Hello, You're On Car Talk

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Cambridge, Massachusetts

The first time I met Ray Magliozzi I schemed to get the happy end of the deal. I shouldered my '64 blue VW Beetle into his new entrepreneurial experiment one bone-cold December morning circa 1973. With his brother Tom, Ray's get-rich-quick plan went something like this:

• Rent a garage in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Seduce hundreds of Boston's college kids to work on their own cars with the Magliozzi brothers' tools.
• And charge them all a couple bucks an hour for the privilege of an afternoon at Hackers' Haven, while Tom and Ray perused the yachts-for-sale classifieds in the Cape Cod newspapers.

My plan was theirs in reverse. Instead of ponying up ten bucks an hour for a single mechanic at the suburban VW dealership, I'd hook Tom and Ray both into doing the work for me for peanuts.

By the end of the day, I was out about 20 bucks, covered in grease, and my belly hurt from laughing so much I barely noticed or cared that my baby blue bug still needed a strong shoulder to start.

Fast forward 33 years, and Tom and Ray Magliozzi – Click & Clack, the Tappet Brothers – are still making millions of autophiles howl each week on Car Talk. The hour-long National Public Radio distributed show has cornered top ratings for years, making Tom and Ray veritable cult figures who offer marital advice along with recommendations for gooey lube products for recalcitrant automotive parts.

High atop Car Talk Plaza in Harvard Square, Tom and Ray Magliozzi bid a Merry Christmas.
Photos by Richard Howard.

The show and the Magliozzi Brothers were inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1998, joining the empire of the air along with broadcasting royalty Garrison Keillor, Guglielmo Marconi, Walter Winchell and Edward R. Murrow, among many others.

"It all started as a fluke in 1977," said Ray, at the Cambridge garage he still manages, "The Boston University radio station asked my brother Tom and me to come and join some other mechanics for a straight talk show about car repairs, sort of a radio version of This Old House, but for jalopies."

Only Tom showed up at the station, but he held callers at bay with a natural, self-deprecating humor that had more to do with our unflagging love for cars than the quirkeries of the machines themselves.

The next week Tom dragged Ray along, and the pair became to radio what Butch and Sundance became to bank robbery.

And the rest is broadcasting history.

After a few years of doing Car Talk for coffee and donuts, as a service to the college station, the Brothers Magliozzi asked WBUR for the grand sum of $20 a show and became bona fide professional broadcasters.

A decade passed before they went national, and like all success stories, many hands raise to take credit for the discovery. Robert Seigel, one of the hosts of All Things Considered, remembers that he heard them while on summer vacation in Boston and lobbied the Washington brass to take the show big time. Several other NPR producers share a similar tale of their acumen for sniffing out talent.

But the first confirmed NPR national yack came courtesy of Susan Stamberg, who arranged for Tom and Ray to host a weekly Car Talk segment on her new show, Sunday Weekend Edition.

"So many goofy letters and calls came in that about nine months later, in 1987 I think, NPR agreed to take Car Talk nationally as our own show," said Ray.

During the next 20 odd years, listeners have come to know Tom and Ray like the guys next door, replete with biographical spices whose veracity some question. This much is certainly true: Cambridge, Massachusetts is their "Fair City." Both Tom and Ray grew up in East Cambridge (not to be confused with the mansion neighborhood of Longfellow or Harvard's ivy walls).

Both have undergraduate degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Tom's in Chemical Engineering, class of 1958, and Ray's in General Science, class of 1972.

The mission-control of Car Talk, the apocryphal law firm of Dewey, Cheatem & Howe, is a polite literary borrowing from such giants as The Three Stooges, Groucho Marx and Daffy Duck. But, a top floor office in one of Harvard Square's paramount buildings has the name emblazoned in gold on the window. Within its maximum-security confines, show producer Doug Berman tries to herd up Tom and Ray and keep the brothers on script. "What script?" chuckles Ray.

And what ever happened to the brainchild, Hacker's Haven – the New Age enterprise in 1973 hatched to make Tom and Ray rich? The garage gradually evolved into a conventional repair shop with the glitzy moniker of Ray's Garage.

When the Brothers Magliozzi are not answering questions on-air about authentic love or synthetic oil, Tom tends to his marketing enterprises for the radio show and other clients, and Ray is mostly found at Ray's – actually charging money to fix cars.