Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–212
have? How much low-level turbulence in the atmosphere? You have lots of very complicated
stuff to consider. So we ended up with three sites—two in Chile and one in Hawaii. Now I’m
going to have to get into the political aspects of it. Hawaii is a political zoo. It’s Mississippi
with mangoes, I always say. You’ve got the native people, whatever they are; there is so much
inbreeding it’s almost like the Shinnecock Indians with their casino on Long Island.
ASPATURIAN: In the Hamptons. I was just reading about that in The New Yorker.
TOMBRELLO: Native Hawaiians make up about 5 percent of Hawaii’s population—but that 5
percent represents a margin for a potential election victory, so it’s hard to get a politician in
Hawaii to completely disregard the Hawaiian groups. So far the Hawaiian groups are divided in
many different ways. They range from people who are totally rational and are saying absolutely
the correct thing, which is that we need more jobs and we need local industry, to the group that
wants to bring back the king or queen. It’s hard putting these groups together. It’s hard dealing
with them. One of the ways they try to deal with big projects, if I can be candid—I mean, I have
a home there; I pay taxes there; I think I know a little bit about the Islands—is how much money,
how big a bribe can they extract to do stuff.
For a while, we really were making very little headway with Hawaii. But at one of the
last planning meetings I attended, which was roughly around Christmas 2007, I met a new
member of the TMT board, whose name is Henry Yang, and he’s chancellor at UC Santa
Barbara. He is a quiet man. He does not stand out in a crowd. He speaks softly. But I’ll tell
you, Henry Yang, like Bob Sharp, is a genius at strategy. I’m up there and I know I’m going to
have to leave for the meeting at the end and go to the hospital, where my daughter Kerstin has
just had her pancreas out; she had pancreatic cancer; this had been a terrible fifteen-hour
operation. With pancreatic cancer, you don’t dare be optimistic, but one tried to be. At that
meeting, Henry, being an absolute genius, came up with the key point, which I should have
gotten myself. There is a saying in Hawaii: Everything runs downhill to Honolulu. And yet
we’d been trying to deal with Honolulu when we were going to put a telescope on the Big Island.
Henry came up with the strategy of how do you divide them? How do you go after the
local people, the local political types on the Big Island? The islands are counties. Kauai, where
my home is, is a county. The Big Island is a county—albeit a pretty big and interesting one. I
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