Ray Magliozzi, left, and his brother Tom share a moment in the radio station’s break area in 2004.
Tom Magliozzi, one particular of the “Click and Clack” brothers who founded the most well-liked system on National Public Radio and forever turned automobile repair into a laughing matter, died today soon after a lengthy 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 3 other mechanics into the studio in 1977. 4 years earlier, the MIT graduate and element-time college lecturer had opened a do-it-your self garage in Cambridge with his brother, Ray, wherein customers paid to function on their own cars. Magliozzi was the only mechanic to show up, “gave out numerous incorrect answers and misled several callers,” according to the brothers’ personal account, and was invited back only to uncover a note that stated “You’re on your own, have a good time, and try to watch your language.” This was the start off of Automobile Speak.
In 1987, Auto Talk went national when the brothers have been invited to be weekly guests on the NPR news show Sunday Weekend Edition. Nine months later, they had their personal 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 3 to 4 million listeners every single week, higher than NPR’s personal news programs—at the very same college studio on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue. Normally, gearhead-focused radio and television programming fails to locate widespread accomplishment. But not the Magliozzi brothers. By means of inescapable sarcasm, self-deprecation, and seriously good gags (such as fooling longtime producer Doug Berman into believing that Tom was actually a CIA agent), Auto Talk was about individuals first and vehicles a distant third or 4th.
Jokes, each on-air and off, fueled the show’s rampant success. At one particular point, according to Automobile Talk’s “Technical, Spiritual, and Menu advisor” John Lawlor, they soaked the studio with weekly squirt gun fights and blasted Berman with a 3-gallon pump produced for watering plants. Other instances, 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 individuals with vehicle (and life) troubles with his radio show and syndicated columns in hundreds of newspapers was the cherry on leading of having fun with his brother and obtaining paid to do it. A lot greater, according to Ray, than his previous job “putting on a suit and functioning in the 9-to-5 world.”
The pair’s official headquarters in Cambridge, methods from exactly where Tom rejected an undergraduate offer you to Harvard due to the fact the scholarship was $ 200 significantly less than MIT (he earned a degree in chemical engineering), has a window marked Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe. Despite their final reside radio show possessing occurred in October 2012, due in component to Tom’s declining overall health, Automobile Speak reruns are still aired on far more than 600 stations across the country.
Ray sums up Tom’s life ideal thusly: “We can be happy he lived the life he wanted to reside goofing off a lot, talking to you guys each and every week, and mainly, laughing his ass off. In lieu of flowers, or rotten fish, we ask that folks make a donation to their favourite public radio station in his memory, or to the Alzheimer’s Association.”
Tom Magliozzi, 1 Half of “Click and Clack” from NPR’s Vehicle Talk, Dies at 77
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