Larry Lujack, a Cranky Radio Voice That Carried, Dies at 73 Larry Lujack, a Chicago disc jockey who nearly half a century ago replaced the unctuous ooze that defined his calling with a crusty cantankerousness that influenced present-day radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, died on Wednesday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 73. The cause was esophageal cancer, his wife, Judith, told The Associated Press. Before Mr. Lujack hit the Chicago airwaves in 1967, Top 40 D.J.s were known for rapid-fire patter, velvet sonorities and inexhaustible cheer. Mr. Lujack was laconic, sandpapery and curmudgeonly - and, to judge from the one million listeners he garnered at his height, delightfully so. In 2000, The Chicago Sun-Times called him (approvingly) "a crabby coot dropping PG-rated acid bombs at a snail's pace." First at WCFL-AM and later at WLS-AM, a clear-channel station that could be heard far beyond Chicago, Mr. Lujack - known on the air as Uncle Lar" or Superjock - spent 20 years spinning records and spouting opinions. Frequent targets of his opprobrium included the very albums he was playing, the very stations he was working for and various rival D.J.s. Mr. Lujack once stormed a competitor's show and threatened, on the air, to ram the man's head through a wall. He became famous for regular features including "Klunk Letter of the Day" and "Cheap and Trashy Showbiz Report." His best-known feature, done in collaboration with his longtime on-air partner Tommy Edwards ("Li'l Snot-Nose Tommy," Mr. Lujack fondly called him), was "Animal Stories." Growing directly from the farm reports Mr. Lujack had to give early in his career, the feature involved his reading comic news reports about animals - among them the tale of a chicken who lived on despite having parted company with his head days before - to an astonished Mr. Edwards. "Animal Stories" prefigured the "Stupid Pet Tricks" television segments of David Letterman, on whom Mr. Lujack was an acknowledged influence. Mr. Lujack's style, which also included strategic pauses, audible paper-shuffling and grandiloquent references to himself in the third person, demonstrably shaped that of Mr. Limbaugh, who in 1990 told The New York Times Magazine that Mr. Lujack was "the only person I ever copied." That influence by all accounts made Mr. Lujack even crankier. "His appeal escapes me," he once said of Mr. Limbaugh. Larry Lee Blankenburg was born in 1940 in Quasqueton, Iowa, and reared in Caldwell, Idaho. At 18 he joined KCID-AM in Caldwell, adopting the surname of his idol, the Chicago Bears quarterback Johnny Lujack. After working at stations in Idaho and Washington State, Mr. Lujack joined WCFL in 1967 and moved to WLS four months later. Except for a four-year stint back at WCFL, he remained with WLS for the next two decades. In 1984 WLS gave Mr. Lujack a 12-year, $6 million contract, making him one of the country's highest-paid radio personalities. "I am not the least bit excited," he was reported to have said. But in 1987, amid declining ratings, the station's corporate parent, Capital Cities-ABC, bought out his contract. Mr. Lujack's marriage to his first wife, Gina, ended in divorce; a son from that marriage, John, died in 1986. His survivors, The AP reported, include his second wife, the former Judith Seguin; two children from his first marriage, Anthony Lujack and Linda Lujack-Shirley; a stepson, Taber Seguin; and two grandchildren. His honors include membership in the Illinois Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame ("It's not Mount Rushmore," he said on learning of his induction) and the National Radio Hall of Fame. Broadcasting from Santa Fe, Mr. Lujack made occasional comebacks on Chicago radio in recent years. But on balance, he said, he was relieved to be retired. "I did rock "n" roll radio for 30 years," he told The Sun-Times in 2008. "It got to the point if I had to play "Surfin" U.S.A." one more time, I was gonna puke."