I loved this guy. I thought he was pretty funny. I think he moved to Utah after he retired.
RIP
Superjock Larry Lujack remains opinionated in his life off the air
June 13, 2002|By Raoul V. Mowatt, Tribune staff reporter.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002 ... ottom-lineThe man who once was Superjock now has a standard answer for people who ask him how he's doing in his retirement in New Mexico.
"Just dodging rattlesnakes and waiting to die," Larry Lujack says.
He may have left radio as a lifestyle far behind. But he still has the sarcastic wit that helped propel him to being one of the most famous on-air personalities Chicago has produced.
Now, Lujack has been recognized for his three decades of achievement with his induction last week into the Illinois Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame. The honor came at the IBA's annual convention in Peoria, just as Lujack was turning 62.
"Although I am somewhat humbled by that thing, it's the Illinois Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame," Lujack says in a phone interview. "It's not Mount Rushmore. But hey, it ain't bad."
Lujack, who used the nicknames "Superjock" and "Uncle Lar," resides in the memory of almost anyone who listened to Chicago radio between 1967 and 1997. His gravelly voice, sometimes surly disposition and his larger-than-life personality separated him from the others on radio at the time and paved the way for today's shock jocks such as Howard Stern, said Bruce DuMont, founder and president of the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago.
The bulk of Lujack's career was with WLS-AM 890, where he would act curmudgeonly and tell offbeat stories about our furry friends called "Animal Stories."
Battles the stereotype
"He had a chip on his shoulder, which is not something normally you would do [then] in broadcasting," DuMont said. "He was a cantankerous young man, and he'd come in and complain about everything. He was the things radio stations told people you couldn't be to be successful."
Dennis Lyle, president of the IBA, remembers listening to Lujack while growing up on a Harvard farm. The humor in the broadcasts was what made him pursue the field, he says.
"When one thinks of radio in Chicago in the past quarter-century, Larry Lujack has to be the first name to come to mind," said Lyle.
The selection places Lujack and fellow inductee comedian Bill Murray in a group of about 40, including such titans of radio and television as Jack Benny, Steve Allen and Mike Wallace.
When asked if he misses being on the air, Lujack answers a swift, "No."
"I did that for 30 years," Lujack says. When you walk into a radio station control room day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year for 30 years, it's like any other job. You do the same thing for 30 years and it gets kind of boring. When I hung up the old rock and roll headphones in 1987, I kind of wondered if I would miss it. But my God, I don't miss it at all."
The bottom line
Lujack reacts with dismay to the growing concentration of stations among a few corporate entities.
"Radio is a whole different ballgame as far as that goes," he says. "Practically everyone that is in the business that I occasionally talk to, I think everyone says the same thing. It's no fun anymore. These huge companies buy up all these radio stations and the entertainment factor kind of gets lost. Everybody's interested in the bottom line."
But would he dive into it again, as he did two years ago when he hosted a weekend show on the former WUBT-FM? (The station, which used to play soul hits from the '60s and '70s, has since become WKSC-FM 103.5, playing Top 40 music.)
Lujack says he'd be receptive to such a situation, but isn't actively seeking it and sees it as a remote possibility.
"That was actually, I must admit, kind of fun. All those years, I was really a morning show and getting up at 2 o'clock so I could make it into the city by 3 and read the Trib and the Sun-Times before I went on the air at 5 or 5:30. That was a grind.
"The thing I was doing was kind of neat in that it was only one day a week, I could do it from my house, I didn't have to go anywhere."
Lujack says he hardly even plays the radio these days, except for occasionally flipping on the oldies station while he's in his car.
"After you've played `Surfing USA' by the Beach Boys approximately 47 million times, you have no desire to hear it again," he says.
Friction in the house
"I don't listen to music. In fact, that's probably one of the big problems in this marriage in that my wife [Judith] always loves to have music playing in the house. She's got a gazillion CDs and always wants music going and I'm more into peace and quiet these days. . . . I can only take so much Celine Dion slush and I want to vomit. It's just a constant friction type thing in this house."
For him, peace and quiet doesn't include golf, a hobby he used to be passionate about. Instead, he says he typically wakes up about 5 a.m., putters around his 1.5-acre property on the outskirts of Santa Fe before the sun gets too high. When it does, he says he fusses with the inside for a while before going back outside and doing more landscaping.
It suits him more, he says, because as an Idaho native he is far more comfortable with open space than with the big city.
"But it's like any other job. If you want to make any money you have to go to the big city," he says. "So I spent half my life in Chicago, from '67 to '97, in a place I didn't like. There were way too damn many people, way too damn many cars."
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