Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–68
THOMAS A. TOMBRELLO
SESSION 4
December 27, 2010
ASPATURIAN: In this session, we’re going to start by talking about your early days here at
Caltech as a young researcher in the Kellogg Laboratory. [See also Session 2]
TOMBRELLO: Let’s just start with the arrival in Pasadena in August 1961. Wife, small child.
Chris was probably about two and a half. We found an apartment up on Washington Boulevard,
not too far from Caltech, furnished, at about $100 or $105 a month, which worked well with the
NSF postdoc I had. I got into Kellogg; I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I got here. I talked to
Bob Christy but then decided that maybe the thing to do was go back and do experimental
physics. Willy Fowler was very interesting, but Willy was just within weeks of leaving for
England for a year. He really liked spending time in England with Fred Hoyle—later, Sir Fred
Hoyle. The personalities in Kellogg are very interesting, and the sociology, or anthropology, of
Kellogg was interesting. First thing, you discovered that the professors were more approachable
than they had been at Rice. My advisor had been quite approachable, but there was a definite
barrier between the grad students, the postdocs, and the faculty. In Kellogg it was different.
There were lots of young students who were about my age or a little bit older. I was working
with them. There was a new tandem accelerator in the basement of Sloan. Sloan had been
renovated. It had been the old High-Voltage Lab, and they had turned it into a math building
with experimental facilities on the basement and sub-basement level. Low-temperature physics
was on the basement level, where John Pellam was running a program.
ASPATURIAN: And who was John Pellam?
TOMBRELLO: John Pellam [professor of physics 1954-1964] was a low-temperature physicist
mainly working, I believe, in liquid helium. Some very interesting experiments had been done in
that group. It was a small group. Pellam left somewhere in that period, or died, I cannot
remember for sure. [Pellam went to UC Irvine in 1965 and died in 1977—ed.] But the sub-
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Tombrello_T