Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–28
TOMBRELLO: Really bright. Very quick. Enormously quick. Willing to take on hard things.
Was he as good as Weaver? I don’t know. They were both very good in slightly different ways.
Girlfriend appeared—Laurie appeared. They’re still married. Laurie was a high school girl, I
think, at John Muir High School. Delightful woman. Eventually they began to go to Los
Alamos too, so some of the hiking that was being done was with a bunch of grads and
undergrads. My son, Chris, and I would climb mountains with them. We were probably in
better shape than they were, though. We sort of ground them down. We had a lot of fun
climbing up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Truchas Peaks. Quite a beautiful place.
Three 13,000-foot peaks you could climb in a day if you kept whipping yourself along. That was
the Los Alamos thing. By the end of that, Tommy [Thomas] Lauritsen [professor of physics, d.
1973]—well, Tommy had had colon cancer in ’69, I think, and it was clear that it was recurring
and they would not be able to cure it.
ASPATURIAN: Was he overseeing Kellogg at that time?
TOMBRELLO: Willy had been running Kellogg when I first came—though, to be honest, Charlie
Charles C.] Lauritsen, Tommy’s father, was still alive until 1968, and really everyone deferred to
Charlie. Charlie was brilliant. During the war he had been one of the powers in some of the
weapons-related stuff, including the solid-fuel rocket project. He had also been one of the
primary people in the wartime proximity-fuse project at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism
at the Carnegie [Institution] in Washington. At one point, he moved the whole group, including
a very young Tommy and Willy, back there to get the proximity-fuse project started and didn’t
come back to Caltech until about the time the war really started. Charlie was a mover and
shaker: China Lake Weapons Lab, the Aerospace Corporation after the war—there were a
number of things Charlie was instrumental in. Very close to [J. Robert] Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer brought Charlie in as one of the cowpunchers. Back to the late sixties. Probably
in 1968 Willy got put on the National Science Board.
ASPATURIAN: The National Science Board being a federal agency?
TOMBRELLO: It’s the group that oversees the National Science Foundation. It’s like a board of
directors. By then Kellogg had an NSF grant—we shifted from the Office of Naval Research
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