Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–237
the tandem laboratory [tandem Van de Graaff accelerator], and that’s in the sub-basement of
Sloan. Throop Hall still existed in those days, and if you went up to Sloan’s third floor, there
was a vending machine up on one of the landings, where it connected Throop to Kellogg. In the
middle of the night, Lionel would say, “Hey, I think I’d like to go up and get a Stokely.” Now
that was a Stokely Carmichael—our definition of an ice cream bar that was chocolate inside with
chocolate covering. Or I’d say, “I think I’d like a Martin Luther King.” You know, that was
vanilla ice cream with a chocolate covering.”
ASPATURIAN: Not fair.
TOMBRELLO: We were not politically correct in any sense, and any professor who was down
there that got subjected to Stokelys and Martins did not know what to make of it.
ASPATURIAN: So. What happened to the student? Where did he go?
TOMBRELLO: He ended up going to Bell Labs and has retired, I think. He did pretty well there.
A lot of my students went to Bell Labs in those days.
ASPATURIAN: Quite a story.
TOMBRELLO: So anyway, I go to Yale, miss the place, come back. We’ve talked about that.
Picked up Andy Bacher, Bob Bacher’s son, who had been Willy’s student. He and I got on very
well—he’s still one of my very best friends. He’s an emeritus professor now at Indiana
University. I see him a couple of times a year, because he still owns his parents’ Santa Barbara
house. I picked up a guy named Bob [Robert J.] Spiger, who approached Willy, and got given to
me. Bob was a very unusual student. Very large physique. Builder of boats. Extraordinarily
good student.
I had a number of students all doing nuclear spectroscopy, some of it with application to
nuclear astrophysics. So it fit into Willy’s game plan. From somewhere in the early 1960s until
probably about the early 1990s, I had something like thirty-five PhDs who worked with me.
There were a lot of other students who were not counted as my graduate students, since they
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