Chasing Howard (Part 1)

Her entire life, Lois Burak was told her family’s story could be a true-crime series, the  kind that starts with ambition, controversy, and ends in tragedy. Chasing Howard follows the connection between that past and her own pursuit decades later: the behind-the-scenes journey of creating The LoLo Show, an internet radio program built with one goal in mind to earn a place within the Howard Stern universe.

Told through archival footage, family letters, and firsthand interviews, Chasing Howard connects a father’s battles for truth with a daughter’s search for belonging. It’s about the cost of speaking up and the weight of inherited chaos told with satirical humor sprinkled throughout to balance the darkness with wit and perspective.

The series traces how the scars of survival play out in real time and how the same battles still surface in new forms today.

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Who knows what causes the pull of attraction. Is it metaphysical? I’m not talking about physical attraction. Maybe it’s what studies call a parasocial bond a stable emotional tie to a public figure. Or maybe it’s personality and attachment. Or even biological predispositions that shape ideology and draw some people toward extreme behavior.

I’ve wondered about this for years. But it’s not that black and white, so I don’t spend much bandwidth trying to solve it. I only know the feeling when it shows up.

Take Rosie O’Donnell and Barbra Streisand. Rosie has talked about how her mother played Streisand’s records, and how after her mother died, that music became a lifeline. The connection deepened and meeting Streisand became the wish.

Some attachments, though, aren’t as innocent or nostalgic. History shows people have felt a strange kinship with those whose behavior crossed into darkness. Not casual fascination…a genuine pull, an identification so deep it leads to imitation.

Take Unity Mitford, a British woman from a wealthy family who became obsessed with Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. What started as fascination turned into allegiance. She followed him, defended him, and modeled her worldview after his. There are others like her, people who, for reasons still debated by psychologists and historians, don’t just admire power but internalize it. They seem to find something of themselves in the very thing most of us recoil from.

What causes that? Unmet belonging? Narcissistic resonance? Or some neurological echo the same circuitry that makes us feel connection, turned inward on itself?

We’ve all seen it, maybe even felt it: that moment when you see someone who looks like you, sounds like you, or shares your story, and something inside you says, Maybe I can do that too. Representation can spark that quiet permission to dream.

Think of Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space, who said that as a child she watched Nichelle Nichols playing Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek and thought, “I knew from that moment I wanted to be up there too.” Decades later, Jemison carried a photo of Nichols with her on the shuttle Endeavour. It’s not just admiration; it’s recognition seeing possibility mirrored back at you.

For me, it wasn’t about resemblance. As a young girl, I adored Diahann Carroll. “Idolized” isn’t quite the right word that feels too dramatic but I was drawn to her grace, her voice, the quiet command she carried. She didn’t look like me; she was a Black woman, and I was a white girl of Jewish descent. But the pull was still there.

It wasn’t just entertainers either. I found the same connection with certain teachers, later with mentors, and even now with people across every line, white cisgender men, women of color, anyone whose mindset or resilience felt familiar. My attraction never followed the expected pattern. It isn’t about likeness. It’s about alignment in ideology, perseverance, and that shared hunger to turn hardship into something visible.

And like the O’Donnell-Streisand connection, mine was to someone most people couldn’t understand: a six foot five 1/2 man, ten years my senior, known for being loud, offensive, and lewd. In 2010, it wasn’t a meeting I wanted. That would’ve been awkward for him, uncomfortable for me, and probably something both of us would’ve wanted to forget. What I wanted wasn’t proximity, it was creation. To build something that could live in public, something that might earn his respect for having the drive, talent, and courage to entertain in a provocative way. I wanted to belong to the community where I felt most at home.

I wanted to be part of the Howard Stern universe.

The House He Never Left

In a letter referencing Jack Paar’s abrupt walk-off from The Tonight Show in February 1960, my grandmother Dena wrote to my father while he was working in New Orleans. By then, he seemed to have found his footing in radio.

He was born in December 1928 in the front room of a row home in the Feltonville section of Philadelphia, to Lou and Dena Burak. Lou, of Polish descent, spoke broken English but owned a small produce business with his name painted on the truck. Dena was his second wife, and Marvin was her only child.

My grandfather, from what I was told, would sometimes bang his head against the wall, I don’t know why. My grandmother, like many Jewish mothers are accused of being, was overbearing and controlling. The mix made for a complicated household.

It’s fair to speculate that the relationship between Marvin and his parents forged a kind of unhealthy codependency, one that later showed up in his marriage to my mother. Letters and stories suggest they genuinely cared for each other, but that same dependence and tension played out between them in a different form.

Marvin eventually ended up in New Orleans, where he was awarded the Key to the City and named an honorary official. It’s unclear whether my grandparents helped financially, but he was never truly financially independent. When my mother became pregnant, they returned to Philadelphia and moved into that same house with my grandparents.

He was born in that house, and he would die abruptly in that same house.

The Turn

By the early 1960s, the pages of newspapers were filled with images of KKK rallies, civil-rights marches, fire hoses, and fear. Cold War anxiety hung over every headline, and talk radio was starting to blur the line between news and opinion. The tension between morality and censorship became a national obsession from music to television to religion and Marvin, never one to hold back, began to test the limits of what could be said on air.

He started questioning the influence of religion on policy and the hypocrisy of politicians preaching virtue while silencing dissent. It was during this period, possibly while broadcasting from stations in Massachusetts or Media, Pennsylvania, that his commentary turned controversial. He spoke in favor of personal choice, including a woman’s right to choose and against what he called “selective morality.”

The pushback came fast. Advertisers withdrew, station managers panicked, and he was taken off the air. One article captured him mid-punch an altercation born of a dispute over censorship and public morality. Though he had trained as a professional boxer, violence was out of character; by all accounts, he was defending himself.

That coverage also detailed the legal battles that followed…his firing from Southern Massachusetts Broadcasters in 1963, his lawsuit for wrongful termination, and the jury’s 1964 verdict awarding him $14,850 in damages, later upheld by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The papers described his courtroom demeanor as relentless and “chutzpah-filled,” a man who refused to accept quiet dismissal.

Back in Philadelphia, the controversy didn’t fade; it followed him. He resumed broadcasting, this time transmitting shows directly from his home through telephone wire, as if refusing to be silenced. Photos from that period show loyal listeners holding signs that read “Bring Marvin Back.” For all the criticism, it was clear he had a devoted audience that saw something honest, even radical, in his defiance.

As the decade went on and the Vietnam War deepened divisions, his views made him an easy target. Neighbors began calling him a “Communist,” the word passed around without context or understanding, a label that carried real consequences. What started as politics turned personal a kind of social isolation that echoed through our home.

By the end of 1964, Marvin was no longer just a radio personality. He was a man worn down by the constant fight to speak freely, still convinced that truth didn’t need permission.

By the time I was born in February 1965, my father was in the thick of another fight. His courtroom victory in Massachusetts had barely settled when he returned to Philadelphia, where controversy seemed to greet him on arrival. The headlines that year.  Vietnam protests, censorship, police brutality, the Civil Rights Act barely a year old, were the same issues that filled our living room.

I was an infant, of course, so I don’t remember any of it. But what I’ve since read and been told about those years feels consistent with everything that came after. None of it surprises me. What I can remember is the safety a child feels in simple things  family dogs, riding alongside my brother’s toy Thunderbird, a grandmother love, even if the air outside was thick with conflict I couldn’t yet see.

I had everything I wanted then: a brother who adored me, two dogs, and a doll collection that could have filled a small village. My parents took us everywhere to Boulevard Pools, to Kiddie Land, to the Barnum & Bailey Circus and the Ice Capades. My father was well connected enough to get passes and tickets for free, even when money was tight. Jimmy Tayoun, the restaurateur and politician who’d once saluted my father for his stance on the Arab Israeli conflict, treated us to lavish dinners at his downtown Middle East restaurant, all belly dancers and music and warm light.

We also took long trips to Louisiana in my father’s Cadillac convertible, my brother Jeffrey and I crammed between our parents and two dogs, heading south to visit my Big Mama and Aunt Nail. My mother would pack hard-boiled eggs and sausage for the train rides when we didn’t drive. My parents took us everywhere…courtrooms, protests, broadcasts,  wherever my father was trying to make something happen. I can still remember falling asleep on the cold tarnished benches of Philadelphia’s courtrooms. People often remarked how quiet the Burak children were, and it was true. We barely spoke.

None of this is surprising. What I’ve learned from articles, court filings, and letters is entirely in line with the life I grew up in house where the fight for free speech, civil liberties and against authority was as constant as breathing. Even the ugly part of it,  the neighbors calling us Communists, N-lovers, and dirty Jews, the trash and beer bottles tossed in front of our house by kids mimicking their parents was part of that climate.On our walls facing the street were photos of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., visible from the front window. I’ve often wondered if that was deliberate, because it certainly fueled the fire. Up until I was three or four, I could still ride shotgun in my brother’s battery-operated Thunderbird around the block and our dogs could play safely in the yard. But the shift had already begun by the late ’60s, the same tension my father argued about on air was playing out right outside our door.

As for my mother, she stood through every fight beside him. If my father was the voice, she was the anchor. 

Rizzo and the Retaliation

By the late 1960s, Philadelphia was a city divided by fear and loyalty. Frank Rizzo had risen from beat cop to police commissioner, promising “law and order” to some and delivering brutality to others. In the same years, Arlen Specter was the district attorney, young, ambitious, and more than willing to defend the city’s image. The two made an imposing pair: Specter in the courtroom, Rizzo in the streets. My father made both of them his targets.

On air and in public, he spoke without restraint. One clipping from that period quoted him calling Rizzo’s police force “an occupying army” and warning that Philadelphia was becoming “a city where truth requires body armor.” Another referenced his claim that local media and city hall “ran on fear, not facts,” and that moral outrage was “the new currency of control.” Whether those were his exact words or close retellings by reporters who alternated between admiring and condemning him, they reflected the tone of his broadcasts…defiant, scathing, and personal.

He railed against double standards in censorship and morality, defending strippers and burlesque performers when the city used “indecency” laws to harass them. To him, these weren’t obscenity cases they were about hypocrisy and power. “They protect violence, not nudity,” one line in a surviving transcript reads, “because violence keeps people afraid, and fear keeps them quiet.”

By 1969, that kind of talk wasn’t just unpopular; it was dangerous.

His license battles, boycotts, and reputation as “the agnostic socialist” a phrase that appeared in one editorial headline made him a convenient villain. Behind closed doors, Specter’s prosecutors and Rizzo’s officers had begun watching him more closely. Some letters in the ACLU file describe “persistent harassment” and note that his broadcasts “directly challenged police authority.”

Then came the Camera Arts Club case.

The story made front-page news: a “moral crackdown,” police raiding a club accused of indecent photography and underage exploitation. My father was named the “manager” of the club  an accusation that would stick to him for years. He insisted it was a setup. According to one typed ACLU note, he told an associate he had warned a journalist earlier that week that “a raid was coming,” based on what he’d heard through his press contacts. That same document notes that he had a press pass and frequently attended or reported on adult entertainment venues, including some where my mother had performed. He saw the so-called “obscenity” charges as part of the same system he’d spent years exposing.

“Anything that touches nudity, they want to shut down,” one memo quotes him saying. “They don’t care about truth. They want silence.”

When the arrest came, it was theatrical. One photo from the Philadelphia Daily News shows him being led away in handcuffs  not resisting, just staring directly at the camera. It wasn’t long before that image became shorthand for his career: the loudmouth liberal who pushed too far. But the full story, as later records show, was more complex. The key witness against him, the so-called “underage model,” was later discredited, and his conviction , years later was overturned. My father found out not from a lawyer, but from the newspaper.

He was vindicated on paper, but the damage was already done. Sponsors had fled, his name was toxic, and the stigma of the “Camera Club” headline followed him long after the case collapsed. Still, he refused to stop speaking. In letters and radio transcripts that survive from the early 1970s, he wrote of “organized corruption” and warned that Rizzo’s reach “extended into every courthouse and news desk.”

What had begun as a political disagreement had turned into open warfare between a man with a microphone and a city that wanted him gone.

And as the decade changed, that fight came home.

A little bit about My Mother The Cajun Queen

A Complicated Entry Point into the Stern World

Before I ever got close to the Stern inner circle, I got pulled into an unexpected and complicated connection with one of its top executives.

When I finally pressed Tim Sabean for a straight answer years after he had left the show, I asked if he had ever really listened to The LoLo Show. He admitted he had only heard parts of it because some of it made him uncomfortable. He did not like hearing me talk openly about anything sexual, and he said he thought I lived my life too publicly.

Despite that, he kept me tethered for years in what felt like a fantasy relationship. If you read the messages between us, you’d think we were engaged. He talked about what could have been, but never actually moved forward. Not sexually, and not in any real, committed way. It was this strange in-between space where he held on without ever sealing the deal. My closest friends and even some of his said the same thing: he was nuts. Eventually, he admitted that the thought of a real relationship with me frightened him, which tied right back to what he said about my public life.

I thought back to a pivotal point early on, when he was courting me. Lisa G, Howard 100 News reporter, was publicly accusing him of dating Brandi Glanville from Real Housewives. I remember how upset he was. He made a point of telling me that none of it was true, that it was all show fodder, and he hoped I did not get the wrong idea. He hated being dragged into that part of the on-air mix where his personal life became content.

Once I made the decision to win a slot on Howard 101, I dove deeper into the Stern universe through Facebook, building community with superfans. That is really where Lolo was born. Lolo was a childhood nickname. The kids could not pronounce Lois, and it stuck. It had a nice flow to it: The Lolo Show.

Early on, I became close with a guy known online as Doc Ivan. He was deeply entrenched in the Stern Fan Network and managed the message boards, which were still active at the time. (Howard eventually shut them down.) Those boards were a mix of diehard fans, sharp commentary, and a lot of negativity, but I found my place quickly.

Through my online persona and connection to the Stern fan community, I ended up appearing on one of the shows on Howard 101, The Miserable Men Show.

At the time, the hosts were Bob Levy, Al Rosenberg, Mike Morse, Mark Burns (a musician from New Jersey), and Shuli Egar. I got their attention by messaging Bob Levy on Facebook and challenging him to a boxing match. It was a gimmick, but it worked. They invited me on the show. Not to box Bob, but because they saw me as a character, a tough talking chick from New York.

They were supposed to write bits or skits for me, but nothing materialized. Bob was heavily medicated back then, that is the polite way of putting it, and nothing was organized. When I arrived, everything was off the cuff. I rode up with Bob driving, Al Rosenberg in the backseat with me, and another regular sitting up front. Bob spent most of the drive bragging about how important he was to Howard. Al and I just exchanged looks and rolled our eyes.

On that ride, Al and I started talking. I told him about my dad, the shooting, the bullet in my leg, and why I was a Stern fan. We clicked instantly. For anyone who does not know, Al Rosenberg was a writer and on-air personality for The Howard Stern Show and appeared on the Channel 9 Show. He was incredibly kind to me over the years. He passed away two years ago, and I miss him terribly.

That night’s show did not go as I had hoped. Shuli Egar, who is brilliant and was a regular on the Stern Show, was respectful and had my back when callers started harassing me, mostly friends of my ex, calling in with cheap shots like “her ex paid for her boobs.” It added nothing. Bob was bouncing in and out of the room, completely out of it. Al leaned over and said it was a shame. They were missing the real story. If they had actually talked to me about my background, it would have been radio gold.

Even though the segment itself did not launch anything formal, I started a campaign to “Bring Lolo Back” as a regular. It did not stick, but it made me a recognizable presence in the Stern universe. When I went to events in New York, fans would swarm me like I was part of the cast. That visibility helped. Over the years, Howard’s news department interviewed me multiple times, and by then, I had become a constant presence in that world.