Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–3
TOMBRELLO: Bisacquino. I’m not sure of the pronunciation. It was a little town, associated with
mines. He and his brother came in through New Orleans, where they were lynching Sicilians—
probably with good reason—and they followed the mines and ended up in northern Alabama,
because the iron and coal mines there were still a big thing.
ASPATURIAN: A thirteen-year-old boy and his nine-year-old brother?
TOMBRELLO: Yes. Some small fraction of kids who were thrown out in the world that way
survived. I learned later that Lee Iacocca’s father was twelve when he came to America. It was
not just Sicilians. It was all ethnic groups who came from places where poverty and starvation
made them desperate. If they had a boy who was big for his age, or aggressive for his age—
probably the case with my grandfather—they threw them out in the world. Their job was to save
the family, which they did, surprisingly enough. But, of course, if they hadn’t saved the family, I
wouldn’t be here being interviewed. So it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
ASPATURIAN: Anthropic principle of the Tombrello family.
TOMBRELLO: Absolutely. Weak anthropic principle. So by means no one quite knows, my
grandfather fought in the Spanish-American War. He was a muleskinner, a muleskinner being a
person who handles the mules. Things were pulled, hauled, whatever, with mules, in those days,
on the battlefields, in the coal mines. He started handling the mules because presumably that is
what he had done as an even younger child in Sicily. By means that no one ever talks about, and
that probably nobody even knows about anymore, he ended up owning a small mining town. So
“we” owned a company store. We paid people in company money. And we were not exactly an
equal-opportunity employer, I gather. But we didn’t learn that in Sicily, I suspect; we probably
learned it from the people we replaced in northern Alabama, because that was the way of the
world then. We could go more into this later, but in some ways, it’s a bit of a distraction. But it
shows that the people I come from were survivors and very tough. As for my mother’s side of
the family, you might say the only person my grandfather felt was as tough as he was, was my
little German-American mother.
My mother met my father in Austin. He had come there by another strange route. He
had grown up in Alabama, escaped the family business, and become a stock boy in a variety
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