Many of our grandparents may remember gathering around a radio set as small children, listening to classics like Jack Benny, Gunsmoke, and Dragnet. By the mid 1950s, those shows were just a distant echo, though, because television had become king.

Still, most of us probably have some connection to the radio. It may have been listening to nineties pop on a road trip, Bob Uecker calling a Brewers game, or a piece of breaking news you caught on the drive to work.

As a 10-year old boy, I remember running errands with my father on Saturday mornings – riding shotgun, radio tuned to “Car Talk.”

Tom Magliozzi, one half of “Car Talk’s” hosting brother duo known as “Click and Clack”, died on Nov. 3, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease, according to NPR. He was 77.

For those unfamiliar, “Car Talk” is a radio program syndicated by NPR that featured brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi giving automotive advice to listeners.

The typically long-winded path from a caller’s question to the actual car advice would feature hilarious banter between the brothers and the caller, life lessons, and trademark loud, obnoxious laughing often accompanied by snorting. The humor was often self-deprecating.

“Do two people who don’t know what they are talking about, know more or less than one person who doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Magliozzi quipped during one broadcast.

“Car Talk” ran from 1977 until Oct. of 2012. The episodes that still air weekly on weekends are rebroadcasts of past shows. “Car Talk” reached an audience of more than four million listeners a week during its peak, according to NPR.

Presumably like many of those listeners, I know little about automotive mechanics. I can change my oil and replace a radiator hose, but automotive knowledge was no pre-requisite to listening to the show – a sense of humor was. I remember my father (with even less automotive prowess than I) laughing and near the point of tears on drives back from the corn stand, the bank, or Grandma’s house.

The calls would be as brilliant as the humor. My dog threw up in the defrost vents on top of the dashboard and I can’t get the smell out, what should I do? Sell the car to someone with a stuffy nose. My husband likes to crush our aluminum cans by driving over them and he puts them under my tires when I leave for work, how can I get him to stop? Negative reinforcement. Record a cat screaming and blast the recording in the car the next time he backs it up. These were typical questions and answers the brothers would spend their time answering.

And we would spend our time listening, much the same way the generation before spent their evenings, around a large box that transmitted sound, connecting with one another and the characters that burst to life across the wire.