Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–26
electronics when I’d been an undergraduate and graduate student. So let’s see now, we’re in the
late sixties. We began to take some summers off—in ’69 we went up to Seattle to the University
of Washington for a couple of months.
ASPATURIAN: By then are you an associate professor?
TOMBRELLO: I’m an associate professor in 1967. But I did not have tenure. They wanted to
keep some of us, but they weren’t sure they wanted to keep us for a long, long, long time, which
is all right. It’s perfectly fair. I thought so at the time, too. In fact, I just wasn’t worried about
tenure. Eventually you start worrying about things like that. So anyway, the summer of ’69 we
went to Seattle. Summer of 1970, we went back to Yale.
ASPATURIAN: Was this a sabbatical?
TOMBRELLO: They’d invited me, and I basically just took off for the summer to do things I could
do at Yale. They paid enough that it was basically a free vacation back East. In the middle of
visiting Yale in 1970, I got pulled into a Latin American summer school and left Yale for a
couple of weeks to go to South America, which was interesting. The wife and kids went off to
Washington to see friends whom we had known when they were students and postdocs, like
Roger Noll [former Caltech professor of economics]. By then there are three kids—Karen was
born in 1964. I think Ann and the kids probably stayed in downtown Washington, but they saw
the Nolls and did the usual things you do when you go to Washington for the first time.
That was an interesting summer. I was still doing nuclear physics. I’m not doing any
real consulting yet—the first real consulting was the summer of ’71, when I went to Los Alamos.
I went there because we had gotten interested in accelerator design in Kellogg. I had some
interesting ideas and had some good students who were working on ideas for what you might call
heavy-ion accelerators—accelerators where the particles were moving at speeds very far from
the velocity of light, not high-energy stuff. It would affect nuclear physics, and it would teach
me a few skills that I hadn’t had otherwise or force me to learn them. Los Alamos was an eyeopener.
It’s a lovely place. It’s a great place for the kids to go play in the canyons and see bears
and go off to Indian reservations. Los Alamos was paying for it all, so it was quite wonderful.
We even saved some money from all that. Again, it opened up some interesting possibilities.
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