Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–30
administration. It’s a theme that runs through all this later. Tommy dies in the fall of ’73, and
Willy makes me PI of the NSF grant.
ASPATURIAN: In Kellogg.
TOMBRELLO: In Kellogg. It was roughly a mid-to-end-year grant, supporting lots of people.
Clearly, fewer every year, because we’re going through an inflationary period, the stagflation
period of President Nixon. The Vietnam War is over, but the effects are still there. So I start
bringing in other business that brought money in. I brought in applied things you could do with
nuclear physics. It sort of kept the standard of living going in Kellogg. And yet it was bothering
some people that this work is pretty applied—not necessarily basic research. By ’74, my
marriage has come apart. My wife moves out, and I become an unwed mom of three children.
My son eventually moved in with his mother. You know, teenage sons and fathers, but I had the
two little girls, a nine-year-old and an eleven-year-old.
ASPATURIAN: So the daughters stayed with you and the son went with his mother.
TOMBRELLO: Yes. And the nine-year-old became mistress of the house. I was, of course, head
of a major lab at Caltech, and in those days people entertained at home. The Athenaeum was not
what it is now; you did not entertain much there in those days. The food was rotten, or at least it
was not very good; they didn’t have a liquor license. And so we entertained at home. At one
end of the long table I would be, and at the other end the nine-year-old. Her sister was socially
OK, but she wasn’t running the house, and the nine-year-old was. Karen was really something:
“Would you like some more wine? It’s really nice; I picked it out myself.” That sort of thing.
We actually had a good time. We didn’t have very much money, but we had a wonderful time.
We went off to Europe in ’75 for three months, rode the trains. I was at the Bohr Institute.
Karen became a housewife, and her sister went to an international school. It was good for all of
us. We had a wonderful period there. Then we came back. My son had graduated from high
school—we’re moving right along.
I’m still running Kellogg. Its program has broadened, but I’m the only one doing the
broader things. Everybody else is still trying to do what they were doing, but pressures are
building because all this other stuff is also going on. These things are not taking money away
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