Remembering Howard Stern’s Dad, Ben, Who Died at 99

Howard Stern’s return to his SiriusXM morning present after a summer time off the air arrived with information that his father, Ben Stern, died lately on the age of 99, shortly after his July birthday.

“My father, because it turned out, had prostate most cancers and it has metastasized to his bones,” revealed Howard, who waxed nostalgic about his father’s love for “fountain pens” and “his desk.” For Ben’s remaining birthday on earth, he ate his favourite meal — Nathan’s sizzling canine. Howard additionally spoke of his father’s “secret” glass eye, a “handicap” about which Ben refused to debate.

“You didn’t ask my father something,” stated Howard. “He might blow up.”

“I’m unhappy about it, I’m,” stated Howard of his father’s demise. “My household could be very unusual. I’ve given you glimpses and I’ve all the time made jokes about it. However I keep in mind I went to my mom and I stated to her, ‘Mother, I feel you must go go to dad on the hospice — he’s dying.’ She’s like, ‘No, no, I’m not going.’ She didn’t need to go. I stated, ‘You’re going to remorse this. It is best to go. Do it for me.’ That also didn’t transfer her.”

Finally, Stern’s daughter, Ashley, a nurse practitioner, satisfied Howard’s mom, her grandmother, to go.

“My mom received dressed, she went over to see my dad, spent an hour over on the hospice. A few hours later, my father was useless.”

I don’t keep in mind the primary time I heard the voice of Ben Stern, who was a looming determine on the radio present in addition to its host’s life, however I will need to have been round 12. My friends on the time have been preoccupied by Tiger Beat and Matt Dillon (although I appreciated these, too), however as a child of the ’70s, an period of liberalism when it got here to the films, TV sequence and radio reveals, my pruning adolescent mind was uncovered to issues far past my years, thanks largely to Howard.

My father was a Boston-area public faculty instructor. There was no cash for a nanny or regular babysitter and it didn’t actually matter. Again then, dad and mom took their children locations. I used to be 4 once I went to see “Annie Corridor” and “Saturday Night time Fever” within the movie show, my sneakers sticking to caked Coca-Cola on the Loews’ crimson cement ground. Tavares and the Bees Gees echoed all through our split-level dwelling, the crackle and hiss of Motown information was the soundtrack of second grade. By the point Howard Stern’s radio present launched its 20-year run on terrestrial radio in 1985 — after a 3-year stint at New York’s WNBC (from which Stern was infamously canned, chronicled hilariously within the film “Non-public Components”), I used to be not but carrying a bra, however I used to be a seasoned knowledgeable in grownup fare. 

It was my dad who launched me to the Howard Stern Present. We listened throughout the automotive journey to Hebrew faculty, the home windows rolled down on his Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. When Stern landed a TV present throughout the heyday of E! Leisure, we watched him there, too. And when he moved to satellite tv for pc in 2006, my dad adopted, ponying up for a subscription to SiriusXM.

We beloved the Wack Pack, we beloved Robin Quivers, however it was that undercurrent of familiarity in Howard’s tales about his dad, and Ben’s tales about Howard, that enthralled us to the purpose of intractable fandom. 

My dad and I’ve all the time been shut. We have been born a day and 31 years aside, Piscean twins to the core. Maybe my dad and I noticed a mirrored image — a familial recognition — of our relationship in that of Howard and his father. Ben was a New York Jew with Polish roots who labored as a sound engineer. My father was additionally the progeny of Jewish immigrants from Japanese Europe. “Papa,” my paternal grandfather, owned a five-and-dime retailer in Somerville, Mass. and moonlit as a marriage and b’nei mitzvah photographer. Howard’s mom is known as Ray; my grandmother’s title was Reina (coincidence, however a parallel nonetheless). Whereas Howard was in fixed search of his father’s approval, brazenly chronicling the sophisticated emotional dance through which he and Ben have been engaged, my father didn’t share the identical expertise. “My father by no means missed a single considered one of my softball video games,” says my dad. 

However like most post-Holocaust American Jews, there was collective generational trauma — in addition to private tragedies, from demise to drug habit — that acted as a connective tissue between Howard and Ben Stern and the households tuning in to hear. Recordings of Ben yelling at Howard, “Sit down, shut up, you moron!” will eternally go down as one of the memorable soundbites within the historical past of American radio, its culminating impact on Howard’s shallowness nothing wanting Kafkaesque.

In a 1994 phase, Stern performed tapes of his father asking him — at age 9 — whether or not america ought to stay a member of the United Nations. “Sure, I actually do,” Howard answered. “There must be peace in all of the international locations after which we wouldn’t have any conflict. ‘Cuz we don’t need the Japs anymore.” Stern, once more 9 years-old, cackles laborious. In turns, Ben admonishes younger Howard: “I advised you to not be silly, you moron!” 

Numerous iterations of that very same chorus, a Grecian refrain of disfavor, reverberated all through my grandparents’ home and in my very own childhood dwelling as properly. My grandfather stated it; my father stated it–although he insists it was eternally meant as a joke. I’m extra a fan of the phrase “jerk,” which I’ve often known as my very own teenage children throughout spells of parental frustration. It’s not conduct of which I’m proud, however I perceive it for what it’s: affection expressed via neurosis and angst.

On the air, Howard Stern has famous numerous instances that he by no means as soon as felt his father didn’t love him. In maturity, they have been greatest mates. However the place elevating youngsters was involved, Ben Stern, stated Howard, “by no means had a way of enjoyable.” Foolishness, joking round — neither have been abided. It is a sweeping legacy of child boomers and, to an extent, their Era X offspring. And it’s that longing ache for paternal acceptance that little doubt formed Stern’s infinite capability to plumb the soulful depths of the topics he’s interviewed in a means no different speak present host ever might. 

Stern’s impersonations of his dad and mom, particularly as they grew aged and infirmed, aren’t solely comedian genius, however Shakespearean of their psychological excavation of parent-child dynamics. The brutality of watching one’s dad and mom age — decay of physique and thoughts — has been a recurring theme in Stern’s on-air commentary these previous a number of many years. As my very own father inches deeper into his eighties, these tales change into ever extra poignant — the reminiscence loss, the poor listening to. 

Years in the past, Ben and Ray Stern couldn’t determine how one can “work the machine,” the pc that Howard purchased for them. It stays considered one of my favourite all-time bits, specifically as a result of my father is at fixed conflict with the traditional Dell desktop in his dwelling workplace. For causes that stay unclear, the pc is related to the room’s gentle change. Greater than as soon as, I’ve made the error of clicking off that change, an explosion of static and fuzz flickering throughout the monitor. Each single time, my father turns into apoplectic. Each single time, my father has known as me a “moron.” And as he rants and raves, frantic cellphone calls to physicist cousins and relations with superior levels in laptop science are made, adopted by the inevitable realization that every one one should do is click on on the sunshine change and press the pc’s begin button.