Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–32
regretted it. I don’t think it hurt his career. He was a very young assistant professor, and he got
hired out of grad school as an assistant professor here, over a number of objections. Oh, that’s
an interesting story, which I will stick in.
ASPATURIAN: Yes, please do.
TOMBRELLO: In the year 1974-75, Harold Brown [president of Caltech, 1969-77] issued an
edict: There will be no new faculty appointments. There were three people on the market that
various people in the PMA division thought were the best things in years. One was named David
Politzer. One was named Roger Blandford. One was named Steven Koonin. Three of us got
together. Murray Gell-Mann [Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics, emeritus] wanted
Politzer; I can’t remember who it was that was pushing Blandford; and I wanted Koonin for
Kellogg. We swore a great oath that we were going to get those appointments. And Christy was
provost, and we were told, “OK, they really do look good. But you’re going to have to pay them
entirely out of soft money, except it can’t appear to be soft money.” [Laughter] It was clearly
underhanded, but these three kids were just off any scale you could devise. And we figured out a
way to do it. In Kellogg, I had had a Sloan Fellowship. Arnie [Arnold J.] Sierk was back here.
He’d been one of my students who had come back for an assistant professorship, and he threw in
some of his Sloan Fellowship. We raised money every damn way we could to pay Steve’s
salary, and I’m sure over in high-energy physics they were doing the same thing with Politzer,
and over in astrophysics they were doing it with Roger. And we did it! We hired them in a year
when there were no other appointments. We hired three hotshots. We were very proud of
ourselves, because we had done Caltech a lot of good.
ASPATURIAN: That’s a very interesting story.
TOMBRELLO: Yes. We were determined, and history proved us to be absolutely, totally right.
ASPATURIAN: Sort of Caltech’s miracle year?
TOMBRELLO: It absolutely was a miracle year. These were people that were just guaranteed—
Politzer had already done something very important. Everybody knew it. Roger was clearly
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