Tom Magliozzi, left, and his brother Ray share a moment in the break area in 2004.
Tom Magliozzi, 1 of the “Click and Clack” brothers who founded the most common plan on National Public Radio and forever turned auto repair into a laughing matter, died nowadays following 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 part-time college lecturer had opened a do-it-your self garage in Cambridge with his brother, Ray, wherein consumers paid to perform 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 find 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 Speak went national when the brothers had 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 very 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 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 discover widespread good results. But not the Magliozzi brothers. By means of inescapable sarcasm, self-deprecation, and seriously excellent gags (such as fooling longtime producer Doug Berman into believing that Tom was really a CIA agent), Vehicle Speak was about folks 1st and automobiles a distant third or 4th.
Jokes, each on-air and off, fueled the show’s rampant success. At one point, according to Auto 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 genuine folks with auto (and life) troubles with his radio show and syndicated columns in hundreds of newspapers was the cherry on prime of having entertaining with his brother and acquiring paid to do it. Much 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, measures from where Tom rejected an undergraduate provide to Harvard because the scholarship was $ 200 significantly less than MIT’s (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 portion to Tom’s declining overall health, Automobile Speak reruns are nevertheless aired on a lot more than 600 stations across the nation.
Ray sums up Tom’s life best thusly: “We can be happy he lived the life he wanted to live goofing off a lot, speaking to you guys each and every week, and mostly, laughing his ass off. In lieu of flowers, or rotten fish, we ask that folks make a donation to their preferred public radio station in his memory, or to the Alzheimer’s Association.”
Tom Magliozzi, A single Half of “Click and Clack” from NPR’s Auto Speak, Dies at 77
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