Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–9
otherwise, we mostly went to visit my father’s family in Birmingham, which was a couple
hundred miles away. But in those days you didn’t go very fast, the roads were pretty terrible,
and you always had flats to deal with, because the tires were old and not very well made in any
case.
That’s what I remember about World War II: ration stamps and car trouble. In school
there were the usual tin-can drives, the paper drives, the grease drives. The grease drives were so
successful that one of my father’s assistant managers who’d been in the army said part of our
problem was how to get rid of the grease, because we had too much to use. I don’t know if that
was a universal problem or not, but it certainly was true for him. They had so much grease
donated they could not cope with it. But things like that—drives of various sorts—really were
part of getting people to realize they were in the war. And was the U.S. hit by the war like any
other country? Not really. People, of course, all had somebody in the service. They all
understood the rationing that they had to deal with.
People were working long hours. My mother didn’t go to back to work, but many
women did, particularly if their husbands were in the military. There really wasn’t very much
money coming in. I mean, a buck private was typically getting a buck a day. So it was a tight
time. But it certainly changed the situation of the Depression. People had work. You couldn’t
spend the money, so it was clear that after the war there might well be a bit of a boom from
people having saved money and put it away. That prediction turned out to be true when the war
ended, but could have turned out to be very difficult in other ways, because we did have
inflation. We did have the problems of dislocation. Women did not keep working—we saw the
Leave It to Beaver kind of family, where the wife was a housewife who stayed home. There
were new appliances. You were probably moving into a new house in a new subdivision. You
could see that happening in a lot of places. But right after the war it was hard to rent anything. It
was hard to get a telephone. I can’t say it was a hardship for my family—certainly it wasn’t a
hardship for a little kid. But I’m sure the people in 1945, ’46, had their own problems with it.
ASPATURIAN: By this time you would have been just about in secondary school? At what point
did you realize that math and science were—? I assume there was a time—
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