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