Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–256
been in a fraternity. So I drove up to the Bay Area with my wife. We’re staying with my late
daughter and her husband and their twins. I do something like eighteen interviews in a day. Of
course, I show I have a sense of humor, which I didn’t really have. They would say, “Is there
anything about Bohemia you don’t like?” And I said, “Yeah, there’s one thing. It’s this
affirmative-action policy. As soon as I get in, I want to stop all this letting academics in. I don’t
want to go to the Grove to be around a bunch of academics.” [Laughter] They thought, what a
great sense of humor. And I thought, Ah, I mean it. Although the academics there are
interesting—Stan [Stanley] Prusiner’s there; of course, David Baltimore. At the point I got in,
the only Caltech faculty person there was Baltimore, followed then by Elachi. Then, I think,
followed by me—Andy Lange was trying to get in. He killed himself before he did his
interviews, but he had filled out the application for it. They liked him, and I think he would have
liked it there. It would have been good for him. We academics don’t get to vote, because we are
affirmative-action candidates and we pay a little less for some things.
Once you’re in, you’re just a member, and now you start, in the phrase, “sleeping
around.” Sleeping around means people invite you to various camps or you figure out a way to
get invited to various camps. You spend a weekend at the camp and there must be a lot of
discussion behind the scenes of where people belong. I ended up in a camp called Sons of Toil,
which probably has the most academics of any camp at the Grove. They’re interesting people.
There are some entertainers in it, too. The politics run from liberal to so far right it’s around the
curve of the universe. The most conservative human being I know is Walter Williams, an
African American from Washington, who occasionally sits in for some of the real conservatives
on, you know, TV talk shows. He is clearly in a whole class by himself: There is nothing that
can’t be cured by less government. Mike Garrett, who is a friend of mine and who used to be
athletic director at USC [See also Session 3], is there. He’s quiet about politics, but I know
perfectly well he is not with his fellow African American, Walter Williams. A previous camp
captain, when he met my wife, they realized they had both done something big. He had been a
brain surgeon who realized that a lot of head injuries occurred because people didn’t have seat
belts in cars, and he found himself a congresswoman and got the seat belt law passed.
ASPATURIAN: And Stephanie, of course—
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