Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–14
population. I wasn’t a totally stupid kid. I might have been an unreconstructed Southerner,
because all my friends were and you didn’t dare appear to be a damn Yankee. First time a new
kid comes in they asked you in those days, “Are you a Yankee? You don’t talk like a
Southerner.” I can talk like a Southerner. So I took on all the local coloration and truly believed
most of it, except I knew one thing. I realized that, in fact, by keeping the African American
population down, you were keeping the economy down. If economic times got better for them,
my father might actually make more money, because they’d have more money to spend in his
store. So I sort of figured that out—that the South was not as vigorous an economy as it was
going to be a few years later, because they had this huge group in the population that really had
rotten jobs and were kept in rotten jobs by the unions, by everybody.
Now, during that period one would have thought that it would change, because there was
a migration of people from the East. This is a bunch of Yankees moving to Fort Worth, but the
amazing thing was, they became Southerners very quickly. I think they took on all the attributes
of the local population almost immediately. You didn’t see any sign that the people coming in
from the East—the “damn Yankees”—had views about segregation different from anybody
else’s. It was not until 1954, when I just finished high school, that Brown v. Board of Education
came through, and of course we were aghast that this was going to happen. So, you know, it
would have been nice to say that I was liberal in a social sense, but I wasn’t, really.
My parents were conservative. I do remember that in the 1944 election my parents, as
nearly as I could tell, were the only people in Memphis who voted for Thomas Dewey.
Everybody else voted for FDR. My father and mother had voted for him in 1932 and never
voted for him again. We were Republicans in a foreign land. Of course, we were registered
Democrats. There really wasn’t a Republican Party in the South, except in the black community.
FDR got a lot of their votes, but the structure was that the local Republican Party was largely
African American. As for people from other countries, the United States was white and black.
So, from junior high to high school, I was a chubby little kid for a few years. Smart,
wore thick glasses. Funny-looking little kid. And it hasn’t totally worn off. But I quit being
chubby sometime at the end of junior high. Got interested in sports but wasn’t very good at it.
Got good grades but didn’t really care about the academic parts of school. I was trying to pass
for being like everybody else. I was interested in sports and model airplanes and later cars and
girls, and it was a question of trying to pass. I did not really associate with the other bright kids.
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