WCFL in Chicago.

Lujack’s on-air personality was unusual for the day. His sarcasm and irony was sort of a preview of the ’80s, but he also would go entire seconds saying nothing, for the dead-air effect. That’s commonplace now, but it wasn’t in those days.

Feder compared Lujack to Limbaugh, and Lujack did occasionally channel his inner Floyd Turbo, though it was probably for entertainment value more than for the political statement. Limbaugh, remember, started as a rock DJ before he became a right-wing talker.

One of Lujack’s former bosses, John Rook, inherited Lujack:

Larry Lujack and Art Roberts were common folks, with distinctive voices and an abundance of imagination. I instinctively knew they figured into my plans. …

Larry’s rebellious image and appearance gave need for me to think he must have some James Dean or Marlon Brando in him. As time would tell, both Art and Larry were radio originals and LuJack would become a radio franchise.  He never ventured from radio but I feel certain he could have made major contributions as an actor.                                                                                           

Larry inspired and left his imprint on a young David Letterman.  …

Rush would borrow heavily from the Lujack style and become a talk radio star….but he never forgave me for not hiring him at WLS, where today his “talk” show is featured.

Everyone who listened to WLS during its top 40 heyday agrees that WLS didn’t stand out for its music. WLS stood out because of its personalities, including Fred Winston, who replaced Lujack on the morning show and whose deeeeeep voice can be heard from Ferris Bueller’s clock-radio at the beginning of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”; and John Records Landecker, who has been written about on this blog. (WLS’ first renowned rock DJ, Dick Biondi, is still on the air, five decades after he started at WLS, which wasn’t his first radio job.)

Radio guy Ted Ehlen explains why Lujack and his WLS colleagues were as so great at what they did:

In the time that I’ve been involved in radio, mornings on the medium have changed for music stations. The yuck-it-up, wink-wink-naughty and often noisy nature of “morning zoo” radio has been in vogue for decades now. The listener has become the eavesdropper rather than the recipient of the message in this venue, which is why I seldom listen to morning music radio (or music radio as a whole these days) and stick to a one-host talk show in the morning, because that’s the way that morning hit radio used to be with personalities like Larry Lujack. He groused, he voiced his opinions, and poked fun of the world around him while he gave you the time and temp and cranked out the hits on WLS and WCFL. Larry Lujack was made for morning radio, because he sounded an awful lot like you felt as you rolled out of the sack, got on your feet, and negotiated your way to getting ready to get out the door and head to work. And he talked to YOU. Yes, you’ll hear an awful lot about “Animal Stories” with Lil’ Snotnose Tommy, but, for the most part, Larry Lujack was sharing his world with YOU. …

When I was first learning about radio at WBSD, the 10-watt FM station at Burlington High School as “Top 40 Ted”, my on-air style was molded by those I heard primarily on WLS Musicradio…Bob Sirott, Fred Winston, even the likes of Clark Weber from the ‘60’s (John Records Landecker, as I told him on my Racine program last April, was a level of disc jockey talent that I looked up at, and, realizing my personal personality limitations, appreciated without attempting to duplicate). I listened to Larry Lujack, but he really didn’t influence me directly during this formative period, but I appreciated him much more the further down the road I went in broadcasting when it was putting bread on my table. However, the indirect influence of Lujack at the time is tangible, because his on-air delivery allowed me and every disc jockey who cracked a mic to have the ability to truly be themselves on the air and not have to fit the stereotypical deejay mold of smiley, pukey platter patter guy. And when I hosted WLKG’s “Saturday At The ‘70’s” show for about five-and-a-half years, I tried my best to synthesize what a good hit radio personality sounded like then, and bring it to the present day. My models for that were the jocks from the WLS Musicradio years, especially ol’ Superjock, Larry Lujack…

For a legion of air personalities around the country like me, he will be remembered for his contribution to our own on-air presentation formation.

The Letterman parallel is perfect because in each of those cases, there was one and only one DJ on at a time. Everyone else — the news and sports people, and “Animal Stories” sidekick Little Tommy — they came on when needed, and then left. It wasn’t the “Lujack and _______,” show, it was Larry Lujack, first and foremost.

The aforemtnioned Landecker’s book coauthor adds:

I’ve known John Landecker for more than twenty years now, and everywhere he goes someone tells him how important he was to their lives because of his stint on WLS. People really look up to him. But one of the people that John always looked up to was Larry Lujack. He keeps an autographed picture of Larry in his home office, inscribed with classic Lujack wit: “This is to certify that John Landecker knows me personally.”

And Landecker adds in his book Records Truly Is My Middle Name (because it is):

WLS already had an all-star lineup when I came aboard in 1972. Superjock Larry Lujack was the morning man, Fred Winston was doing middays, and J.J. Jeffrey was the afternoon man. I was hired to fill the evening slot.

I met Larry before I was on the air a single time. The program director Mike McCormack called me into his office because he wanted me to sit in on a Larry Lujack aircheck. In the radio business we call them “airchecks,” but they’re really just critique sessions with the program director. The disc jockey brings in a tape of his or her show, and if the program director likes it, he praises it. I suppose this has happened once or twice in radio history. Usually it goes the other way. Usually the program director picks it apart.

McCormack started Larry’s tape, and we listened to a bit Lujack had done that morning. It was reality radio. Larry was pointing out that you could hear the garbage trucks in the alley through the air conditioner in WLS’s main air studio, and he held the microphone right up to it, so the listeners could hear it too. After the bit ended, the program director turned to me.

“What do you think of that?” he asked.

“I thought that was pretty funny,” I said.

I didn’t know what I had done, but after the meeting I was walking back to the jock lounge with Larry and he turned toward me.

“Thanks, kid,” he said.

Apparently before I came in, the program director had been telling Larry he hated it, and Larry was defending it. When I backed him up by saying I thought it was funny, it defused the criticism, and Larry thought the new guy was alright.

On the other hand, not too long after that, I may have turned the tide in the other direction at least for a day. We were in a jock meeting, shooting the shit, and someone asked the seemingly innocuous question: “Who was more important to music — Elvis or the Beatles?”

“I don’t think Elvis was that great,” I said.

Well, I had no idea that Larry Lujack was a huge Elvis fan, but I found out pretty fast. Larry glared at me. And then he nearly spit the words at me, in his patented Lujack delivery.

“You don’t know anything about music, you… Phil… a… del… phia… FUCK!”

Years later I was at the station when the news came across the wire that Elvis had died (August 16, 1977). The first thing that crossed my mind was that nobody in the world would want to know this information more than Larry Lujack. (When someone calls you a Philadelphia fuck for not loving Elvis, you have a tendency to remember that sort of thing.)

So, I called him at home, and his wife answered.

“Judy,” I said, “It’s John Landecker. I’ve got something very important to tell Larry. Trust me; he’s going to want to know about this.”

“OK, hang on,” she said.

A few seconds later Larry growled on the phone. “Yeah?”

“Larry, it’s me, John Landecker. Elvis is dead.”

“Who cares?” he growled again. “I’m taking a nap.”

About Lujack’s golf game: He told the story one day about having a “golf thought” while driving (a car), and so he stopped at a driving range in Kankakee, Ill. Armed with a cup of coffee, Lujack began to swing away, until it started to rain. This was some time after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster when fallout supposedly was drifting over the U.S. And as he watched the raindrops dripping into his coffee, Lujack said, he wondered if he was being irradiated by Chernobyl’s fallout. It doesn’t look funny in print, but it was funny enough on air to remember three decades later.

WLS History has a tribute to Lujack on its home page. The site also tells a story about a DJ meeting, where Landecker would argue about the playlist, Winston would suggest at 10-minute intervals that everybody be fired, and Lujack staring at the ceiling before interrupting the program director to tell him there was a fly on the ceiling.

Lujack’s funniest regular segment was Animal Stories, which (in its “early morning rerun of the previous day’s edition”) woke me up each weekday morning at 6:45 to hear …

One of the Animal Stories that got repeated airplay was of a woman at a party who saw the host’s dog’s eating one of the hors d’oeuvres handed to her by someone, after which the person finished the food. When the woman telling the story commented about that, the food-sharer said she did that all the time with her own dog. To that, the narrator said she wouldn’t have had done that had she noticed that the dog had been previously licking his … followed by a series of tones to blot out the words every listener could fill in, followed by laughter and expressions of revulsion by Uncle Lar and Little Tommy.

Lujack and I had one interaction. (Besides my possession of a WLS Fantastic Plastic card, which was worthless in southern Wisconsin.) I helped plan a Boy Scouts trip to Chicago, and as part of it I tried to arrange a tour of the WLS studios, then at 360 N. Michigan Ave. (or, as Lujack’s colleague John Records Landecker called it, the fifth floor of the downtown Burger King). I got my letter back a few days later with a note from Lujack saying that he was sorry, but building security didn’t allow tours on weekends, signed “Lar.”)

Lujack reminds us WLS Musicradio listeners of the days when radio stations were not automated or voice-tracked, and DJs were allowed to have personalities.