Simon Ramo

Ramo has been a fixture of this community's industrial and civic life since he returned from a wartime sojourn at General Electric's headquarters in Schenectady, N.Y., to live in Southern California. He had received his doctorate from Caltech in 1936. A Salt Lake City native whose family traces its history to Jewish "conversos," who converted to Christianity in Inquisition-era Spain, he has served in trusteeships at Caltech and the California State University, and sat on the boards of the L.A. Philharmonic and the Music Center, Atlantic Richfield Co. and Times Mirror (which until 2000 was owner of The Times). He landed at Hughes Aircraft in Culver City, then a small outpost of Howard Hughes' industrial empire. The company's drawback was that it was owned by an eccentric. Its virtue was that the eccentric almost never came around. The Pentagon was uneasy with Hughes but comfortable with Ramo, whose R&D unit specialized in airborne communications, computers and guided missiles. But by 1950, Hughes' increasingly bizarre decision-making was undermining the division Ramo had built with his friend and Caltech classmate Dean Wooldridge. Ramo and Wooldridge resigned together in 1953. Their unit had grown from a small handful of employees to 3,000 engineers and scientists. Their next step was to found their own company, which would build the intercontinental ballistic missile and become a major participant in the space project. TRW merged with Northrop Grumman Corp. in 2002. Although Ramo officially retired from the aerospace industry in 1978 at 65, he continued to help lead major space and weapons developments and remained an active consultant to aerospace executives and an advisor to presidents, Cabinet members and Congress. Ramo is survived by two children, Jim and Alan. His wife of 71 years, Virginia, died in 2009.