Distinguished Engineer
Hometown: Plankinton
Electrical Engineering ,
Harold C. Hohbach, under an accelerated program sponsored by U.S. Army Signal Corps, completed his degree from South à£à£Ö±²¥Ðã State College in 1943. Immediately thereafter, he entered basic training in Camp Crowder, Missouri, after which he attended Officers Candidates School in Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey. He was commissioned in 1944 and served in North Africa and Germany. After the Signal Corps, he obtained a B.S. in Business Administration in 1947 from the University of California at Berkeley, California. From 1947 to 1949, he worked as a sales engineer for Westinghouse Electric Corp. From 1949 to 1952, he attended the Boalt School of Law also at UC-Berkeley, and received a LLD. In 1952, he joined the patent law firm of Flehr & Swain in San Francisco, California, which in 1968 became Flehr Hohbach Test Albritton and Herbert. He remained with that firm until 2002 when he retired. The firm at that time was acquired by Dorsey and Whitney of Minneapolis. Hohbach spent his legal career in patent prosecution and litigation. He was instrumental in commissioning a large portrait of 14 pre-World War II inventors in electronics in Silicon Valley including Hewlett, Packard, Teman, De Forest, Farnsworth and Lawrence (of South à£à£Ö±²¥Ðã). He was also active in managing and developing real estate in Palo Alto, California. He founded the Harold C. Hohbach Chair in Electrical Engineering at SDSU which was established in 2000.