Love him or hate him, you can’t deny that Howard Stern has a strange passion for radio. Since the age of five, Stern was obsessed with being a radio personality, and he followed that dream throughout his time at Boston University, where he was involved with the campus radio station WTBU, and also at the Radio Engineering Institute of Electronics in Virginia. Following his graduation, Stern worked at a variety of smaller radio stations in New York, Connecticut, and Michigan, before landing a job on WWDC radio in Washington, D.C. It was there that he met Robin Quivers, a newscaster and consumer affairs reporter from Baltimore who, over the years, would come to be his shock-jock co-host. As Stern’s show ventured further and further into controversial comedy territory, his relationship with station management worsened, but his ratings kept climbing. His contract with WWDC was finally terminated, and he moved to New York to work for WNBC. However, Stern’s antics proved too much for WNBC to handle as well, and Stern and Quivers were fired. Once again, Stern’s ratings were through the roof, though, and other stations were clambering to get him on board. By the early nineties, Stern’s reputation for being a crude yet hilarious radio personality had spread like wildfire. He got his own talk show called The Howard Stern Show, released several comedy albums, and appeared at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards as his fictional superhero alter-ego Fartman. In 1993, Stern published his first book: Private Parts, an autobiography of his exploits, which became a New York Times bestseller and sold over a million copies in only a few weeks. The book would eventually be adapted into a movie starring Stern as himself. This period in the mid-to-late-nineties would prove to be the peak years of Stern’s career, and in 2004, after a controversial performance at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show, Stern decided to leave terrestrial radio broadcasting in favour of Sirius Satellite Radio – a medium free from FCC regulations. He continues to broadcast on Sirius Satellite Radio today, and it has also been announced that Stern will be replacing Piers Morgan as a judge on the seventh season of America’s Got Talent. I wonder how long he will last before the network gets tired of reigning him in! Howard Stern turns 58 today.