Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–200
for things. Would a little bit of discretionary money—you know, that was just yours—help?” I
said, “It wouldn’t hurt, Walter. And I will always give you a very good accounting of how I
spend it.” One of the ways I spent the discretionary money some years later was when one of
our donors, John Robinson—whom I mentioned earlier—was dying at Pebble Beach. At the
time, he was interested in cosmology, and I used tiny bits of Walter’s money to send Kip Thorne,
Marc Kamionkowski, and Andrew Lange up to entertain him. And they loved him. He loved
them. And it was entertaining. There was a little bit of an upset with Walter, because at our next
meeting he said, “Look. You’re not spending that money fast enough.” I said, “Walter, you
gave money to a Depression kid. I’ve got to squeeze every damn dime until it squeals.” He said,
“You know, I’m not going to live forever. You spend it, because once you spend it, I’ll give you
some more.” [Laughter] So that’s Walter. He loves winners, and I appeared to be a winner for
Walter, and he loved it.
So let’s now go back. We’re in early 2000. The Cahill building is now moving forward.
We were going after a preliminary design. We had thought about a price tag of $30 million.
Development had played very little role in any of that. Things are moving forward. I think I’ve
told this story already, but we’ll repeat it, because it fits. We’re at an off-site trustees’ meeting in
Palm Springs. Ben Rosen, who had been a Caltech undergrad, has just replaced Gordon Moore
as chair of the trustees. He came up to me and said, “I’m really disappointed in you. We
announced this fund-raising drive this morning and you haven’t given me anything yet.” I said,
“Give me five minutes. The list is in my room.” He thought I was joking. But I got it for him,
and he looked at it and was impressed. It was a big wish list. We ended up getting a lot of it.
However, you know, the whole business of raising money is not a case of telling people what
you want and getting it. Some things were really worth having, like the CHICOS [California
High School Cosmic Ray Observatory] project idea that Bob McKeown had of putting these
cosmic-ray detectors in local high schools. That was, I thought, a winner. We didn’t get any
money for it. Roger Blandford left [2003] and went to Stanford—I think I could have kept him
at Caltech if I’d gotten any money for numerical astrophysics. I ended up getting a lot of money
later for numerical relativity for Thorne, mostly from the Fairchild Foundation. But Walter is a
true believer in Kip Thorne. He is, as I say, a very sound man with very good judgment. There
were a number of other things I just struck out on.
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Tombrello_T