Tom and Ray Magliozzi

Early life and education

Tom Magliozzi was born in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. His education was entirely in Cambridge: Gannett School, Wellington School, Cambridge High and Latin School, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at MIT, he participated in Air Force ROTC, and subsequently he spent six months in the Army Reserve.

Ray Magliozzi was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts; he also graduated from MIT.

Career

Tom earned a degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He subsequently worked for Sylvania's Semiconductor Division in Woburn, Massachusetts and then for the Foxboro Company while earning his MBA from Northeastern University and teaching part-time at local universities. Eventually tiring of his commute and job, he quit, spending the next year doing odd jobs such as painting for other tenants in his apartment building.

Ray taught science in Bennington, Vermont for a few years before returning to Cambridge in 1973. He and Tom then opened a do-it-yourself repair shop named Hacker's Haven. The shop rented space and equipment to hackers trying to fix their own cars but was not profitable. Nevertheless, the two enjoyed the experience and were invited in 1977 to be part of a panel of automotive experts on Boston's National Public Radio affiliate WBUR-FM. Subsequently, the brothers converted the shop into a standard auto-repair shop named Good News Garage.

In addition to the local radio show, Tom worked a day or two per week at the Technology Consulting Group, run by a former MIT classmate, in Boston, and he still taught at local universities. Tom's professed belief that college professors make lots of money without working drove him to spend nine years working while getting his doctorate in Marketing from Boston University School of Management. After being a professor for eight years, he decided that he disliked teaching, and quit.

Car Talk

In January 1987, host Susan Stamberg of Weekend Edition on NPR asked the two to contribute weekly to her program. Nine months later, Car Talk premiered as an independent NPR program. In 1992, Tom and Ray won a Peabody Award for Car Talk—for "distinguished achievement and meritorious public service".

Tom and Ray continued to work in their garage while they produced Car Talk. On June 8, 2012, it was announced that Car Talk would stop producing new episodes in September 2012, though NPR will continue airing reruns of the show.

After Tom's death, the show's long time producer Doug (the "Subway Fugitive") Berman said that Tom, "...and his brother changed public broadcasting forever." “Before Car Talk, NPR was formal, polite, cautious….even stiff. By being entirely themselves, without pretense, Tom and Ray single-handedly changed that, and showed that real people are far more interesting than canned radio announcers." "Every interesting show that has come after them owes them a debt of gratitude." “The guys are culturally right up there with Mark Twain and the Marx Brothers,” Berman said. “They will stand the test of time. People will still be enjoying them years from now. They’re that good.”

Other work

In addition to the radio show, Tom wrote for CarTalk.com and ran his own consulting business.

In 1999, the brothers returned to MIT to jointly deliver the commencement speech to that year's graduates.

Tom and Ray both appeared in the Pixar films Cars (2006) and Cars 3 (2017), with Tom reprising his role in the third film thorough archive recordings. They played the owners of Rust-eze, who discovered Lightning McQueen and gave him his first big break. Tom appeared as a 1963 Dodge Dart convertible, a reference to a 1963 Dart convertible he owned for many years and often mentioned on Car Talk. Ray appeared as a 1964 Dodge A100 van. In both films, they each admonished: "Don't drive like my brother", the catchphrase from the close of their radio show.

The Magliozzi brothers also appeared in a seventh-season episode of the PBS Kids show Arthur, called "Pick a Car, Any Car", which originally aired on November 25, 2002. Arthur calls them with a question about the family car, which would have been hauled away by the local mechanic without their help. The answer turns out to be a baby rattle, presumably that of Arthur's baby sister Kate, in the car's tailpipe.

In 2008, the brothers starred in their own PBS animated series, Click and Clack's As the Wrench Turns, playing fictionalized versions of themselves.

Also in 2008, the brothers hosted an episode of PBS show NOVA entitled "The Car of the Future".

Tom's death

On November 3, 2014, Tom died, aged 77, in Belmont, Massachusetts, due to complications from Alzheimer's disease.