After several years of doing "Car Talk" pro bono, as they say, we finally steeled up our nerve and asked WBUR for twenty bucks a week. To our shock and amazement, they agreed to it on the spot. At that moment, we realized that we had obviously asked for too little. We kicked ourselves all the way home. This did, however, mean that we could buy donuts and coffee each week. In 1980, we asked for a five dollar a week raise and they told us to take a long walk off a short plank. We didn't argue, since a case easily could have been made that twenty bucks a week was twenty bucks too much already.
Despite our complete lack of preparation and our consumate unprofessionalism that set new lows in radio, the show somehow managed to not only survive, but to thrive. The now notorious Car Talk puzzler effectively doubled our listener base, as three more relatives (okay, okay, uncle Nunzio and cousin Vinny were both in the slammer, so they were sort of a "captive" audience) began listening to the show.
How we ended up going national is somewhat a matter of contention. We're not even sure how it happened. Robert Seigel, one of NPR's hosts of "All Things Considered" claims credit. He says that one day when he was on vacation here in Massachusetts, he was surfing the dial and heard the show — and somehow decided that we were national material. (It was later determined that Seigel suffered from a rare, transient brain parasite that normally infects bull moose during rutting season, which only partly explains his bizzare decision.)
Jay Kernis, the original Producer of NPR's "Morning Edition" tells a similar story about how he was driving through Massachusetts and knew we were destined to be big. NPR Field Producer Gary Covino says the same damn thing. So who knows.
Of course, WBUR's General Manager, Jane Christo says that, by that point, she had been sending in tapes to NPR for several years in a row. Of course, we knew all along that she was chucking them in the dumpster outside the station. She used to tell us, "Oh yes, boys, of course I sent the tape in! It was rejected again, sorry."
Along the way, we picked up our esteemed producer, Mr. Dougie Berman.
Since 1987, Berman has made every conceivable attempt to refine, focus, and otherwise elevate the standards for the show. We would like to take this opportunity to publicly apologize to Doug for our complete inability to follow any of his directions, despite his best intentions. He's long since given up on us, which is a good thing, because we were getting tired of reading his memos.
Berman is a real radio professional, so you can understand why we never clicked. He's great company, though, and every now and then we do take a piece of his advice. For example, just last month we made sure that we're in the building at least five minutes before going on the air.
The person who first put us on the air nationally was NPR's Susan Stamberg, who invited us to host a weekly "Car Talk" segment on her new show, "Sunday Weekend Edition."
Susan is a great person — funny, charming and quite smart. That's why we're so terribly troubled, having single-handedly wrecked her program.
Nine months after starting with Susan, in the fall of 1987, NPR agreed to launch "Car Talk" nationally. So there we were, following in the footsteps of award programs like "All Things Considered," "Weekend Edition," and "Morning Edition." We, like you, remain entirely mystified and have no idea what combination of prescription medicines brought about a decision like this out of NPR's management. We can only assume that they were looking for some cultural diversity, trying somehow to balance their high quality programming with crud like ours. Stations turned to us in droves - much in the same way that lemmings flock to the sea.
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