Car Talk: Getting Started on the Radio
Glenn M.: I understand you’ve been in radio for 30 years. How did the radio show get started?
Ray: It’s been 31 years, actually.
Glenn M.: Who's counting?
Ray: I am. Thirty-one and six days.
Tom: We got a phone call from someone from radio station WBUR. We were doing the do-it-yourself thing. We were spending a lot of money on advertising, because who had ever heard of a do-it-yourself garage? No one!
Anyway, who ever called said, "We're doing a show next Saturday about cars. We're going to invite six mechanics to come and talk about cars. Can one of you guys come?" So, I jumped right on that, because that was an opportunity to not go to work! My stupid brother said, "I don't want to go." I said, "Hee, hee, hee." So he worked, and I went to the radio station.
Of the six mechanics they had invited, the only one who showed up was me. So I was a panel of one. We talked about cars for 10 or 15 minutes, and there was a guy from the station with me. What was his name?
Ray: I think Vic Wheatman. We'll tell you about Vic in a minute.
Tom: After 15 minutes, I said to Vic, "I've said everything I can say. Is there any chance we can take phone calls? Maybe I can answer some questions." He said, "I think we can do it. Here's the number." We gave out the number, and the phone rang off the hook. For the next hour and 15 minutes, I answered questions. He said, "That was great. Can you come back next week?" I said, "Can I bring my dipshit brother?"
Ray: I didn't know he had another brother! What a surprise.
Tom: And that's it.
Ray: So Tom invites me to go back to the station the following week. I said, "Ehhh, I don't want to do it. I don't know anything about radio."
We thought this Vic Wheatman fellow was going to be the host -
Tom: Ohhh, yeah.
Ray: You forgot this part.
Tom: I forgot that part.
Ray: Because neither one of us had any experience in ...
Tom: ... in anything.
Ray: ... in anything, let alone radio. So, we figured Vic Wheatman was going to do all the intros and out-tros and all that radio stuff, you know. It turned out that Vic Wheatman, in the intervening six days, had gotten fired. He was gracious enough to leave a note encouraging us to do a good job - and to try to watch our language ...
Tom: ... which I guess, I didn't do the week before!
Ray: We didn't know what to call the show. There was a show that was on just before us called Shop Talk. That show was about stereos and whatnot, a couple of very knowledgeable guys. So, we figured we'd call our show, what? Car Talk.
We started doing the show, and thank God, people called in. Without those phone calls, I think we would have lasted about another week, and that would have been it. So Tom has done one more show than me. So he started it off, and we've done 31 years of it.
Glenn M.: Did you get paid?
Ray: For most of the early years we did not get paid. We figured it would drum up business for the shop, which was at an all-time low.
We thought that we would be appealing to the Boston University community. You know most college stations don't have much of a range. Then we started getting calls from places like Newton, Wellesley and remote places we had never heard of. We realized that WBUR was a 50,000-watt station. It was as powerful as WBZ! We were getting calls from all over the place. It hit me one day: we should probably know what we're doing here. But you know what? That never came into the picture, as you saw from our little physics test!
