WWTBAM Bored

Tom Magliozzi, one of the Car Talk guys duo, passed away this morning.

http://www.npr.org/2014/11/03/357428287 ... ent=202503

I'll miss the advice and the laughs

WBUR, their home station, has been airing the funeral for Mayor Menino all day. So when I turned the radio on to hear part of a car-talk episode I thought "oh, the funeral's over & rather than going to regularly scheduled programming (Fresh Air at that time slot) they're finishing out the hour with some Car-Talk. Great! (They usually fill awkward empty slots with part of a This American Life show, which seems to me a weird choice, but anyway.) But then the announcers who would have been on leading up to 2:00pm, Robin Young & that guy they paired her with when her show went to 2 hours because "you have to have male voices in a longer show", say the radio idiot gods, were talking about how great Tom M. was.


I was sad when Mayor Menino died. This one hit me in the gut.


I've been listening to the show longer than any of you unless you also live in the Boston area, because it was a local phenom for a long, long time before it got syndicated. Tom, who had gone back to school (after he & Ray both graduated MIT as engineers) to get a business degree, was reportedly the force behind getting the show into national syndication.


When the show went off of live status 2 years ago local entities, & maybe some national, interviewed Doug Berman, their producer, who kept saying, politely, when asked why they were no longer doing the show "Well, Tom is 81 years old". Apparently he was actually a lot younger. But the way Mr. Berman said it made me think the reason had to do with Alzheimers, which turns out be what Tom had (see the obit), or senile dementia, because that show was the kind of thing you could keep doing unless you were losing your faculties or were in very, very great pain.


I never met Tom Magliozzi. I say him & brother Ray introduce acts, & sing some themselves, at the Joe Val Bluegrass Festival at least once, maybe twice. (As you'll know from the show, they could really sing, when they weren't fooling around at it.) I met Ray in person when my mechanic sent me there after they threw up their hands at my carburetor problem; by this time it was a new carburetor, put in by a dealer, & still didn't work so as to have me pass the emissions test. Ray only charged me for half the time he put in on it because "no-one should be paying for 7 hours work on a new carburetor". He's a mensch. I'll bet so was Tom, despite his occasional "business person" facade. My heart goes out to Ray, & Tom's family.


The only reason Good News Garage wasn't my garage is that when I bought my 1st car, a car any mechanic, including my eventual mechanic & the Magliozzi brothers, would have warned me against, & it turned out to need its brake rotors worked on, their mother (honestly) answered the phone at the garage & said (but in a very genuinely sweet voice) "the boys aren't taking any new customers for about 6 months". The show had just gone national.

So has the show been airing repeats for the last few years? I did't realize that.

RIP, Click. (Or was he Clack?)

This makes me very sad.

Thanks for the local insight, ghost.

I think they kept it a deep inner secret who was Click & who Clack. They may have kidded about it on air, but never specifically owned up to who-was-who.

Once I'd actually met Ray, I could tell, for a while, which voice was which brother while they were talking on air. (You all could avail yourselves of this knowledge by watching interviews where they're interviewed together. Tom's the one with hair on his head.) But that's faded, so unless I hear one of them on the replays currently airing address the other by name, I dunno who is talking.


The radio station gave them a big goodbye party when they stopped taping new shows, but being Public Radio it was also a fundraiser with a high-priced ticket, so I couldn't go.


Doug Berman, the producer, said on air today that those composite shows they've been running since the new shows stopped will continue to be available for broadcast as long as stations want them; the families have decided that.


The station, WBUR, 90.9FM, is airing a remembrance show right now which I should be listening to; I hope it will be archived on line. Earlier, when they were promoing this 9:00pm show, the announcer tried to pronounce Magliozzi (technically, its "Mal-yah'-tzee") about 3 times & then gave up & said "Tom M." or something like that. I can just hear him cackling at that from beyond the grave. (You can tell why they used "Click & Clack, the Tappit Brothers", though.)

'BUR's show was just a rerun of one the episodes of the show we all know & love, but Terry Gross on Fresh Air today reran a 2001 interview with the brothers, interspersed with an interview with their producer, Doug Berman, discussing Tom. This is well worth hearing.


Apparently Tom was the laugher. I always thought it could be either one of them laughing, but all the interviews say that laughter that went on forever (often he would crack himself up just anticipating what was info was coming) was Tom's.