Tom Magliozzi, NPR 'Car Talk' host, dies at 77
Tom Magliozzi, who along with his brother delivered insights on automobiles through a blizzard of Boston-accented quips, putdowns and laughter on NPR's “Car Talk” radio program, has died. He was 77.
He died today of complications from Alzheimer's disease, NPR said.
Magliozzi and his younger brother, Ray, called themselves “Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers” on “Car Talk,” which aired weekly on NPR from 1987 until their retirement in 2012. The show has been heard in re-runs on NPR member stations since then.
On a show that found comedy in pistons and mufflers, Magliozzi's guffaws were the richest and most raucous.
“His laugh is the working definition of infectious laughter,” Doug Berman, the show's longtime producer, told NPR.
Even when they phoned in with genuine car questions, callers got in the spirit of the show, laughing at their lemons and offering their best imitations of the mysterious noise coming from their rides.
“Somewhere along the line we decided that cars were boring,” Magliozzi told the Boston Globe in 2000. “But they provide an entry into life, so we can talk about life philosophy, which is more interesting than talking about valve clearances.”
Early shows
“When the show first started, people were still working on their own cars, and people would call and say, 'I'm in my driveway, and I'm replacing the valve cover, and I can't do blah blah blah.' And that got boring pretty fast. We didn't realize anyone was really listening, and we started fooling around.”
Magliozzi was born on June 28, 1937, in East Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge.
He spent six months of active duty in the U.S. Army Reserve, then worked for Sylvania's semiconductor division in Woburn, Massachusetts, and Foxboro Co. in Foxboro, Massachusetts, while earning an MBA from Northeastern University. (He'd go on to receive a doctorate from Boston University.)
He said his commute — one hour each way between Cambridge and Foxboro, in “my little MGA” — became too much, and he spent a year “'hanging out' in Harvard Square, drinking coffee.”
Auto shop
He taught executive development for the International Marketing Institute in places including Saudi Arabia and Kuala Lumpur. When his brother, another MIT grad, who had been teaching science in Vermont, joined him in Cambridge, the two went into the auto-repair business.
They opened Hackers Heaven, a do-it-yourself repair shop, in the early 1970s, then a more traditional repair shop called the Good News Garage.
Radio found Magliozzi in 1977 when WBUR, Boston's NPR station, put him on a panel of car mechanics for a talk show. The next week, he brought his brother. It wasn't until a decade later that their show went national.
In 2012, when the brothers stopped doing new episodes, the Associated Press reported “Car Talk” was NPR's most popular program.
“We've managed to avoid getting thrown off NPR for 25 years, giving tens of thousands of wrong answers and had a hell of a time every week talking to callers,” Magliozzi said, according to AP. “The stuff in our archives still makes us laugh. So we figured, why keep slaving over a hot microphone?”