Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–15
I associated with the jocks. I wasn’t a great jock. That was the part of childhood I felt I had
missed in other places by moving around so much, and I really enjoyed that part of it. Of course
I knew I was going to go to a good college. My mother wanted me to go to Southern Methodist
University, which was in town. But I knew I wanted to get out of town. I was not going to
Southern Methodist University no matter how much my mother thought I was. And there were
no arguments against Rice—it had no tuition, which was a help. It was a very good school, and
one of Dad’s friends, a local judge, had basically said, “Of course he’s going to Rice!” I’d done
well in school; why would I go to SMU? Or even the University of Texas, though that would
have been my second choice.
ASPATURIAN: So you went on a full scholarship, basically?
TOMBRELLO: Everybody did. It was a free school. You had about a hundred dollars’ worth of
fees every year.
ASPATURIAN: So that decision was made.
TOMBRELLO: That decision was made because of friends of my father, like the judge. My father
was running a variety store, but he was very active in downtown Dallas things. A friend of his
had a store across the street, and it was a very different kind of store. It was called Neiman
Marcus—and so Dad was friends with Stanley Marcus. You could be accepted even though you
were running a five-and-dime store, if you were a local civic leader. My father was. He knew
Bill Thornton, who ran the Republic National Bank. They did things for Dallas together. He
belonged to the Lions Club. He belonged to the Shrine. It was a great disappointment to him
that I was never going to be in the Masons and never going to be in the Shrine, and—though I
didn’t tell him—never going to be in things like the Lions Club. I wasn’t a joiner.
ASPATURIAN: So you went to Rice.
TOMBRELLO: I was off to Rice, majoring in physics. It was the typical attitude one finds at
Caltech: “Well, what else is there to major in?” They tried, of course, just like Caltech does, to
make you aware of other things that are going on, and probably they did a better job of it. We
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