Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–24
getting my father’s situation stabilized, getting my mother buried. Fortunately there was enough
money. Nobody was rich, but nobody was so poor that you had to worry about how you handle
all of this.
ASPATURIAN: May I interpose a question? Were you in Dallas in the aftermath of the JFK
assassination then?
TOMBRELLO: Oh, that’s interesting historically, right. Yes, not long afterward. We were at a
scheduled meeting in front of the heavy-ion accelerator at Yale. We come out and discover that
Kennedy’s been shot. This is November 1963. I remember making the remark—now you’re
connected back to my mother’s feelings about Lyndon Johnson—“They better not look too
closely at that, because they might find that the vice president had something to do with it.”
Probably uncharitable, but Johnson was having his own hard times at that point with things in
Texas. I went down to Dallas roughly at Christmastime, leaving wife and two children in New
Haven to try to get more or less packed up and get things sorted out after a death in the family.
We bring my father out to California for a while. We found a place to live close to the campus.
I was almost immediately back in the lab, which is where I wanted to be.
ASPATURIAN: In Kellogg.
TOMBRELLO: In Kellogg. By the next fall, I was teaching Willy Fowler’s course. I was a
postdoc, and Willy thought, “Hey, he’ll teach this course? Let’s see what he can do with it.” I
liked it, but I’m sure the students noticed that I was trying to cut every corner to spend every
moment in the lab. I think I did a decent job of teaching the course, but I kept it very, very
compartmentalized. The main thing was to spend every waking moment in the lab. It was an
eight o’clock class—we had eight o’clock classes then. I would get in early, try to get the
experiment set up on the tandem accelerator, maybe leave a student in charge of the last stages of
getting the beam cued up, teach the class, and then right after class just run down there
immediately. One of the students in the class said, “You do watch the clock..” I said, “I have to.
I have to get down there as fast as I can.” They were not unsuccessful classes, but for some
years I was strictly doing it by the numbers.
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