Tom Magliozzi, left, and his brother Ray share a moment in the break room in 2004.
Tom Magliozzi, one of the "Click and Clack" brothers who founded the most popular program on National Public Radio and forever turned car repair into a laughing matter, died today after a long battle with Alzheimer's. He was 77.
Magliozzi, born in East Cambridge, Massachusetts, didn't have an inkling of what lie ahead when WBUR, Boston University's NPR affiliate, invited him and three other mechanics into the studio in 1977. Four years earlier, the MIT graduate and part-time college lecturer had opened a do-it-yourself garage in Cambridge with his brother, Ray, wherein customers paid to work on their own cars. Magliozzi was the only mechanic to show up, "gave out many wrong answers and misled many callers," according to the brothers' own account, and was invited back only to find a note that said "You're on your own, have a good time, and try to watch your language." This was the start of Car Talk.
In 1987, Car Talk went national when the brothers were invited to be weekly guests on the NPR news show Sunday Weekend Edition. Nine months later, they had their own show and "stations turned to us in droves—much in the same way that lemmings flock to the sea."
Tom and Ray went on to amass one of the biggest audiences in the automotive world—some three to four million listeners each week, higher than NPR's own news programs—at the same college studio on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue. Typically, gearhead-focused radio and television programming fails to find widespread success. But not the Magliozzi brothers. Through inescapable sarcasm, self-deprecation, and seriously good gags (such as fooling longtime producer Doug Berman into believing that Tom was actually a CIA agent), Car Talk was about people first and cars a distant third or fourth.
Jokes, both on-air and off, fueled the show's rampant success. At one point, according to Car Talk's "Technical, Spiritual, and Menu advisor" John Lawlor, they soaked the studio with weekly squirt gun fights and blasted Berman with a three-gallon pump made for watering plants. Other times, Tom would stuff Ray's pipe with erasers to encourage him to quit smoking. During a radio convention in Texas, Lawlor and Tom donned sombreros to disguise themselves from Berman, who was convinced they took the wrong plane to Florida.
That Tom helped tens of thousands of real people with car (and life) troubles with his radio show and syndicated columns in hundreds of newspapers was the cherry on top of having fun with his brother and getting paid to do it. Much better, according to Ray, than his past job "putting on a suit and working in the 9-to-5 world."
The pair's official headquarters in Cambridge, steps from where Tom rejected an undergraduate offer to Harvard because the scholarship was $200 less than MIT (he earned a degree in chemical engineering), has a window marked Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe. Despite their last live radio show having occurred in October 2012, due in part to Tom's declining health, Car Talk reruns are still aired on more than 600 stations across the country.
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Ray sums up Tom's life best thusly: "We can be happy he lived the life he wanted to live; goofing off a lot, talking to you guys every week, and primarily, laughing his ass off. In lieu of flowers, or rotten fish, we ask that folks make a donation to their favorite public radio station in his memory, or to the Alzheimer's Association."
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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