Neil Rogers from nighttime to day and, until Lassiter was fired, was grooming him as Rogers' replacement.) He took over WPLP's afternoon drive time slot on September 23, 1985. Lassiter recalled on the air that the station initially offered him $12,000 per year, which he turned down, eventually accepting a comeback offer of $18,000 when Rogers suggested he take the job as training for doing talk radio every day. (He later admitted faking his resume to get hired at WPLP, claiming to be a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.) Although Lassiter's Miami career was not to be, he soon took Tampa by storm with his confrontational and deliberately offensive style, quickly rising to the top-rated talk program in the market by an enormous margin. He was, in fact, the second-highest-rated radio show in the market, bested only by Cleveland Wheeler and Scott Shannon's Q-ZOO on WRBQ-FM. Lassiter redefined AM talk radio in Tampa Bay, asserting himself as an on-air bully who targeted Christians, conservatives, the elderly, and virtually everybody else. As he himself would one day describe: Instead of a market for the retirees who formed much of the area's population, Lassiter made talk radio a young listener's medium: kids and young Baby Boomers would listen to hear Lassiter torment the old people. In the process, they would join in on the conversation and find themselves lambasted as well. Lassiter's ratings and reputation were such that the biggest AM radio station in the market, WFLA, hired him away from WPLP for substantially more money in mid-1987. At FLA Lassiter joined the ranks of the golden age of Tampa talk radio, with such personalities as Dick Norman, Tedd Webb, and Liz Richards, and maintained his ratings supremacy to that local competition. Indeed, while Lassiter had pulled upwards of 7% shares at WPLP — which by itself made him the number one talk show in Tampa Bay — at WFLA he rose to 8 and 9 shares, at a time when the entire talk-radio audience in Tampa Bay was roughly a 10 share of the market. Chicago (1989–91) By 1989 Lassiter had become something of a sensation in the broadcast industry, appearing on national television and creating a demand for his talents in the largest markets in the U.S. WABC (AM) in New York made an offer in 1988, but WFLA would not let him out of his contract. (The slot