Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–90
what I did with the staffing committee. I put all the strong voices in the division on the staffing
committee. We would sit out there and decide whether we were going to have the kumquat or
the pomegranate or the apple or the orange. It was not always totally a happy choice. But by the
time you made the choice, everybody went into the next faculty meeting marching in step, and
that had a big effect. I think that’s what Maarten was trying to do. But what happened to
Maarten was that while he was chair, the divorce with Carnegie occurred, and in response to that
he took over the directorship of Palomar and Robbie Vogt became PMA division chairman
[1978-83].
ASPATURIAN: The divorce with the Carnegie Institution—
TOMBRELLO: Yes. We shared the facilities. Basically, they had Mount Wilson. They had Cerro
Tololo [in Chile]. And we had Palomar, but it was all run as one thing.
ASPATURIAN: Was there a particular reason that it separated?
TOMBRELLO: Ah—
ASPATURIAN: If this isn’t going off on a tangent.
TOMBRELLO: We wanted to hire a woman as a professor. I think that just did not fly at
Carnegie. They didn’t like her. I will not mention who she is. This was a strong personality, a
leader. She’s now at Santa Cruz. That was part of it. It also could have been a build-up over
time of a lot of little things. The thing that brings things to a separation is not necessarily the real
cause. It may have been a lot of causes, and I don’t know what they were. All I know is, by the
fall of 1979 we were in the middle of a divorce settlement with Carnegie. Maarten then took
over Palomar, Robbie became PMA chairman, and that was an interesting period. You’ve read
my analysis of Robbie’s personality in the Archives. Robbie is a genius. He was one of the true
visionaries of modern-day Caltech—that is, 95 percent of the time. The other 5 percent of the
time, I have explained, I think, candidly in the other part of the Archive. Robbie was just doing
fine with the administration until the trustees’ chair, Rube [Ruben] Mettler, saw the other 5
percent. And when the chairman of the trustees saw what the rest of us had seen—this other
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