Car Talk Part 1
University of Massachusetts
“Uncommon Leadership” Series
June 2, 2007
Tom and Ray Magliozzi
Car Talk
"Standing the Test of Time: 30 Years and Still Running"
Tom and Ray Magliozzi (aka the Tappet Brothers) were recent guests at the University of Massachusetts “Uncommon Leadership” series. Tom and Ray were interviewed by Glenn Mangurian, University of Massachusetts Executive in Residence. Jack Wilson, President of the University of Massachusetts, co-hosted the event. Following is a summary of that interesting and amusing conversation.
Glenn M: Good morning and welcome to the University of Massachusetts “Uncommon Leadership” program. We're going to have some fun this morning.
Many of you know I graduated from Arlington High School, and Ray Magliozzi was one of my close friends. Ray sat in front of me in most all my classes. In the science classes I would sneak a peak over Ray’s shoulder. Unfortunately, Ray would shift his seat position. He was no help.
I know many of you are avid Car Talk listeners. If you missed last week’s show her is a short audio clip:
The Physics Question
(Banjo music)
(Telephone call)
Ray: Hello. Welcome to Car Talk from National Public Radio with us, Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers. So, what's goin' on Tyler?
Caller: My question isn't about a car. It's actually a physics question that I have been debating with my dad for well over ten years.
Ray: We may have to call Wolfgang, but go ahead. We'll give it a shot.
Caller: Okay. Here's the setup. There are two cars driving head-on, right at each other. They each weigh the same and they're going ... let's call it 60 miles an hour. Then, they hit each other, head-on. Well, I say that's the same as one car of that same weight going 60 miles an hour, into an immovable wall. And my dad and now my wife -
Tom: Your dad is right, and your wife is right and you're wrong.
Caller: My dad says it's the equivalent of driving a car into a wall at 120 miles an hour.
Ray: I believe that is correct.
Tom: He's right.
Caller: Oh, come on.
Tom: And I just want you to know, I took that physics course, and got in it, are you ready, an F.
Ray: That's why he took it a second time.
Tom: Because Professor Tisza said to me, (in a Hungarian accent), "Mr. Magliozzi, I'm going to do you a favor. I'm going to give you an F."
Ray: Driving two cars at 60 miles an hour into each other is the equivalent, I believe, of driving one car at 120 into an immovable object. Now, if you had a choice of driving into a stone wall at 60 miles an hour, or driving into another car going in the opposite direction at sixty, which would you choose?
Caller: I have to admit, I would choose to drive into a wall.
Ray: Why, though?
Caller: I don't know. That almost seems like an argument based upon emotion. Just 'cause it seems like you're going faster, but when I work out the physics in my head, it seems -
Ray: The head will get you in trouble every time. You'd be surprised how many times it lets us down in a week. Now, we could certainly be wrong, but my impression from high school physics is that it's the equivalent of hitting the wall at 120.
Tom: We're not wrong.
Caller: I'm never going to hear the end of this.
Ray: I know it. Well, we won't tell them if you don't. One of our other four and a half million listeners might. But you're on your own, man.
Caller: Well, you guys, I guess, thank you. I have to eat some crow on this, but that's okay.
Tom: Sorry.
Ray: I think you do.
Tom: See you Tyler.
Glenn M.: I’m going to ask Dr. Jack Wilson, Physics Professor and President of the University of Massachusetts, to give us the definitive answer to this dilemma. Jack who is right here?
President Wilson: Thank you, Glenn. I'm just going to make this short. I'm sorry guys. Wolfgang was right to flunk you. These two situations are the same from a physics point of view. Two identical cars going 60 miles per hour and hitting head-on perfectly square is the same as hitting a wall at 60 miles per hour. Now, it is true you have twice as much energy to dissipate. But, you have two cars that are crumpling to dissipate the energy, so in fact the acceleration the occupants feel is exactly the same whether they hit the wall or they hit the other car.
Glenn M: I think you should have Jack on the program next week.
President Wilson: To tell the truth, when I take my physics hat off, I'd rather hit the wall, because the guy might be carrying a bowling ball on the dashboard or something. A wall rarely does anything unusual. You can kind of rely on walls a lot more than you can other drivers.
Ray: We got a call from Wolfgang Rueckner, who is a professor at Harvard in the Physics Department. Wolfgang says, "Guys, guys."
Tom: And we said, "Oh, oh."
Ray: He essentially gave the exact same explanation that Jack just gave. We're accustomed to being wrong, and it's not unusual for us to give a wrong answer or two or three or four or five. So, there you go. We can take it.
Driving to Today’s Breakfast
Glenn M.: Tom and Ray, welcome. By the way who drove today?
Tom: He did.
Ray: Neither one of us actually drove today.
Tom: That's right.
Ray: I have to tell you a story.
Tom: You can't get an answer out of my brother. He's always got to tell you a story.
Ray: It's a short story. Glenn had asked us to do this, and we agreed, but we could never agree on a date. We started this discussion about a year ago.
"How about January?" "No, it's too cold in January."
"How about March?" "No, we're going to be away in March."
“How about April?" "The solstice is coming up."
We always had an excuse.
Finally we agreed on a date, and you said, "Oh, by the way, you have to be there at 7 o'clock in the morning." "7 o'clock in the morning, are you crazy? I'll never get my brother out of the house and here and awake at 7 a.m. So I had this brilliant idea that we would sleep here. We actually have rooms here.
Glenn M: Oh, you had rooms?
Tom: And, you paid for them!
Ray: So I packed a bag. I forgot socks, but … so neither of us drove here this morning. But, I drove last night.
Glenn M: What kind of car did you drive?
Ray: Well, we get to test-drive just about all the cars that come out. So if you're interested in buying a new car...
Tom: ... we can give you one!
Ray: Like, they’ll never know. We have them for weeks at a time.
Tom: Anybody want a Ford?
Ray: It's a Ford Focus. It's a very nice little car. That's what we're driving this week.
Interest in Cars
Glenn M: When did you guys get interested in cars?
Tom: That's a good question. I don't think we're interested yet.
Ray: I got interested because … Tom's my older brother...
Tom: Older, wiser and more handsome.
Ray: Anything else?
Tom: That will do for now.
Ray: Tom always had a car. He had a car obviously before I was even close to driving age. He was always tinkering. Every car he ever bought was a jalopy. He's maintained that tradition to this day.
Tom: I have had some beautiful cars, though.
Glenn M.: Which was your favorite?
Tom: Of all the cars I've had, the one I loved the most was my '63 Dodge Dart convertible.
Ray: Ohhh, boy.
Tom: Oh, man.
Glenn M: There are people here who were not born in '63.
Tom: That was a great car.
Ray: No, on it's best day, it was never a great car, but it …
Tom: It had a lot of things wrong with it. You'd put the top down…it wasn't automatic. You had to get out and wrestle with it. It made all kinds of noises, but I knew what every single noise was. I had proven to myself that it was not dangerous. One day I was driving three people in the car, and there was a new noise. I said, "What was that?" And someone said, "What was what?" I said, "That noise." They all started laughing. They said, "Which one?" I knew what every single noise was, and it didn't bother me in the slightest. It was part of the gestalt of the car.
Ray: And, the good news was, as pieces fell off, there was less to go wrong. It finally got to the point where the car had, like, seven moving parts.
Tom: And, none of them was in the engine!
Ray: Not much to go wrong when you have seven moving parts.
Our Relationship with MIT
Glenn M: I would assume because of your interest in cars, that you would both be mechanical engineers, is that right?
Tom: Chemical engineer here.
Ray: I started off as a mechanical engineer and I quickly abandoned it. I could see myself designing windshield wiper linkages. In fact, I took an entire course designing windshield wiper linkages, and I decided that that wasn't for me. I ended up majoring in humanities and science. MIT has a fabulous humanities department.
Tom: Well, if you ever want to get out of MIT whole, you have to do something like that. Ray's got a T-shirt, and it says, MIT Class of '70. Scratched out. Class of '71, scratched out. Class of '72 …
Glenn M.: By the way, this is your 50th college reunion year, you know.
Tom: Yes, it is -
Glenn M.: - I just wanted to remind you. -
Tom: I'm going there today.
Glenn M.: Today? Congratulations. Fifty years.
(Applause)
Ray: Is Professor Tisza going to be there, the one who flunked you in that physics course?
Tom: I'll kill him if he's there!
Glenn M.: By the way, you gave the commencement address at MIT in '99?
Tom: Ohhh, yeah.
Glenn M.: How did that come about?
Ray: We were first on the list, actually.
Tom: No, not that list. They don't choose persons from that list.
Ray: It wasn't my idea. Tom decided it would be a nice thing if a couple of alums gave a commencement address. Basically, one of our staunchest listeners had been Charles Vest, who was then President of MIT. His was a real nice guy until he made this mistake. We basically goaded him into inviting us to give the commencement address.
Tom: On the air, every once in a while whenever he would announce who the new person was this year, we'd always say, "Well, what about us?"
Ray: Yeah, we're right here.
Tom: Who the hell is this Kofi Annan? Who knows him?
Ray: So we made this big deal:
“Look, you don't have to fly us in; we can walk over.
You don't have to put us up in a hotel; we're right here.”
We gave him all kinds of reasons. He wrote back a very funny letter and said, “Well, we would do this, and we would be happy to have you as commencement speakers, but you don't have a flag.”
Tom: Kofi Annan brought his own flag.
Ray: So we had come up with our own flag ...
Tom: ... of course.
Ray: On our flag, it said in Latin, Non impediti ratione cogitatonis which translates into our motto: "Not Encumbered by the Thought Process."
Tom: But, it was perfect Latin.
Ray: So, we showed up with our flag, and of course, we were allowed to give the address.
Tom: You can't skip over a very interesting part of the story. Before we did this, the march, everyone marches out to the Great Court and all this, and my brother is walking along next to … a guy.
Ray: Oh, I know who the guy was.
Tom: The guy’s name was Howard Johnson. He was the President of MIT at some point. So Howard turns around and says to my brother,
"Are you nervous?"
My brother says, "About what?"
He said, "Well, you're going to do the address, and people are going to hear you. You should be nervous."
My brother says, "Not yet."
The guy says, "How come you're not nervous? I'm always nervous before they do this."
My brother says, "You know, when you go to a graduation, I'll bet there isn't one person in a thousand who can remember who gave the graduation speech. Who the hell remembers who this guy is. They're probably talking about nonsensical, stupid, irrelevant things."
And the guy says, "Do you remember who spoke at your graduation?"
Tom says, "I have no idea."
Ray: And I said, "I'm sure whoever it was ...
Tom: ... was boring. Howard Johnson turns to him at says, "I gave the address." How perfect can that be?
Ray: Now, if ever there was a case of being sandbagged, that was it. And of course, I had to defend myself, "Hadah, hadah, hadah … how do you know you gave the commencement address? Maybe it wasn't my year. You were President for a bunch of years and maybe someone else gave it." He said, (serious tone) "Back then, only the President delivered the commencement address." I gave up. And I was nervous from that point on.
Early Career Choices
Glenn M: Tom, did you practice your chemical engineering?
Tom: I was a chemical engineer at Foxboro Company.
Ray: Did they close that division since then?
Tom: It was a long, long haul from Cambridge. Actually, there were two reasons that I quit that job. One was that I wanted to work a four-day week instead of a five-day week. They wouldn't let me do that. They said, "If you do that, everyone's going to want to do it." And I said, "Well, I have three weeks of vacation coming. Can I take a day every week?" They said, "Take your vacation whenever you want." So I took 15 weeks of Fridays. Not bad, ay?
Glenn M: Not bad.
Tom: Then, it was summer, and I had no vacation. So I quit!
Ray: I have to tell you one other Tom Magliozzi story about quitting.
Ray: After Tom left the Foxboro Company, he decided he wanted to go back and earn a PhD. So he did that. Took him 22½ years, but that's another story.
He gets his PhD. He was teaching at Boston University, and then he moved to Suffolk. One day, we were sitting in our parents’ living room, and Tom says to Dad ... now, our father worked six days a week his whole life. He delivered home heating oil, and before that he delivered ice and kerosene. He worked hard carrying blocks of ice up three flights of stairs. He knew hard work his whole life. And Tom says, "I think I'm going to quit my job at Suffolk."
Tom: No, I had already quit.
Ray: Oh. Okay. And Dad said, "Well, what's the matter, you're not making enough money?" "Oh, no, they're paying me a ton of money," he said. "It's the hours that are killing me. It's just way too much responsibility." Dad asks, "Well, why don't you go and speak to your boss and maybe they can cut you down from five days to four. That would make it a little easier." And Tom says ...
Tom: ... I only work two days now!
Ray: Dad put his hands like this … he couldn't believe it! "What mistake have I made?" he was thinking.
Tom: And he kept saying, "You make that much money for two days?"
Ray: And you quit?
Tom: Yeah, well.
Tom: Let me tell you something about being unemployed: you learn how inexpensive it is to really live. I mean, when I was working, I had to buy suits. I had to have my shirts done so I'd look beautiful every day.
Ray: It didn't help.
Tom: Unemployed, I had nothing to do. I would meander down to Harvard Square. I used to go to Grendel's Den, which is still there. For two bucks they had a brunch. Two bucks, all you can eat. It went from 11:00 to 2:00. I would be there at 11:00 right on time every day to have breakfast. Then, I would sit there, smoking my cigar and reading a book. And at quarter of two, I would have lunch. For two dollars a day I was taking care of two meals!
Ray: And five hours!
Tom: It was unbelievable.
The Opening of the Garage
Glenn M.: How did you get started as garage owners?
Tom: He forced me into it. When I was still working I was the long-range planner for the company …
Ray: His long-range plan was to retire!
Tom: … to retire or to quit. But as a long-range planner, I was looking at all kinds of trends - what was happening in the world, blah, blah, blah. I realized that the cost of various things was going up, especially automobile repair. So, I came up with the idea of a do-it-yourself auto-repair shop, where people would come, and we would give them advice and the tools, and they would fix their own cars.
I made the mistake of mentioning it to my brother. This was when I had quit my jobs and I was hanging around Harvard Square drinking coffee. It was beautiful. I mentioned this to Ray, and he said, "That's a great idea. Let's do it!" I said, "No, that would be w-w-w-work."
Tom: I put him off for months, and somehow he just kept at me, "Let's do it, let's …"
Ray: I'll tell you exactly why. My wife and I were living in Vermont. Living the good life; I was teaching school; we were growing radishes in the back yard. Everything was wonderful.
Mom called, like every week, as you'd expect. If I didn't call her, she'd call me. She would say:
"Your brother quit his job at Foxboro," "Yeah, I know Mom."
"I'm really worried about him." "I know, Mom."
"He's becoming a bum." "I know, Mom.
"Have you seen him lately?" "I know, Mom."
"Do something." "What am I going to do?"
And then he happens to mention this idea of the do-it-yourself garage. I didn't want to do it. I was living like Don King up there in Vermont!
Tom: You hated it.
Ray: I did. The winters were interminable!
Tom: He said the gas station is open by appointment only!
Ray: I didn't hate it, but it wasn't what I thought it was going to be.
Tom: Well, they hated you then.
Ray: Maybe that was it. So, I came back to rescue my brother because our mother felt that he was sinking down into this abyss, this life of dissipation and worthlessness -
Tom: And she was right!
Ray: So, that's how it came to pass that we opened the shop.
Glenn M.: What was the name of the garage?
Ray: The original garage was Hacker's Haven but it had some problems.
Glenn M.: Did the “do-it-yourself” concept catch on?
Ray: The business plan Tom had devised was brilliant. Obviously that was his forte -forecasting the future. He had considerable business acumen and I thought that I would be able to jump on and ride his coattails to riches. We thought that our biggest challenge would be getting wheelbarrows big enough to load all the money for the trip to the bank. We envisioned ourselves standing there in pristine white lab coats, rocking back and forth, giving occasional demos and advice.
Tom: “Hey, put that a little to the right.”
Ray: “Tighten that to 22.” That couldn't have been farther from what happened. We had every moron, idiot, screw-up imaginable who came into our shop and expected that they would take the cars apart, have a pile of a thousand pieces and then say, "duh … I can't put it together. Can you do it?"
You know, I can put stuff together if I've taken it apart, but if someone else has taken it apart it's pretty tough. So eventually, we ended up spending hours and hours holding hands with these people, trying to get their cars back on the road. We felt a social responsibility, because we had advertised: “We can help you, our children.”
And they came in, and we couldn't help them! And there was not one night that I made it home before 11 pm. We opened up at 9:00 in the morning, and there was not one night that I made it home to see Johnny Carson's monologue. So we realized immediately that plan wasn't going to work. At least it wasn't going to work with us doing all the work.