Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–33
doing great stuff, because—to drag Weaver back in there, see, he was my candidate for
somebody in theoretical astrophysics, and I realized Roger was probably better than Tom
Weaver. Koonin we all know about, because he came here and never got away, even though it
was a battle at the time, because outside the division nobody knew who he was. Everybody
thought I’d gone way out on a limb. But as soon as he got here, people realized it had been a
coup. Everybody tried to hire him away, so keeping him here was tricky. The only thing that
probably saved us was that the people who were trying to get him were just not as clever as they
should have been. They were working against Sicilian cleverness, or deviousness. [Laughter] I
figured out a way to keep him, fight off every one of these offers from outside.
ASPATURIAN: Do you want to detail that?
TOMBRELLO: The main thing was figuring out how to meet offers without entirely meeting the
offers. Well, I’ll tell you one. Geoff [Geoffrey] Chew was running the Physics Department at
Berkeley, and they wanted Koonin. And Geoff made a classic mistake that people make when
they negotiate. I am a great believer that you make your best offer first, and it should be better
than the person expects. Geoff Chew allowed his offer to sort of ratchet up slowly, and of course
the reaction from Koonin was, This guy is trying to get me for the cheapest price he can—which
was probably true. But it probably had something to do with the politics at Berkeley in physics,
too. By the end of it, Chew was offering more than Caltech was, in terms of tenure and a bunch
of things. All Steve got here was an associate professorship without tenure, which is an
absolutely meaningless position. It’s just like being an assistant professor, but we had made our
best offer first. Chew was ratcheting it up slowly, and even though he ended up ahead of us it
seemed that he was clearly looking for a bargain, and it made the offer look a lot worse than it
actually was. So we kept Steve.
So now we are well into the seventies. By ’76, I had met Stephanie, and we got married
fairly quickly. I guess we’d known one another six months by the time we were married. We
were probably engaged in—she would say six days—but it was probably two weeks. We put the
two families together almost immediately. She had a daughter, the one who died a couple of
years ago. Kerstin [pronounced Sherstin] just became my daughter, because she was so young.
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