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