Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–12
done very well at that—as well as he had done at the mines. He was the only uncle whose mine
didn’t get unionized by the United Mine Workers, and nobody quite knows how and nobody ever
asked. I’d always jokingly say, “It’s hard to find a union organizer if he’s under a thousand tons
of rock.” [Laughter] I don’t know that anything like that happened. But for some reason Uncle
Joe never got unionized and always made a lot of money. My Uncle Sam got unionized
immediately, because he always met union activity head-on with “Nobody is going to unionize
my mines.” John L. Lewis got him very easily.
ASPATURIAN: John L. Lewis was quite a force of nature.
TOMBRELLO: Absolutely. But my Uncle Sam figured, “You know, the price of coal is dropping.
I could make this more efficient. I can use better technology. I can make money at $5 a ton.”
The answer is, All you can do is lose a lot of money at $5 a ton. And he did.
I had one uncle who had been in the war. Well, he’d been a quartermaster. Well, no. He
had been a kind of gofer for a colonel or maybe a general—a fixer. Uncle Frank. He had one
eye—another childhood-accident case, like my father. They each had lost an eye in a childhood
accident. Uncle Frank was showing off for this teenage girl he had married—my Aunt Isabel—
and he enlisted! He spent the war finding cases of Scotch and that kind of thing for his colonel
or general. But then he comes back, and the coal thing is over. He hasn’t started any new
businesses, and so he flails around for a couple of years, trying to raise peanuts, trying to do a
variety of things. None of them work. Then he looked around at the rights-of-way under power
lines—you know, the land under them, which has clearly been bought or leased—and he realized
that a lot of stuff had grown up there during the war and that it hadn’t been cleared. He hired a
bunch of unemployed teenagers who previously would have worked in the mines. And so with
primitive tools—hand tools—they went out and took contracts to clear the rights-of-way.
Brilliant, opportunistic business. As he made money, he began to invest in equipment.
Eventually, he took on other projects, like roads and dams and that sort of thing. Very successful
at business, and it all started from a bunch of kids out there with bush hooks, killing rattlesnakes
and chopping down trees and hauling them off. It was an interesting story.
I still see one of my first cousins, who is about the age of my oldest child. She was on
the punk-rock circuit—she’s an interesting lady, too—and we talk about Uncle Frank. He was
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Tombrello_T