Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–195
discretionary $19,000. I cried foul to Koonin. He laughed at me and said, “You’re good with
money. Let’s see what you can do.” Because of the rather primitive nature of Caltech’s
accounting system, you could sort of generate virtual money. It also helped to renormalize the
expectations of the division. Having no money does a good job of that, because you can say,
“There just isn’t any money.”
The first thing was to try to get a few things moving. One was to find the money for the
endowed postdoc positions. One of our trustees, Walter Burke, had been the head of the
Sherman Fairchild Foundation. His daughter was now running it, but he was still a major force.
I’d just been made chair, and Walter wanted to have dinner with me. We went to the
Athenaeum, chatted about any number of things, and took a liking to one another. Walter
basically said, “What are your priorities?” And I told him about the fellowships. He said, “You
got a choice. You can have ten million dollars for fellowships, or we could probably find ten
million for the [astrophysics] building.” I said, “The priorities are very clear. We want the
fellowships.”
The procedure was, it had to be looked at by the Fairchild board. They sent out a
member of the board whose name escapes me at the moment, but I think he’d been president of a
college until very recently—a physicist. We made a presentation to him with Roger Blandford.
We had discussed the nature of the presentation, but Roger was a genius at it. He had some
viewgraphs—people were still using viewgraphs then. He put up a viewgraph that sort of said,
Where are they now?—people who in the past had had Caltech named fellowships in, for
example, theoretical astrophysics. It was a Who’s Who. It was people running major facilities.
It was people running laboratories, centers. It was wonderful. He had a page full of them. The
person from the foundation board said, “But what about the unnamed postdocs you had? Let’s
do a control on that.” Roger, with a smile, takes the first viewgraph off and puts another one up.
And there they are. They’re doing fine, they’re certainly not chopped liver, but they’re not like
the first list. The guy says, “You’ve made your point.” Really, the whole thing was over then.
We were going to get $10 million. So I started off on a roll; I’d gotten that money.
ASPATURIAN: This was 2000?
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