After co-hosting the NPR show “Car Talk” with his brother Ray for a quarter century, Tom Magliozzi died yesterday at the age of 77:
In a remembrance, Mike Riggs declares, “If you are, or ever were, one of the 25 percent of Americans who can’t afford a major repair, Tom and Ray weren’t just funny, or just entertaining, they were very close to necessary”:
Car Talk did not pioneer consumer advocacy. Many local newspapers and TV stations employ columnists and on-air talent who will hound service providers accused of fleecing people. But most consumer protection journalists aren’t experts, and they certainly aren’t philosophers. Tom Magliozzi – a grease monkey with a degree from MIT – was both. Which is why what you got from Car Talk wasn’t just a first or second opinion on your car problem, but counsel and succor. Some of the people I heard call into Car Talk were anxious and more than a few were borderline frantic. …
Tom and Ray knew that for many of the people who listened to them, a car was not a luxury; they knew that millions of Americans need their cars – to get to work, to transport their children, to buy groceries. So they didn’t stop at diagnosing your about-to-break CV joint or a bad power steering pump, and they didn’t stop at coaching you on how to stand up to your mechanic. They wouldn’t let you off the line until they knew that you knew that there was a solution to your problem.
At least, that’s how it felt as a listener. We never actually called in to Car Talk. But we listened to Tom and Ray the way some people listen to televangelists, waiting for nuggets of divine wisdom that applied to our exact situation.
A classic clip from a reader:
Bob Collins remembers Magliozzi as “the man who made it OK to laugh on public radio”:
Public radio was a lot of things back in the day, but it wasn’t much for personality. You just didn’t laugh on public radio. Even within the public radio industry, a contingent thought the show threatened the dignity of the institution. To others, however, the show liberated public radio from itself, clearing the way for subsequent shows such as “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.”
And John Biggs notes that “Car Talk” had a special significance for a generation of tinkerers:
The brothers, and Tom in particular, reminded us that building and fixing isn’t scary and that repair, in fact, was the way forward. We aren’t supposed to be scared of getting our hands dirty because that’s how progress is made and that’s how you have fun. Tom taught a generation of hackers that there is nothing frightening about taking things apart.
The Dish 