at WABC eventually went to Rush Limbaugh instead.) Ultimately he was won over by WLS (AM), the Capital Cities/ABC radio hub in Chicago, who offered him a five-year, $1.05 million contract for the afternoon drive timeslot. Lassiter's tenure at WLS was uneasy from the start: the CapCities executives behind the station micromanaged to an extreme degree, and were anxious to cultivate a friendly, inoffensive image, which ran completely counter to the type of radio that Lassiter did best. Members of management were waiting outside the studio on Lassiter's first night at WLS (23 August 1989) to give him a laundry list of things he had done that they did not want on their airwaves. Lassiter felt that since CapCities executives knew of his work before they even asked for a job interview, they knew perfectly well what kind of on-air personality they were getting. Lassiter deeply resented their sudden desire to rein him in. Rather than change the style that had attracted WLS to him in the first place, Lassiter asked to be let out of the contract. The station refused, touching off what Lassiter called "open warfare" between WLS executives and their new employee. Their attempts to censor him only intensified his efforts to insult and infuriate his audience (and employers) on-air, and led Lassiter to walk out in the middle of staff meetings off-air. One journalist wrote that By late 1991, both parties were exasperated; unimpressive Arbitron ratings did not ease tensions. Lassiter's five-year contract had an escape clause that gave WLS the option to terminate it at the end of 1991, and Lassiter was openly predicting that the station would do exactly that. In fact, they didn't even wait for the end of the year, removing Lassiter from the air following his afternoon broadcast on September 20. Although he would remember his time in Chicago as "a two-and-a-half-year nightmare", the job did raise Lassiter's profile significantly; in 1990, he appeared on CNN's Crossfire as a representative of left-wing political talk radio. In December 2005, Lassiter would later point out that - more than fourteen years after he was thrown off the air - he was still on the FAQ page on the WLS website. Indeed, as of August 2007, Question 7 on that page is "Why don't you bring back Bob Lassiter/Larry Lujack/etc.?" . "Maybe you don't know much about Lujack, but to be mentioned in the