Talking About Cars, From New England to The World

Town hall in Grafton, Vermont in March

In the nineteenth century, Yankee clipper ships were instrumental in the growth of the United States as an industrial power. The sailors from ports from Connecticut to Maine raced around the world’s oceans bringing American raw materials and industrial products to Europe and Asia, making friends, opening markets, spreading the gospel of democracy and capitalism and, occasionally, empire building. No, this is not a post about the state of America’s relationship with the world, our economy, or our current political situation. It’s about radio. One radio show in particular.

I giggle a bit when I imagine the reaction some of the Yankee sailors would have encountered when they arrived on the far side of the world and the locals first heard their accents. [N.b. For folks here in America, a “Yankee” is someone from New England, meaning the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine with the notable exception of baseball players. Yes, it’s ironic that the baseball Yankees are from New York and are reviled in New England, but that’s another story altogether.] Consider, if you will, the iconic ‘paaahk yaw caaaah in Haaavaahd Yaaad’ (read: park your car in Harvard Yard) accented Bostonian arriving in nineteenth century Japan (for reference, think of the accents in the film Good Will Hunting). Granted, this year the same person would be able to have a very interesting conversation with any Japanese baseball fan about the pros and cons of Bobby Valentine as a baseball manager, but I digress. Along with the accent, these intrepid Yankees brought with them a freshness, unencumbered by hierarchical class society and its stultifying self-consciousness. Easy in their openness, quick to laugh out loud at anything remotely funny, and genuinely curious, the world’s first wide exposure to Americans must have been entertaining at a minimum. Ok, ok, I do like where I live and I’m biased, but it does crack me up to think about some jamoke from Southie roaming around the globe in a sailing ship. But again, this is about a radio show.

For the past twenty-five years, a couple of brothers from Cambridge (“aaah feh city”) have been hosting a radio show on National Public Radio once a week (and for 35 years over all). It’s called Car Talk (“Caaah Taaahhk”). The show's hosts, Tom and Ray Magliozzi (a/k/a Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers), are graduates of MIT, are owners of a repair shop Cambridge, Massachusetts, and are bearers of accents that make Kennedys sound like Roosevelts. The premise of the show is that the guys field phone calls from listeners about their car troubles. Sounds simple enough. The subjects frequently proceed into the real issues at hand – relationships, travel tips, dispute resolution, buyers advice and remorse, dealing with dim-witted brothers, lazy mechanics, and so forth. I’m not particularly a car guy and, though I have learned a fair bit from listening to Tom and Ray over the years, any information I get about cars has been secondary to why I’ve been listening. The guys are simply funny in a totally unpretentious, incredibly inclusive and endlessly entertaining way. Mostly, the guys crack themselves up and they manage to crack me up as well. This past week, much to the chagrin of their many fans, Tom and Ray announced that they will be retiring from live radio. As one of them noted: if my brother retired, how would we know? I like to think of Click and Clack as refurbished, updated ambassadors of our particular sensibility and character here in New England, carried on the airwaves instead of by clipper ships. And yes, I do realize that’s a stretch but work with me here.

In my years as a ski race coach, I hit the road with the team every Friday night for our weekend of collegiate races and would time our departure so we could all listen to Tom and Ray on the radio. In the few years when I was out of the ski business and in the dark world of the weekend warrior, Tom and Ray again accompanied on my every-weekend drives to the mountains. Now that I’ve been at it full-time in the ski business for well over a decade, Tom and Ray accompany me in a different way. I download their podcasts to my iPod and listen to them while I ride the spin bike at the gym I use in New Zealand in the summer/winter/whatever. I miss my bicycle while I’m away and I hate spin classes, so I close myself in the spin room of the gym when there’s nobody else in there and I listen to the boys. By mid-season in Wanaka, there’s enough sunlight still outside when I get to the gym that I’ll set up shop in the spin room with the lights off. The problem is that I get lost in listening to Car Talk and occasionally can be found alone in a dark spin room, sweating profusely, and laughing out loud all by myself. It’s given quite a fright to a few people over the years, but it makes me happy. What can I say?! There I am, as far from the ports of New England as one can get, finding some entertainment in the sounds of the people from home, the personalities from home, in a way that has unified my various experiences in the ski business. They’ve traveled with me all these years, and I’m grateful for them.

Car Talk will continue on the radio in a ‘best of’ format for years to come and I have a library of back episodes of the show that I have yet to hear. I’ll be able to listen to them for some time. Still, it’s a little bittersweet, the end of an era. So, going forward, it’ll take just a little longer to explain to people why every cab and limo driver in the world is referred to as Pikup Andropov, customer service people as Heywood Jabuzoff, and law firm partners as H. Louie Dewey. They’ll be missed, but I’ll still be laughing, by myself, in the dark, on the bike. Thanks guys!

For more on Car Talk and Tom and Ray's decision to retire, go to:
http://www.cartalk.com/content/time-get-even-lazier

Newport, New Hampshire in June

Tanned Feet

A typical securities industry disclaimer says something to the effect that ‘past performance is not an indication of future performance’, and it’s just like snow storms in autumn. Pre-season snow may excite us, but it is not an indication of a snowy winter to come. Still, all of us, myself included, reserve the right to become giddy when it does snow in autumn. At a minimum, it reminds us how much we love skiing and riding and it brings some of the details to the front of our minds as we make plans for the approaching winter. Even the simple motions of getting ready for winter – changing to snow tires, pulling our winter clothing out of basements and back closets, and trying to locate boot heater batteries – are elevated and become worthy of excitement and giddy anticipation.

This is equally true for Southern Hemisphere winters, though with some funny wrinkles for me. Instead of slowly evolving my wardrobe into warmer clothing, with flip-flops and shorts slowly finding their way to the back of closets and the bottoms of drawers as I do here in October, I sit and contemplate all of those funny winter details while enjoying the benefits of warm weather and sunshine. There’s nothing quite like sitting outside on my favorite beach chair reading in the warm sunshine while contemplating which down coat and how many pairs and which weight of long underwear bottoms to have with me in Wanaka, New Zealand for the winter. I consider packing shoes and socks necessary for life in a small town where I walk everywhere and don’t have use of a car, where I look for housing close enough to town to pack groceries into a backpack on my way home from work and can make it to my weekly pub quiz on time without rushing.

A newly-hatched dragonfly and friend.

The forests here in Vermont have now fully evolved into that rich, yellowy-green of pre-summer foliage and the hardwoods are covered in newly full-sized leaves. Memorial Day weekend was gorgeous – sunny, warm, unhurried for me, and a wonderful reminder of summer. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, there is snow on the peaks of the Southern Alps and several New Zealand ski fields have announced early openings. It’s downright exciting, and the bigger the contrast between the season here and the season there, the happier I’ll be. Ultimately, one fun sign of the perfect transition from Northern to Southern Hemisphere for me is to be sitting in a ski school locker room in the Southern Alps and taking a fond look at flip-flop tanned feet before shoving them into my Nordicas for the day. If I get to walk through LAX in shorts and sandals while carrying my ski bag over my shoulder, all the better! It’s these contrasts that make my choice of on-and-off season so odd for people trying to grasp what I really do for a living, and I definitely revel a bit watching them grapple with it.

Pre-season snow may not be an accurate indicator of a snowy winter, but it definitely helps me get excited and focused. I leave for New Zealand next week, and I’m looking forward to the confused looks of the folks in LA. More importantly, I’m very much looking forward to putting my suntanned feet into ski boots and going skiing!

Lake Winnipesaukee, surrounded by New Hampshire's White Mountains