Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–106
TOMBRELLO: They really put almost no money in it. They had to give them space, but they
charged them for it; they didn’t like it. The women here who were in the previous generation
didn’t understand the point of it, because they didn’t work and they didn’t understand the whole
model. My first wife, Ann, was a relatively young wife of a senior professor, and so she was
caught right in the middle. She had gone back to school. Now her kids were old enough that she
didn’t need that kind of child care, but she understood what this new group of women were
about, and why they didn’t want afternoon meetings of the Caltech Women’s Club—because
they were working. It was an interesting transition. Stephanie was one of the activists. I didn’t
know her until later. But Ann was allied with that side in a way, trying to translate what they
were saying to the women that she had been associating with and who just didn’t understand why
these women were being so difficult about something that they hadn’t needed at all. The answer
is, Well, they need it now.
ASPATURIAN: Was there anything particular about your two years at Schlumberger that you
brought back to Caltech that affected or reinforced your outlook or shaped your thinking or
behavior?
TOMBRELLO: Well, it convinced me that I really could run something. Of course, I had been
running Kellogg for a while—roughly nine, ten years—so I knew I could run something. But
this was more freestanding. This was something where I was the one who sent the Christmas
presents to the local police department and the fire department and, you know, dealt with the
local taxes and the rest of it. That’s a confidence builder. You can take a complex situation,
break it down into pieces, and make it work. You also have more scope than I had at Caltech—
though I did run Kellogg and that was not a small operation. There may have been, at the high
point, ninety people associated with Kellogg—students, faculty, and technicians and engineers.
Budget of several million dollars. Now, it was a much smaller budget than at Schlumberger, but
a lot of them were students, and therefore they weren’t paid very well.
Yes, I think it was confidence building—the feeling that you’ll make mistakes and you
have to figure out ways to correct the mistakes. Of course, you always try to avoid making
mistakes, but you can never avoid making them. You often have to make decisions based on
limited data. You also learn to evaluate personality types that can either help you or that will
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