Farewells
Better Practices
The law is a profession that venerates precedent, caution and stability. Craig W. Johnson stood apart not only as one of the profession's most successful practitioners, but also as a trailblazing innovator. Johnson, 62, died on October 3 in Palo Alto, four days after he suffered a massive stroke.
Johnson was born in Pasadena, Calif., and graduated magna cum laude from Yale in 1968. He spent two years in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia and worked as a systems computer programmer before attending Stanford Law School. Graduated in 1974, he joined the Palo Alto law firm of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati as its 14th attorney and helped establish the firm's strong reputation as consort to high-tech companies.
In 1993, he made his first foray out of traditional law practice when he launched the Venture Law Group. Instead of naming the firm with the traditional list of partner names, he created a "branded" firm focused on small, high-growth companies. By taking equity in lieu of some fees from entrepreneurial companies still at the pre-public stage, Venture Law Group was itself a Silicon Valley-style innovation, one that profited from high-tech companies, including Yahoo, drugstore.com and Hotmail. Johnson sold the firm in 2003.
Johnson was called one of Silicon Valley's top 25 "movers and shakers" by BusinessWeek magazine in 1997. "He genuinely cared about seeing others around him succeed," says Venture Law Group alumnus Glen Van Ligten.
With his wife, RoseAnn M. Rotandaro, JD '95, and Andrea Chavez, MS '98, Johnson in 2008 created a radical model for legal practice, Virtual Law Partners. "It's clear to me that the large-law-firm model is broken," Johnson said in an interview in 2009. Virtual Law Partners would be a "distributed, web-based" firm staffed by experienced attorneys who mostly worked out of their homes. The structure, by limiting overhead, allowed the firm to charge clients less than traditional firms. The firm, with 40 attorneys at the time of Johnson's death, intends to continue developing this model.
Johnson is survived by Rotandaro, with whom he had just spent a European honeymoon; his father, Roger Miles Johnson; his brother, Brian Johnson; and his two sons by a previous marriage, Scott and Matthew Johnson.
The life of Steven Julius Torok—born Török István Gyula—spanned three continents and led from revolution to international policy making. A businessman and a United Nations energy consultant, Torok died July 23 in a Budapest hospital. He was 71.
Torok, MS '68, was born to landed gentry in Hungary; his son, John, recalls him describing playing cowboys and Indians in the garden of the family's estate. A youth able to speak Hungarian, French, German and Russian, he started university in Debrecen in September 1956.
In October, unarmed students protesting Stalinism were fired upon. A tinkerer, Torok did radio communications work for the uprising. "He was sufficiently involved that had he stayed he would have been shot," John Torok says.
Torok spent time in a refugee camp before making his way to the United States. He learned English from an African-American seaman as their ship crossed the Atlantic. He earned an undergraduate degree at the University of Montana, his master's in statistics at Stanford and his doctorate in international economics at Columbia. He also studied philosophy in Kyoto.
He was employed by Shell International in London, Tokyo, Malaysia and Brunei. In his later career, he worked for the United Nations, primarily as an economist on energy issues, including early work on the Kyoto protocol. He was part of the UN mission in Cambodia that supervised the first democratic election after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Torok was active in conferences and forums sponsored by Stanford's World Association of International Studies.
Torok is survived by his partner, Sanguansri Nenthananta; his former wife, Sachiko; his son; daughters Estee and Juli; four grandchildren; and a sister, Ilona.
The co-inventor of the wing central to the development of paragliders, stunt kites, kite-board kites and hang gliders died September 1 in Southern Shores, N.C. Francis M. Rogallo, "the father of hang gliding," was 97.
Rogallo, '32, Engr. '35, who studied mechanical engineering and aeronautics at Stanford, was hired in 1936 by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the predecessor to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He conducted theoretical and experimental work in aerodynamic research, including airplane development.
Rogallo and his wife, Gertrude, dreamed of affordable personal flight without the aid of an engine. Their prototype of "the flexible wing" was made from a chintz kitchen curtain and tested in a home wind tunnel powered by a large window fan. Unlike other designs, the Rogallos' flexible wing required no rigid parts. (Even birds, he remarked, had bones.) Formed by fabric and shroud lines, the wing achieved its shape and lift as a result of wind pressure.
In 1951 the Rogallos obtained a patent for the design and worked tirelessly to sell it to government and industry. No buyer was to be found, and the couple marketed a small version as a toy: the Flexikite.
After Sputnik was launched in October 1957, NASA picked up the flexible wing design and began testing it as a device capable of safely returning space capsules to earth. The "parawing" was tested at three times the speed of sound and heights of up to 200,000 feet. It was incorporated into other designs, including the administration's flying jeep—or "Fleep"—project.
Meanwhile, aspiring flyers around the world were at work modifying the design to fulfill the Rogallos' original dream: giving wings to humankind. "People were building their own wings from pictures in magazines. They were teaching themselves to fly," Mike Meier, president of the Hang Glider Manufacturers Association, told the Los Angeles Times.
Among the first to achieve this dream were Rogallo's children, who soared above the beach near their home, test-piloting wing designs. "We were tethered to an old piece of shipwreck that had floated in," his daughter Carol recalls. "He was making calculations in his mind, while I was just having fun."
Francis Rogallo made his last personal flight amid the Kitty Hawk dunes of North Carolina in 1992, on his 80th birthday.
Survivors include his children, Robert S. Rogallo, Carol R. Sparks, Frances R. MacEachren and Marie "Bunny" R. Samuels; three grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. Gertrude Sugden Rogallo, his wife of 68 years, died in 2008.
