Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–39
clearly willing to pay for me to spend a lot of time trying to advise them on things, and in the
middle of that, I get this offer to come run the lab.
Oil had dropped to $10 a barrel, and in the summer of ’86 they fired a third of the
research lab. Out in the field, they probably fired many more people. In one day, the research
lab lost 30 percent of its people, and the upper brass of the company had done it. They had
basically chosen, one by one, the people to keep and the people to get rid of. And, as you can
imagine, with a bunch of senior vice presidents doing something like that, it was not well done.
It was done very strangely. After that, the lab basically stopped doing anything. The director of
the lab didn’t know what the hell was going on. He had been on an upper growth curve of
building new stuff, hiring more people, building new facilities, and suddenly one day it’s all
over. So he’s rattled. And in the middle of that, they just decide to get rid of him and bring me
in.
They brought me in on a two-year contract, because that’s what I agreed to do. I was
able to get a two-year leave because by then my friend Barclay Kamb was provost, and Barclay
clearly knew what a plum this was. He was not going to stand in my way of trying to get out.
He said to me, “I wish it were me [laughter], because the lab’s a gem.” In some ways—you’ll
hear more about this later—it was a challenge, because they had fired all but one of the engineers
and they fired all the technicians. They had kept a bunch of theorists. And the lab was just
nonfunctional.
I realize I am going to have the world’s shortest honeymoon. I’m going to go there, the
theorists think I’m going to save them, and I am going to end up firing them. But that won’t
happen for maybe twelve hours. By the second day, we are reorganizing the lab, and I’m having
heart-to-heart talks with people. I explain to them, “I’ve got to do this. And you’ve got to help
me. What you get out of it is, I’ve been at a university for a long time and I can find you jobs. I
can find you very good jobs, maybe better jobs than you’ve got now, out in the academic world.
You work with me and I’ll take care of you.”
And it worked. I got the lab restructured. I got the budget under control even though it
was 30 to 40 percent less than it had been under the previous directors. We started getting stuff
done. As I explained to the people, we’re a working farm now, we’re no longer a deer park. But
you understand that even with deer parks, someday they’re going to come in and kill the deer.
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