Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–5
TOMBRELLO: This proceeded until he got to Texas, where the East Texas oil field had come in.
This was probably in the early 1930s. There were bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush and
buttercups on the hills. It was springtime in Texas, and the Depression was somewhere else. My
father sent a telegram back to the company. You didn’t make long-distance calls in those days,
you sent a telegram. He says, “Hi. If you don’t mind, I plan not to close the Austin store. I plan
to run it.” The answer basically came back, “If you say so, Tom. Sounds like the right thing to
do.” The rest is history. He met my mother. As I mentioned, she had come to Austin to be a
shop girl, and she was in a boarding house with LBJ, whom she detested.
ASPATURIAN: He was a fellow boarder?
TOMBRELLO: I think he ate there but did not live there. I’m not sure. He used to court the old
ladies in the Austin area and would stop in at the boarding house and have coffee with old Mrs.
Marcuse, and she adored him. This was perfect.
My mother did not like her own family very much, because they had denied her an
education even though she had been an extremely good student. Very good grades, student
government, winning essay prizes, but you didn’t educate women then. And so the story—her
story—goes, she was walking down the street with a girlfriend, and they saw my father. And the
girlfriend says: “That’s a very handsome man.” And my mother says: “Yes, I’m going to marry
him.” She got a job as his cashier, and she did indeed marry him. Family story was she got to
take the proceeds from the day to the bank in a bag. You collected the cash at the end of the day
and took it to the bank and deposited it. I said, “Dad, didn’t it ever bother you that you sent this
tiny little woman off to the bank with the money?” He said, “Tommy, your mother had a
twenty-five-caliber automatic pistol in her purse and she really knew how to use it and
everybody knew it.” So my mother was something else.
My mother raced whippets before she knew my father. That was one of her hobbies. To
keep the whippets sharp, they would let them chase a live rabbit—a Texas jackrabbit, which is a
pretty good race even for a whippet. There were pictures that I saw of those days. They were an
interesting crowd—the flappers, with the hip flask or the tiny silver flask under a very short skirt.
My mother was definitely a flapper, but with a 25-caliber automatic in her purse, and she knew
interesting people. My mother rode, and some of their friends were in the polo crowd. They
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