Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–235
THOMAS A. TOMBRELLO
SESSION 9
December 31, 2010
ASPATURIAN: So we are at our final interview with Professor Tom Tombrello, and you are going
to talk today about your graduate students.
TOMBRELLO: Well, some pieces of this we’ve already talked about. I got to Caltech. They had
a new accelerator. The professors were not as closely involved with the students as the students
might have liked and so I just fell into this. I was working with everybody’s grad students, and
we were publishing all kinds of things. I worked with Peter Parker, who’s a professor at Yale.
He was Ralph Kavanagh’s student. I worked with some of Charlie Barnes’s students, including
an African American student named Lionel Senhouse. Lionel and I hit it off.
ASPATURIAN: What year are we talking about?
TOMBRELLO: 1961.
ASPATURIAN: OK, early days at Caltech.
TOMBRELLO: Early days. The students were the big part of my life. I wasn’t advising them
officially, but I was working with them, and we were having a marvelous time doing
experiments together. I wasn’t Lionel’s thesis advisor, but basically some of the stuff we
published really was just the two of us, because Barnes hadn’t been involved in it. It was a
curious thing: Southern boy and African American from the bottom of society in New York.
His father had been a custodian at a subway stop; that is as far down as you can pretty well go.
One day he said, “My father was a pearl diver.” I said, “Yeah, I did some pearl diving myself.”
He said, “You know what I’m talking about?” I said, “Sure. It’s cleaning toilets. I was a
lifeguard one summer. At the end of the day, you were a pearl diver. You cleaned the
restrooms. This is the unglamorous part about being a lifeguard.” He says, “Yeah. So you
really know what pearl diving is.” We hit it off.
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