Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–11
of the ability of the some of the women teaching us. Not that there weren’t some men who were
good at it. And not that there weren’t some women who probably were good at it but were a
little bit strange. I had some very strange teachers at that time. But for a long time there were
very, very good teachers.
But jumping back to age nine or ten and fifth grade in Birmingham, it wasn’t a very good
school. It was well behind what we had been doing in Memphis. So I just read everything in
sight. My father had always read the Reader’s Digest and had saved them. So I read the
Reader’s Digest from somewhere in the thirties up until 1945. And though you can talk about
the quality of the Reader’s Digest, it was a comprehensive exposure to the history of the world
over a roughly ten-year period. If I have an odd assortment of knowledge, part of it comes from
the fact that I just unselectively read my way through all of those Reader’s Digests and
everything else I could find in the library. It was hard to find public libraries in Birmingham.
The school library wasn’t much, and so I just read everything in the house.
We were very fortunate in finding our Birmingham house. We lived near Birmingham-
Southern College up in the hills on what must have been the west side of town, and the house
was beautiful. It can only be described as a craftsman house. It was redwood-shingled on the
outside. It was paneled on the inside. It was a beautiful house. It was bought for the princely
sum of $13,500. It was on an acre of land, on this hill. It must be that the man who built it had
seen craftsman houses, and he built three of them, basically, on this hillside. It was an
extraordinary house. It had a semi-finished attic, which was roughly the footprint of the house,
and that was mine. That was for Erector Sets and all kinds of projects. The house also had a
basement. That’s when I realized I was pretty good at fixing things, because my father’s idea of
something easy to do while he was having his year off was to have a franchise for gumball
machines. You put a penny in and a colored piece of gum comes out. Actually, it’s quite
remunerative. He had many machines. But some of them would break, and I would sort of
fiddle with them and some of them I got fixed, and I got paid a little bit for doing it. My uncles
would give me pieces of old discarded equipment from the mines, and I would take those apart
and try to figure out how to fix them.
I adored my uncles. They were very interesting people. They had done very well during
the war. My smartest uncle—Uncle Joe—had gotten out of the mining business and started
investing in something called mutual funds, which were new to the time, and he seemed to have
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