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.
