Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–112
TOMBRELLO: A very strong personality. Though I loved the man, he did not listen. He’d
lecture. Everyone remembers going in and being told things by Robert Bacher, and you’d better
listen and you’d better do them. But on the whole, he had extraordinary judgment, was an
extraordinarily interesting man. We all knew he had done something big during the war.
Running the gadget division at Los Alamos was important. He was clearly second-in-command
to Oppenheimer. I never knew Oppenheimer. I met him, but I never knew him. We’ll talk
about Oppenheimer next, after we get through with two of my heroes, Bacher and Sharp.
Sharp took over a very good but narrowly directed program—geology, geophysics,
paleontology, and bones basically, and of course seismology. [Beno] Gutenberg [professor of
geophysics, d.1960] and [Charles] Richter [professor of seismology, d.1985], you know—they
were highly successful. Sharp saw to it that the bones got given away or sold to the L.A. County
Museum of Natural History. Seismology, of course, would continue, because Richter and
Gutenberg were still here. But Sharp was the one who started basically the mass-spectrometry
research as it is applied to meteorites and planetary samples of various kinds, and the work on
lead in the environment by Clair Patterson. He got the geology division into planetary stuff,
because JPL was now beginning to do things that Sharp could see were going to be important.
He and Bacher had extremely different styles. Bacher knew where he was going and you’d
better go along with it. I don’t mean that in a negative sense. He was determined. Sharp was
also determined. Sharp knew exactly where he was going, but there was a good-ol’-boy style to
it. I grew up in the Deep South, so I know about good-ol’-boy styles, and you should be careful
when you see it in people, particularly politicians. I never saw it applied to a division chairman
before. You should watch out for people who pretend to be a good ol’ boy; they’re trying to
convince you of something, and you’re going to be led astray because you think this person is
more limited than they really are.
ASPATURIAN: Can you give me an example?
TOMBRELLO: There was a person down in Livingston, Louisiana, and I cannot remember his
name. He was in the House of Representatives from Livingston. I was down there for, I guess,
the dedication of the LIGO site. He got up and gave a talk. He started off in a good-ol’-boy
style, which was basically telling Cajun stories. And right in the middle, basically to show off a
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