R.I.P., Mr. Lujack

In an ideal world, every station in the radio industry would find a clever and carefully-planned-out way to lead up to long, drawn-out, pregnant-with-sarcastic-meaning moment of silence at 5:30pm today to mourn the passing of arguably the best disk jockey that ever worked the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest (eventually on a 50,000-watt AM flamethrower that covered much of the nation), Larry Lujack.

In a world spanning almost precisely the glory days of AM Top 40 radio, where DJs were fast-paced, frenetic, and fun, Mr. Lujack (as he told us repeatedly that he preferred to be called) stood out as the antithesis of almost everyone else on the air.  He was surly, disgruntled, straightforward, and wry; while he could occasionally be cheery when the occasion called for it, it was always clearly a sarcastic cheery.

Mr. Lujack had predecessors and successors, of course, but they were all meaningfully different.  A couple that come mind are predecessor Henry Morgan (a radio personality from the pre-rock era who moved on to greater fame as a TV game show panelist) and successor Howard Stern (who has blended Steve Dahl’s realness with Mr. Lujack’s winking egotism).

But I always perceived that Morgan was a genuine grump and Stern isn’t really winking.  Lujack, despite being a curmudgeon in real life, somehow added a unique kind of likability.

The reason that radio’s tribute to Mr. Lujack should be at 5:30pm is that that was the time of his best feature at what I believe was the height of his career, the “Klunk Letter of the Day,” on “Super CFL” in Chicago — a feature in which he would read from and respond to a letter from one of his listeners.  (They started out as “crank letters,” but the featured evolved to encompass letters from fans as well.)

On special occasions, the “Klunk Letter of the Day” would be pre-empted by features like his “Christmas Address to the Nation.”  If you’ve been to a RAIN Summit and seen my biannual “State of the Industry Address,” you should know that the title of the speech is an allusion to Mr. Lujack.

I’m writing this blog post from the Starbucks across the river from Marina City, where the office building that contained the WCFL studios has been converted into the Hotel Sax, and I realize that I’m probably working both in Chicago (and picked an office near Marina City) and in radio as a result of Mr. Lujack’s influence.  And I’m sure I’m not alone.

Here’s a pretty good portion of a December, 1972 aircheck on YouTube:  The final joke, making a Hallmark cards slogan joke out of Jesus’s birth, is, I think, pretty cutting-edge for its era.

Another nice tribute from TV comedy writer. Ken Levine is here:.