Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
<strong>Tombrello</strong>–23<br />
TOMBRELLO: Let me go on about that. Today it seems like a big deal. I was negotiating <strong>with</strong><br />
Willy, not letting the people at Yale know what was going on. I went off to a conference at<br />
Gatlinburg [Tennessee]. In those days, people shared rooms, because we didn’t have any money.<br />
No one had any money. My roommate comes in and hears me on the phone negotiating <strong>with</strong><br />
Willy, and he realizes, you know, I’m in play. The next morning, like I was Cinderella after the<br />
ball, three assistant-professor offers had been pushed under the door of my room. One of them<br />
was from Stanford, and I can’t remember where the other two were from, but they were the sort<br />
of thing that would get your attention. Of course, I was determined to go back to <strong>Caltech</strong> as a<br />
postdoc. It was not that I was such great stuff, although I think my advisor had sold people on<br />
that idea. It was more that the times were changing. Kennedy was in. There was money going<br />
into science, a lot of money. Small labs, small accelerator labs, particularly in nuclear physics,<br />
were being built. They didn’t have anybody to run those labs.<br />
ASPATURIAN: You were in a hot area.<br />
TOMBRELLO: I was in a hot area, at the right time, and <strong>with</strong> a great agent—my advisor Gerry<br />
Phillips, at Rice, who basically said, “You ought to take a look at Tom. He’ll get something<br />
going there.” It’s probably true. Anyway, I knew that even if I made a mistake about <strong>Caltech</strong>,<br />
there were still jobs out there. Then, of course, I had to tell Yale before somebody else told<br />
them. The chairman of the department basically said, “Nobody leaves an assistant professorship<br />
at Yale to go be a postdoc again.” I said, “You missed the point. I’m doing it.” He said, “Yes,<br />
you are. Are you sure you’re not making a mistake?” I said, “I don’t think so.” Yale was<br />
sufficiently curious about all of this that for years we were invited back to spend a month or two<br />
in the summer there, which, after I met Stephanie—which is farther along in the story—became<br />
a good deal, because her parents lived not very far away. So my family and I came back to<br />
<strong>Caltech</strong>—also in the dead of winter—and I’ve never regretted it.<br />
ASPATURIAN: What year are we in now?<br />
TOMBRELLO: We are now in early 1964. I spent basically the calendar year of 1963 at Yale, at<br />
the end of which I was down in Dallas, because my mother died and my father had a heart attack.<br />
It turned out to be an interesting transition period of getting out of Yale, getting to <strong>Caltech</strong>,<br />
http://resolver.caltech.edu/<strong>Caltech</strong>OH:OH_<strong>Tombrello</strong>_T