Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–196
TOMBRELLO: That was probably in early 1999, because there is a second verse to this story. I
was also wooing a man named [Charles] Cahill. Chris Yates in Development, the lawyer, had
found him. Cahill wanted, potentially, to give his entire fortune to Caltech if he saw a vision. I
gave him a vision of a building that would change the sociology of astronomy and astrophysics
on campus by putting together groups that were currently spread over several buildings. It was
going to make one tribe out of two tribes or three tribes. He liked that. And he liked me. So I
figured I was going to get some money for that building. That was in the works. The reason
1999 is a date that’s important is because, you remember, we were in the middle of the dot-com
bubble.
ASPATURIAN: Yes, I do remember.
TOMBRELLO: So I was going to get $10 million from Fairchild in two $5-million pieces over the
next two years. But by the time the first money was due, the bubble had burst, and everybody
had been heavy in dot-com stocks, and certainly the Fairchild Foundation. I got a phone call,
and perhaps a letter, from Walter saying, “Look, we’ve got a problem. We’re going to give you
the money, but you’re going to have to be patient. It’s not going to come exactly when you think
it should.” I thought there was something I could do. I said, “Walter, that’s not a problem. But
to show we have such faith, we’re going to start this program when we were going to anyway.” I
got Caltech—Koonin particularly—to back the idea, and I wrote out a business plan of how we
could fund the first choice of postdocs—not as many as we would have had otherwise, but a
few—to show the foundation that we believed they were really giving us the money and to show
them that we were going to get some really interesting people here. That was a very good
investment. It was a good investment in Walter Burke, who likes backing winners. There’s
going to be a little sequel to this story, and I’m going to tell it out of sequence in just a minute.
And the money started coming in. The stock market started rebuilding it, and we did get the $10
million. We repaid our debt to Caltech with a little bit of advance funding, which was no more
than half a million dollars. It may even have been less. The whole thing was going forward.
Let me give you the second Walter Burke verse, where we have to sort of speed forward
roughly ten years. This is probably the summer of ’09. I’m now not in office, and Andrew
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