Remembering Si Ramo, America's pioneering renaissance man
The obituaries are all in, chronicling the amazing career of Simon Ramo, who died June 28 at the age of 103. But Ramo was one of those extraordinary individuals whose life can’t be confined, or defined, within columns of newsprint or the pixels on a screen.
I can’t do any better than the thorough obit written by my colleagues Peter Pae and W.J. Hennigan in outlining the milestones of Ramo’s career. I can, however, contribute a few personal observations, drawn from the regular lunches I spent with Ramo over the last few years.
Starting in mid-2010, when I first visited him to gather material for a profile, Si would invite me to see him every six or eight weeks. We usually met at the Los Angeles Country Club; it was a rare lunchtime that we weren’t interrupted by a well-wisher or former associate. Sometimes I would arrive with a question or agenda of my own, related to a column I was planning or a book project. It rarely mattered, because Ramo always had an agenda of his own, and his thoughts were invariably more interesting and illuminating than mine.
Si Ramo was a skilled amateur musician, an engineering pioneer, a management guru, a builder and teacher. The Utah-born Ramo had come west to study at Caltech in 1933 and joined General Electric before the war. He received his first patent just after his 28th birthday and the last of his portfolio of about 40 at the age of 100, making him the oldest inventor to earn a patent.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-ramo-20160707-snap-story.html