Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–79
TOMBRELLO: Well, it wasn’t clear I was on the tenure track. They didn’t have any other track. I
mean, once you became an assistant professor it was not obvious you were ever going to be
anything else.
ASPATURIAN: But not everyone who came as a postdoc then became an assistant professor. So,
I just wondered what the circumstances of that were.
TOMBRELLO: I think the thing that impressed them— I don’t know if I impressed them because
I was smart; I think I impressed them because I got things done. I got a lot of things done.
Except for Willy, I was probably publishing more than the rest of the lab. It may not have been
as good as the other stuff going on, but there was certainly a lot of it. It kept the students coming
out. I had a lot of students. And we had plenty of money. See, that’s the reason we could have
all of those visitors. Back in the middle sixties, we had over a million dollars a year from the
Office of Naval Research. That would fund operating the accelerator and pay for visitors,
postdocs, and lots of students. Now, the students weren’t making very much money; and
overhead was not terribly high. So the money went a long way. So we could have Fred Hoyle
come in. Hans Bethe would come, and all sorts of other people would come regularly. It was
really quite wonderful. Willy ran a salon. That’s the only way you can describe it. It was so
much fun to meet these people and hear what they had to say. A lot of them, of course, would
come when springtime came to Southern California, which is about the 15th of January. And if
you come from Cornell, you know perfectly well that things aren’t going to thaw there for a long
time. This place had an incredible attraction during the winter.
So Willy really ran something extremely interesting here. It was fun being part of it. At
some point, roughly ten years later, I got to run Kellogg myself. But by that time, as I said in an
earlier interview, the bloom was off. Lyndon Johnson had become president. They were
fighting the Vietnam War; they were tightening up on money. It wasn’t that our budgets got cut
much, but while inflation, salaries, and prices of things went up, the grant did not go up.
[Feynman Professor of Physics] Kip Thorne came back during that period. At first, he was sort
of part of Kellogg, and then he set out to form a relativity group of his own. That was very
interesting. That must have happened about 1966, something like that.
ASPATURIAN: Had Kip been one of your students?
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