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Ira writes:

Bad news today. One of the Car Talk guys, Tom Magliozzi, is dead at 77. I only ever met Tom and Ray a few times, mostly in the first year or two of our show. They had no reason to be nice to me but they were lovely and supportive. When they announced their retirement two years ago, I wrote an essay for the public radio newspaper Current, which included this section, explaining how important their show has been to public radio. They were the single most popular hour on public radio for years. Here's an excerpt:

I enjoy Car Talk. I like those guys. And as a public radio lifer, I'm grateful for what Tom and Ray Magliozzi did to bring a vast audience to public radio, year after year.

They made our stations a destination for millions of radio listeners on Saturday mornings. They shoved public radio's sound away from stuffy and towards chatty. They loosened everyone's notion of what is possible or appropriate for a national show and — just as important — what could be a hit with our audience.

Without Car Talk, shows like mine would have had a much harder time getting onto stations, no question. The Car Guys and Garrison Keillor proved you can sound different, you can organize huge swaths of what you're doing around just being funny, you can think of your program first and foremost as entertainment, and audiences will show up in big numbers.

What they did was huge. Doug Berman does a canny, brilliant job producing them. Tom and Ray — like great ballplayers — are so phenomenally surefooted at what they do that they make it seem effortless. And they wear the mantle of success as lightly and gracefully as anyone could.

Tom and Ray were kind enough to make appearances on our show three times. In 1997 and 1998 we were still a pretty unknown show, and they were titans, iconic, one of the biggest shows on public radio. It helped us seem legit to have them on, and I was grateful they made the time. I recommend those appearances if you're a fan, because you hear a slightly different side of them than you do on their own show, especially the first time they came onto our program. Those appearances:

In our 1997 Fiasco! episode, they explained how hard it was to get their hit show onto the radio in Wisconsin.

In a 2002 show, they explained how they screwed up repairing their own former employee's car, but maybe got him a girlfriend in the process. That ex-employee btw is Joe Richman, the guy who went on to create the great Radio Diaries series.

They helped me teach Sarah Vowell to drive a car in 1998.

Image from Car Talk.