Radio personality Tom Magliozzi, who along with his brother hosted the popular show "Car Talk," died Monday due to complications from Alzheimer's disease at the age of 77.
Though he was known as co-host of the successful NPR show, which ran for 25 years, Magliozzi did not launch his career with radio in mind, NPR reported.
The East Cambridge, Massachusetts, native started out as an engineer after he and his younger brother Ray graduated from MIT. It was a near-death experience involving a tractor-trailer that made Magliozzi decide to do a complete 180 with his life.
"I quit my job," he said according to NPR. "I became a bum. I spent two years sitting in Harvard Square drinking coffee. I invented the concept of the do-it-yourself auto repair shop, and I met my lovely wife."
Magliozzi used the word bum, but in reality he earned a doctoral degree in marketing while working as a consultant and college professor, the radio station noted.
By the early '70s, the Italian brothers opened a do-it-yourself car repair shop named Hackers Haven and eventually opened a regular repair shop named Good News Garage.
A Massachusetts radio station, WBUR, one day contacted Tom Magliozzi's brother Ray, younger by 12 years, about a talk show featuring mechanics.
"They called Ray, and Ray thought it was a dumb idea, so he said, 'I'll send my brother' and Tom thought, 'Great, I'll get out of breaking my knuckles for a couple of hours.' And he went over and he was the only one who showed up," Doug Berman, a longtime producer of "Car Talk," told NPR.
Ray, who idolized his older brother, came on board the following week and together the brothers captivated the show's national audience, telling jokes while spreading car knowledge as the weekly show's "Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers."
The brothers gave sound advice on fixing cars, but it was their playfulness coupled with Tom's boisterous laugh that kept people listening.
"I think it has very little to do with cars," Berman told NPR. "It's the guys' personalities. And Tom especially- really a genius. With a great, facile mind. And he's mischievous. He likes to prod people into honesty."
In fact, it was Tom Magliozzi's laugh that first grabbed Berman's attention when he met him back when Berman was news director of WBUR. He called Tom's laugh "the working definition of infectious laughter."
"I'd just hear this laughter. And then there'd be more of it, and people would sort of gather around him. He was just kind of a magnet."
"Car Talk" ran from 1987 until 2012 but the old shows are still played on air. Ray would like to continue airing the shows in honor of his brother, Berman told NPR.
