Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–40
Now we’re going to be a working farm, and they’re not going to come in and kill the deer. But
we’re going to do a lot more stuff. That was the Faustian bargain I made with the people there.
I gather when I was under consideration—I’m jumping ahead—as PMA division chair,
somebody must have brought up the fact that I’d spent such a short time with Schlumberger that
something bad must have happened—I must have done something terrible. So they sent a letter
to the chairman of the corporation, somebody I’d known for years, and he wrote back basically
saying, “I don’t know how he did it. He fired a whole bunch of them and they love him.”
ASPATURIAN: Did you find them all jobs?
TOMBRELLO: Well—oh, no. There were a few who dug their heels in and didn’t want my help.
They didn’t get very good jobs. But the rest of them, oh, yes. There are lots of contacts out
there. When we talk about the students, we’ll talk about how you get people jobs. Oh, yes.
They had reason to love me. They got very nice jobs, and some of them have become senior
professors at universities. Nobody likes being fired, but I had to have technicians and engineers,
and we had a constrained budget. Anyway, I was there two years and then came back, figuring,
Well, this has been sort of the high point of my career, and now I’m back into strained financial
circumstances. This is now 1989.
ASPATURIAN: So you’re back here in Sloan doing materials and physics.
TOMBRELLO: Yup. And some meteoritic work with lunar samples and the meteorites. But it’s
all sort of a piece. You’re analyzing materials, and some of the materials are from space, some
are from reactors, and some are from other places. But before I came back, Barclay, who was
provost, and Gerry Neugebauer [Millikan Professor of Physics, emeritus], who was chairing the
division, had asked me, “What can we get you to come back? We know we can’t equal your
salary.” I said, “You’re certainly not going to be able to equal my salary”—they ended up
paying me about half what I was making at Schlumberger. They said, “Is there something you
want?” I said, “I’d like to do something that’s just about undergraduates and research.” They
said, “You’re already doing this. You’ve got an incredible record.” You know, there was
Weaver and there was Koonin and there was [Kenneth G.] Libbrecht [professor of physics, BS
’75]. Nobody’s stopping you from doing that. We love it!” And I said, “No, no. I want it to be
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Tombrello_T