TOM MAGLIOZZI, brother of RAY MAGLIOZZI and co-host of NPR's +Car Talk, died this week of complications from Alzheimer's disease. I listened to Car Talk for years, there wasn't a program that I didn't laugh out loud, and I learned a few things too. I listened to the tribute program today on +NPR and laughing, and also could hear and almost feel the sadness and hurt Ray is feeling loosing his brother. Godspeed Tom Magliozzi, and God bless you and comfort you Ray, and your families and friends through your sorrow. And thank you for Car Talk. From +NPR .....
Listen to full show Show Podcast (FREE) Best Moment 01:30
Segment 1
Tom the Consummate Radio Professional
Segment 2
Tom the Philosopher King
Segment 3
Tom the Devoted Son
Segment 4
Tom the Problem Solver
Segment 5
Tom's Haus of Mail
Segment 6
Tom the Storyteller
Segment 7
Tom the Interviewer
Segment 8
Tom, how we will always remember you.
View Call Details
Tom Magliozzi, one of public radio's most popular personalities, died on Monday of complications from Alzheimer's disease. He was 77 years old.
Tom and his brother, Ray, became famous as "Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers" on the weekly NPR show Car Talk. They bantered, told jokes, laughed and sometimes even gave pretty good advice to listeners who called in with their car troubles.
If there was one thing that defined Tom Magliozzi, it was his laugh. It was loud, it was constant, it was infectious.
"His laugh is the working definition of infectious laughter," says Doug Berman, the longtime producer of Car Talk. He remembers the first time he ever encountered Magliozzi.
"Before I ever met him, I heard him, and it wasn't on the air," he recalls.
Berman was the news director of WBUR at the time.
"I'd just hear this laughter," he says. "And then there'd be more of it, and people would sort of gather around him. He was just kind of a magnet."
The Magliozzi brothers grew up in a tough neighborhood of East Cambridge, Mass., in a close-knit Italian family. Tom was 12 years older, the beloved older brother to Ray. They liked to act like they were just a couple of regular guys who happened to be mechanics, but both of them graduated from MIT.
After getting out of college, Tom Magliozzi went to work as an engineer. One day he had a kind of epiphany, he told graduates when he and Ray gave the 1999 commencement address at their alma mater.
He was on his way to work when he had a near-fatal accident with a
tractor-trailer. He pulled off the road and decided to do something
different with his life.
"I quit my job," he said. "I became a bum. I spent two years sitting in Harvard Square drinking coffee. I invented the concept of the do-it-yourself auto repair shop, and I met my lovely wife."
Well, he wasn't exactly a bum; he worked as a consultant and college professor, eventually getting a doctoral degree in marketing. And Tom and Ray Magliozzi did open that do-it-yourself repair shop in the early '70s. They called it Hackers Haven. Later they opened a more traditional car repair shop called the Good News Garage.
They got into radio by accident when someone from the local public
radio station, WBUR, was putting together a panel of car mechanics for a
talk show.
"They called Ray, and Ray thought it was a dumb idea, so he said, 'I'll send my brother' and Tom thought, 'Great, I'll get out of breaking my knuckles for a couple of hours.' And he went over and he was the only one who showed up," Berman says.
Berman says the station liked what Tom did and asked him to come back the next week. This time he brought Ray. The rest, as they say, is history.
In 1987 Car Talk went national on NPR. The Magliozzi brothers were a huge success. Listeners loved their blend of humor, passion, expertise and just plain silliness.
When it came to cars, Berman says the brothers really did know what they were talking about. But, he says, that's not why people listen to the show.
"I think it has very little to do with cars," he says. "It's the guys' personalities. And Tom especially — really a genius. With a great, facile mind. And he's mischievous. He likes to prod people into honesty."
It is almost impossible to talk about Tom Magliozzi without talking about Ray. Berman says the affection you heard on the radio dated back to their childhood — and it was real.
"For Ray, he idolized Tom. This is the guy who introduced him to
everything in life, and Tom liked having his little brother around,"
Berman says. "He liked the guy. So when they grew up they were really,
really great friends."
Tom and Ray haven't done the show live for two years; Car Talk has been airing archives of old shows. Berman says Ray would like to continue doing that, as a tribute to his brother.
When Tom Magliozzi, cohost of NPR's Car Talk, died this
week from complications of Alzheimer's disease, he left behind a fan
base that extended far beyond the United States. Tom and Ray, his
younger brother, took calls from and gave advice to people all over the
world.
Take, for example, the mother-daughter duo who wrote in about buying a car for a yearlong trip around the African continent. Tom and Ray responded via their blog, telling the women to skip buying and instead invest in a guide with a car. They recommended finding someone with a Toyota Land Cruiser, the "official vehicle of sub-Saharan Africa." That way, the tourists will have "an experienced driver, an on-board mechanic, a local translator, a cultural attaché and someone to help you with whatever else comes up during your adventure — like hungry lions."
The Car Talk community message boards are filled with internationally-focused discussions about cars, mechanics and expat life in general. Many of the conversations are about experiences with repairmen in far-off places: Is it really OK for this South African mechanic to disable my temperature regulator? Do I need mud tires to drive in Nicaragua during the rainy season? Can I find diesel fuel in India?
While the brothers didn't always get into these discussions, the loyal fans offered more than enough advice. For every question, there's at least one contributor with some experience on this issue.
The fans were so loyal that many tried to jump on the car-humor bandwagon themselves. A couple from Maine wrote their take on "Road Rules: India versus New England," which the brothers read on the air. While pedestrians have the right of way in Maine, in India, "Cows have the right of way. Pedestrians usually stay out of the road. If you see one, it is considered polite to honk your horn several times before and after you hit them."
And the brothers themselves knew enough about cars to debunk local legend, even when "local" meant Gabon, a country in Central Africa. A Peace Corps volunteer wrote in asking about a trend she'd noticed: Drivers put their fist to their windshield when passing a truck on the road. The idea was that if the truck sent a rock flying, the fist would stop the glass from shattering.
Unless the driver's fist was exactly where the rock hit, Tom said, the technique wouldn't do much. "Lots of folk remedies have legitimate bases in science," is how Tom put it. "This ain't one of them."
When NPR Car Talk hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi opened a
do-it-yourself car repair shop in Cambridge, Mass., in the early 1970s,
Tom had never had so many laughs. The people who came into the shop were
complete "wackos," he told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 2001.
"But man were they fun. And they weren't worried! When the guy jacked up
his Lincoln Town Car and drove the floor jack through his oil pan, did
he cry? He said, 'Uh oh.' I mean people could take a joke!"
Tom died Monday of complications related to Alzheimer's disease. He was 77.
Car Talk is known for the car repair advice Tom and his brother, Ray, dispensed, but it's perhaps even more popular for the brothers' comedic banter. In fact, many people tune in who don't even own a car but just love listening to the brothers.
The show's executive producer, Doug Berman, says Tom's laugh was incredibly infectious.
"It was almost a force, almost separate from him," Berman says. "It was always lurking, trying to come out. And he would see something funny coming a few sentences away, and he would start to laugh while he was talking, and he'd kind of be laughing and it would almost overtake him like a wave."
Two years ago, the brothers stopped taping new episodes of Car Talk because of Tom's Alzheimer's.
"He felt that he just wasn't what he used to be," Berman says. "And he had such an incredible mind that it was really difficult for him."
Both Tom and Ray graduated from MIT, Tom with a degree in chemical engineering. He went on to work in the marketing department of a corporation, speculating about future trends. Then, after narrowly escaping a crash with a tractor-trailer, Tom abandoned the corporate life and started collecting unemployment insurance.
Ray, 12 years Tom's junior, told Gross in 2001 that his mother urged him to try to rescue Tom from his layabout life. So Ray, who had been teaching middle school in Vermont, returned to Boston, and Tom came up with the idea of starting a garage.
Car Talk is still broadcast in an archival version. Fresh Air listens back to Tom's and Ray's 2001 interview with Gross.
Tom: You couldn't make any money at it. It was a great concept and we have never had as many laughs as we had the year that we opened that garage.
Ray: No, we had a rollicking good time. ... Belly laughs, because we attracted every kind of inept weirdo that the city of Cambridge and the surrounding towns had to offer.
Tom: There was no shortage.
Ray: There was no shortage and I was amazed to find out how many wackos inhabited our fair city, and those who came in who thought they knew what they were doing and didn't really expect us to do the work for them for $2.50 an hour, or whatever we were charging them. We soon realized we were doing all the work for everybody, running around like nuts. ... It was pretty much a bust. ... What really drove us out of business was the fact that in 1973, fixing one's own car was within the grasp of the average person. But as emission controls came into being and cars got more complicated, it soon disappeared — that ability soon disappeared — and we found the business diminished considerably. People in Cambridge who had had the time because they were unemployed bums, like my brother, to work on their own cars went out and got jobs and bought newer cars. ...
Tom: But it's interesting how much fun the bums could be. I mean, these were complete wackos, weirdos, as my brother said, he's absolutely right, but man were they fun. ... I mean people could take a joke! People weren't as uptight as they are now. It was only a car. ... What was really sort of spiritual about it was that nobody ever got hurt. I mean, in all the years that we did that, [with] complete rank amateurs using very dangerous equipment ...
Ray: We didn't know any better either! You wanna use the torch,
yeah? Go ahead! We'll be standing on the other side of the brick wall.
Tom: Here, wear this football helmet. Call us if anything happens — we're going out for coffee!
On their first radio appearances as part of a WBUR car mechanics panel in 1977
Tom: We didn't know that it was a real radio station. It's part of Boston University and, at the time, the studios, I mean, you'd think it was like 1920.
Ray: The equipment resembled the tin cans and the string.
Tom: You'd expect [Italian inventor Guglielmo] Marconi to walk by any minute. And so, our assumption was, you know, first of all, who is listening to this station? And we thought it was a station that only broadcast on like wires within the school, within BU.
Ray: We thought it had, you know, 50-watt capacity and then we found out it had 50,000 watts.
Tom: Well, when they turned on the microphones, the lights dimmed. So yeah, I think we were pretty relaxed.
On how much Car Talk changed over the years
Ray: It sounded surprisingly like the new shows do.
Tom: It did?
Ray: I mean, we tended to, if we got someone on the line who we thought was interesting, we tended to talk to that person for whatever a period of time we thought was appropriate, sometimes 25 minutes. And our producer Doug Berman [who joined the show when it went national in 1987] would never allow that. Now he's giving us the cut sign and waving his hands and jumping up and down if we go more than five or six minutes — he gets nervous. But other than that, I would say the show is pretty much the same.
Tom: Really?
Ray: Which begs the question, why do we need Berman? ...
Tom: I've been asking that question since Day 1.
On learning how to do radio and constantly laughing on the air
Tom: No one ever told us anything. Until maybe a week ago, we would walk into the studio and say, "Are we on?" I mean, we had absolutely no information. We knew the room we would go to, we knew where to sit and that was it.
Ray: The only reason we knew that is there was a show on the hour before us called Shop Talk, which was two or three guys talking about stereo equipment and recording and the like. And we would watch them through the glass and we would see how far away from the microphone they sat. And we noticed they wore headphones and we noticed they pressed the lighted buttons on the phone to talk to callers, and so we patterned ourselves after what they did.
Tom: I am proud to say that after 23 or [24] years on the radio we have learned absolutely nothing. It's absolutely the truth. People say, "Tell us about radio!" We have no idea. We sit in front of the microphones and we know nothing about radio. Nothing!
Ray: We've never made an attempt to learn anything, either. And we do laugh a lot, too much sometimes, and I'm sure people complain. And there are many people who can't stand us.
Tom: My wife is one of them!
Ray: Well, that goes without saying. Which wife?
Tom: All of them.
Click and Clack ring in the holiday season with A Car Talk Christmas Carol,
starring Tom and Ray Magliozzi and a stellar cast of public radio
personalities. In a new take on the Dickens classic, the "Scroogiozzi
Brothers" get a lesson in generosity from the Spirits of Public Radio
Past, Present and Future. Children’s author and Weekend Edition Commentator Daniel Pinkwater narrates.
CAST:
Tom and Ray Magliozzi as The Scroogiozzi Brothers
NPR's Robert Siegel as Bob "Robert Siegel" Cratchit
Ira Glass as Tiny Ira
NPR's Susan Stamberg as The Spirit of Public Radio Past
NPR's Scott Simon as The Spirit of Public Radio Present
Commentator Andrei Codrescu as The Spirit of Public Radio Future
NPR's Carl Kasell as Crusty the Mechanic
Commentator Daniel Pinkwater as the Narrator
Produced by Tom Voegeli Productions.
#1445: Tommy, Riposa in Pace
RIP, old friend. We miss you terribly.
Original Air Date: 11.08.2014
Description:
This
week on Car Talk, we pay tribute to our beloved brother, friend, and
co-host, Tom Magliozzi, who passed away Monday, November 3rd. You’ll
hear many of our favorite moments featuring Tom the consummate radio
professional, Tom the philosopher king, Tom the storyteller, and
ultimately Tom, the guy who enjoyed nothing more than to sit with his
brother and all of you listeners for an hour a week, laughing his butt
off. This special edition of the show will be hosted by Ray. We’ll be
listening, and we hope you will, too.
Show Audio Segments
Segment 1
Tom the Consummate Radio Professional
Segment 2
Tom the Philosopher King
Segment 3
Tom the Devoted Son
Segment 4
Tom the Problem Solver
Segment 5
Tom's Haus of Mail
Segment 6
Tom the Storyteller
Segment 7
Tom the Interviewer
Segment 8
Tom, how we will always remember you.
View Call Details
Show Open Topic
A special memorial tribute to Tom Magliozzi, who passed away this week. Listen Now
Tom Magliozzi's laugh boomed in NPR listeners' ears every week as he and his brother, Ray, bantered on Car Talk.
Courtesy of Car Talk
Tom and his brother, Ray, became famous as "Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers" on the weekly NPR show Car Talk. They bantered, told jokes, laughed and sometimes even gave pretty good advice to listeners who called in with their car troubles.
If there was one thing that defined Tom Magliozzi, it was his laugh. It was loud, it was constant, it was infectious.
Tom (right) and Ray grew up great friends despite a 12-year
gap between them. Both graduated from MIT before going into the car
repair business.
Courtesy of Car Talk
"Before I ever met him, I heard him, and it wasn't on the air," he recalls.
Berman was the news director of WBUR at the time.
"I'd just hear this laughter," he says. "And then there'd be more of it, and people would sort of gather around him. He was just kind of a magnet."
The Magliozzi brothers grew up in a tough neighborhood of East Cambridge, Mass., in a close-knit Italian family. Tom was 12 years older, the beloved older brother to Ray. They liked to act like they were just a couple of regular guys who happened to be mechanics, but both of them graduated from MIT.
After getting out of college, Tom Magliozzi went to work as an engineer. One day he had a kind of epiphany, he told graduates when he and Ray gave the 1999 commencement address at their alma mater.
"I quit my job," he said. "I became a bum. I spent two years sitting in Harvard Square drinking coffee. I invented the concept of the do-it-yourself auto repair shop, and I met my lovely wife."
Well, he wasn't exactly a bum; he worked as a consultant and college professor, eventually getting a doctoral degree in marketing. And Tom and Ray Magliozzi did open that do-it-yourself repair shop in the early '70s. They called it Hackers Haven. Later they opened a more traditional car repair shop called the Good News Garage.
"They called Ray, and Ray thought it was a dumb idea, so he said, 'I'll send my brother' and Tom thought, 'Great, I'll get out of breaking my knuckles for a couple of hours.' And he went over and he was the only one who showed up," Berman says.
Berman says the station liked what Tom did and asked him to come back the next week. This time he brought Ray. The rest, as they say, is history.
In 1987 Car Talk went national on NPR. The Magliozzi brothers were a huge success. Listeners loved their blend of humor, passion, expertise and just plain silliness.
When it came to cars, Berman says the brothers really did know what they were talking about. But, he says, that's not why people listen to the show.
"I think it has very little to do with cars," he says. "It's the guys' personalities. And Tom especially — really a genius. With a great, facile mind. And he's mischievous. He likes to prod people into honesty."
It is almost impossible to talk about Tom Magliozzi without talking about Ray. Berman says the affection you heard on the radio dated back to their childhood — and it was real.
Remembering Tom Magliozzi
Tom and Ray haven't done the show live for two years; Car Talk has been airing archives of old shows. Berman says Ray would like to continue doing that, as a tribute to his brother.
Tom Magliozzi, co-host of Car Talk, could opine about driving in far-off places.
Courtesy of Car Talk
Take, for example, the mother-daughter duo who wrote in about buying a car for a yearlong trip around the African continent. Tom and Ray responded via their blog, telling the women to skip buying and instead invest in a guide with a car. They recommended finding someone with a Toyota Land Cruiser, the "official vehicle of sub-Saharan Africa." That way, the tourists will have "an experienced driver, an on-board mechanic, a local translator, a cultural attaché and someone to help you with whatever else comes up during your adventure — like hungry lions."
The Car Talk community message boards are filled with internationally-focused discussions about cars, mechanics and expat life in general. Many of the conversations are about experiences with repairmen in far-off places: Is it really OK for this South African mechanic to disable my temperature regulator? Do I need mud tires to drive in Nicaragua during the rainy season? Can I find diesel fuel in India?
While the brothers didn't always get into these discussions, the loyal fans offered more than enough advice. For every question, there's at least one contributor with some experience on this issue.
The fans were so loyal that many tried to jump on the car-humor bandwagon themselves. A couple from Maine wrote their take on "Road Rules: India versus New England," which the brothers read on the air. While pedestrians have the right of way in Maine, in India, "Cows have the right of way. Pedestrians usually stay out of the road. If you see one, it is considered polite to honk your horn several times before and after you hit them."
And the brothers themselves knew enough about cars to debunk local legend, even when "local" meant Gabon, a country in Central Africa. A Peace Corps volunteer wrote in asking about a trend she'd noticed: Drivers put their fist to their windshield when passing a truck on the road. The idea was that if the truck sent a rock flying, the fist would stop the glass from shattering.
Unless the driver's fist was exactly where the rock hit, Tom said, the technique wouldn't do much. "Lots of folk remedies have legitimate bases in science," is how Tom put it. "This ain't one of them."
Ray and Tom (right) Magliozzi, co-hosts of NPR's Car Talk show, pose for a photo in Cambridge, Mass., in 2008. Tom died Monday of complications from Alzheimer's disease. He was 77.
Charles Krupa/AP
Tom died Monday of complications related to Alzheimer's disease. He was 77.
Car Talk is known for the car repair advice Tom and his brother, Ray, dispensed, but it's perhaps even more popular for the brothers' comedic banter. In fact, many people tune in who don't even own a car but just love listening to the brothers.
The show's executive producer, Doug Berman, says Tom's laugh was incredibly infectious.
"It was almost a force, almost separate from him," Berman says. "It was always lurking, trying to come out. And he would see something funny coming a few sentences away, and he would start to laugh while he was talking, and he'd kind of be laughing and it would almost overtake him like a wave."
"He felt that he just wasn't what he used to be," Berman says. "And he had such an incredible mind that it was really difficult for him."
Both Tom and Ray graduated from MIT, Tom with a degree in chemical engineering. He went on to work in the marketing department of a corporation, speculating about future trends. Then, after narrowly escaping a crash with a tractor-trailer, Tom abandoned the corporate life and started collecting unemployment insurance.
Ray, 12 years Tom's junior, told Gross in 2001 that his mother urged him to try to rescue Tom from his layabout life. So Ray, who had been teaching middle school in Vermont, returned to Boston, and Tom came up with the idea of starting a garage.
Car Talk is still broadcast in an archival version. Fresh Air listens back to Tom's and Ray's 2001 interview with Gross.
Interview Highlights
On their DIY repair shop in CambridgeTom: You couldn't make any money at it. It was a great concept and we have never had as many laughs as we had the year that we opened that garage.
Ray: No, we had a rollicking good time. ... Belly laughs, because we attracted every kind of inept weirdo that the city of Cambridge and the surrounding towns had to offer.
Tom: There was no shortage.
Ray: There was no shortage and I was amazed to find out how many wackos inhabited our fair city, and those who came in who thought they knew what they were doing and didn't really expect us to do the work for them for $2.50 an hour, or whatever we were charging them. We soon realized we were doing all the work for everybody, running around like nuts. ... It was pretty much a bust. ... What really drove us out of business was the fact that in 1973, fixing one's own car was within the grasp of the average person. But as emission controls came into being and cars got more complicated, it soon disappeared — that ability soon disappeared — and we found the business diminished considerably. People in Cambridge who had had the time because they were unemployed bums, like my brother, to work on their own cars went out and got jobs and bought newer cars. ...
Tom: But it's interesting how much fun the bums could be. I mean, these were complete wackos, weirdos, as my brother said, he's absolutely right, but man were they fun. ... I mean people could take a joke! People weren't as uptight as they are now. It was only a car. ... What was really sort of spiritual about it was that nobody ever got hurt. I mean, in all the years that we did that, [with] complete rank amateurs using very dangerous equipment ...
More On Tom Magliozzi
Tom: Here, wear this football helmet. Call us if anything happens — we're going out for coffee!
On their first radio appearances as part of a WBUR car mechanics panel in 1977
Tom: We didn't know that it was a real radio station. It's part of Boston University and, at the time, the studios, I mean, you'd think it was like 1920.
Ray: The equipment resembled the tin cans and the string.
Tom: You'd expect [Italian inventor Guglielmo] Marconi to walk by any minute. And so, our assumption was, you know, first of all, who is listening to this station? And we thought it was a station that only broadcast on like wires within the school, within BU.
Ray: We thought it had, you know, 50-watt capacity and then we found out it had 50,000 watts.
Tom: Well, when they turned on the microphones, the lights dimmed. So yeah, I think we were pretty relaxed.
On how much Car Talk changed over the years
Ray: It sounded surprisingly like the new shows do.
Tom: It did?
Ray: I mean, we tended to, if we got someone on the line who we thought was interesting, we tended to talk to that person for whatever a period of time we thought was appropriate, sometimes 25 minutes. And our producer Doug Berman [who joined the show when it went national in 1987] would never allow that. Now he's giving us the cut sign and waving his hands and jumping up and down if we go more than five or six minutes — he gets nervous. But other than that, I would say the show is pretty much the same.
Tom: Really?
Ray: Which begs the question, why do we need Berman? ...
Tom: I've been asking that question since Day 1.
On learning how to do radio and constantly laughing on the air
Tom: No one ever told us anything. Until maybe a week ago, we would walk into the studio and say, "Are we on?" I mean, we had absolutely no information. We knew the room we would go to, we knew where to sit and that was it.
Ray: The only reason we knew that is there was a show on the hour before us called Shop Talk, which was two or three guys talking about stereo equipment and recording and the like. And we would watch them through the glass and we would see how far away from the microphone they sat. And we noticed they wore headphones and we noticed they pressed the lighted buttons on the phone to talk to callers, and so we patterned ourselves after what they did.
Tom: I am proud to say that after 23 or [24] years on the radio we have learned absolutely nothing. It's absolutely the truth. People say, "Tell us about radio!" We have no idea. We sit in front of the microphones and we know nothing about radio. Nothing!
Ray: We've never made an attempt to learn anything, either. And we do laugh a lot, too much sometimes, and I'm sure people complain. And there are many people who can't stand us.
Tom: My wife is one of them!
Ray: Well, that goes without saying. Which wife?
Tom: All of them.
Listen: Listen to 'A Car Talk Christmas Carol'
Tom and Ray Magliozzi
Richard Howard
CAST:
Tom and Ray Magliozzi as The Scroogiozzi Brothers
NPR's Robert Siegel as Bob "Robert Siegel" Cratchit
Ira Glass as Tiny Ira
NPR's Susan Stamberg as The Spirit of Public Radio Past
NPR's Scott Simon as The Spirit of Public Radio Present
Commentator Andrei Codrescu as The Spirit of Public Radio Future
NPR's Carl Kasell as Crusty the Mechanic
Commentator Daniel Pinkwater as the Narrator
Produced by Tom Voegeli Productions.
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