Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

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