Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–257
TOMBRELLO: —had done the same thing for car seats. It’s interesting. These people have all
done something. When they asked me to be a member of Sons of Toil, I said, “You know, you
people are making a dreadful mistake. All of you are interesting people who have done
important things. All I do is teach little kids and enjoy it, or teenagers and enjoy it.” I think they
let their standards down a bit. But I enjoy it. I enjoy being there. It’s a different environment. I
remember taking Mike Garrett to another camp called Isle of Aves—the Island of the Birds. I
introduced him to the bartender; he didn’t quite get the name. The guy’s name is Jeff Warren.
And Jeff says, “Oh, you’re Mike Garrett. Wow!” He says, “You know, I have a story. I’m a
Berkeley grad. Some years ago, when you were playing, there was going to be a game between
USC and Cal, up in Berkeley. I found these two ladies wandering around the airport in Oakland
and asked if I could help them. And they said they needed to get to the game because one of
them was your mother and one of them was your sister, and,” he says, “I made sure they got to
the game. And then you proceeded to trounce us.” Mike expressed his gratitude, and as we left
the camp, he said, “Who was that guy?” I said, “His name is Jeff Warren. His grandfather was
Earl Warren.” He said, “Oh, my God. One of my heroes.” Of course, one of the stars of that
camp is a guy named Jesse Choper, and Jesse and I are really good friends now. He used to be
dean of Boalt Hall, the law school at Berkeley, and he of course had clerked with Earl Warren.
Every year, there’s a little quiet invitation to lunch at Aves, where Jesse talks about what’s
happened in the Supreme Court for that year. At another camp, Hillside, also quietly advertised,
our very own trustee, Bobby Inman, gets up and summarizes the state of the world—just
standing there without any notes. It takes about an hour and a half and is absolutely spectacular.
The place is so full for his talk that I’m thinking the engineering had better be good, because
otherwise the damn deck will probably collapse because there are so many people on it. There’s
standing room only to hear Bobby.
That’s the kind of stuff that goes on there. You hear things that you wonder about. I’m a
great fan of the writing of Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker reporter. He came and gave a good
talk, but he has feet of clay. He doesn’t listen. At the Grove, you can’t have cell phones. You
can’t have recording devices. You can’t have cameras unless you’re one of the Grove
photographers. Some of them have Pulitzer Prizes, so they sort of come trained to do really good
photography. They let those people run loose and take pictures. But the directives are clear—
especially about cell phones When you go through the gate, you see a bunch of cell phones up on
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