Howard Stern has revealed he got into a fight with someone over his dad's glass eye.
During an appearance on the SmartLess podcast, which was recorded in front of a live audience last month and dropped on September 16, the shock jock recalled his childhood memory to hosts Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett.
"When I was a little kid, I was five years old, there was a kid on my block—a five-year-old kid—said to me, he came up to me he said 'my parents told me your father has a glass eye.' I was so freaked out, we got into a fist fight," Stern said. "It's probably the only fight I ever won, I beat him up. It was crazy."
The Howard Stern Show star added that his father, Ben Stern, was "inapproachable" when it came to the subject, so he pressured his mom, Ray Stern, into telling him what happened.
"I broke her down," he said, noting, "It was a terrible accident when my father was young."
"He put some film in a bottle, and the bottle exploded," the 70-year-old explained. "He lit it, and it exploded in his eye when he was a little kid."
Howard Stern noted, however, that his father "had a fabulous attitude about his eye."
"I didn't see any evidence that he saw himself as handicapped," he said, but added, "I think it was a big pain for him in his life. Seriously, a seriously big pain, you know? It was a big issue."
Newsweek reached out to Stern's publicist via email for additional comment.
During the podcast, Hayes said his mother also had a glass eye, though he didn't find out why until after she passed away.
"She had cancer in the eye. They took it out, two years old, and then as she grew older—this gets really gross and funny," the Will & Grace actor said on the podcast. "As she gets older, my sister and I read the medical reports, they took skin from her vagina to reshape her eye."
In an opinion piece written for USA Today in 2019, Hayes said his mom, Mary Hayes, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease and died in 2018, was totally selfless.
"My mom was constantly giving of herself and her time, and she never liked getting attention or being thought of as needy," he said. "In her mind, everyone else's happiness was far more important than her own, and she would drop everything to be there for anyone or anything," said Hayes.
Howard Stern got his start in radio in the 1970s and went on to have massive success with The Howard Stern Show, which gained mega popularity when it was nationally syndicated on terrestrial radio. He's been on SiriusXM since 2006.
"It was a very strange time because there was an effort by regular radio to say what a failure I would be, and they were putting out that anyone who went to satellite radio—your career would be over, you would disappear forever," the New York native said on SmartLess. "So there was this big campaign to discredit satellite radio. But I knew deep in my heart that satellite radio would be successful."
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