About Alfred Kildow
Email the author: alfred@alfredkildow.com
Alfred Kildow is a former Air Force jet fighter pilot who trained for a mission not unlike the one described in his novel “FALLOUT: remains of an atomic war.”
He also served in senior executive positions with aerospace companies that are leaders in rocketry and military electronics. He was a director at the prestigious American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Kildow grew up in San Diego. Orphaned as a child, he lived in his car for a time, after flunking out of college just ten weeks in. He joined the Air Force out of desperation and, miracle of miracles, became a fighter pilot and served in Korea in a fighter-bomber squadron. As the war ended he was shipped to Japan to join a top-secret program to develop the means to launch atomic bombs from a fighter. From that experience he imagined “Fallout.”
Through another fluke, Kildow next became a journalist, first with the Redding (Calif.) Record Searchlight, where he rose to become City Editor, then to the San Jose Mercury-News, where he served as Assistant Sunday Editor and Aviation Editor. There he mostly wrote features on people ranging from Olympic swimmer Chris von Saltza to F.B. Morse, founder of Pebble Beach and grandson of that other Morse.
Seeking added resources to support his family, which by then included three daughters, Kildow used his military and journalism experiences to land a public relations position with Aerojet General Corporation, then, and now, the free-world’s leading rocket company.
Later he directed public affairs for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, which was a 33,000-member professional society instrumental in fostering advances in aviation and space exploration.
In 1968, Kildow met and ultimately married Judith Tegger Kildow, then a graduate student at MIT. At an AIAA meeting, Kildow met Jonas Salk, who soon hired him away to join him at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, where Kildow had gone to high school. His first task with Salk was to replace author Michael Crichton, who had been serving as Salk’s assistant. His second task was to handle the global press hurricane that followed Salk’s marriage to Francois Gilot, the artist who bore two of Picasso’s children.
For a short, abortive time Kildow was Corporate Public Relations Director of the Raytheon Company.
He was then tapped by Nobel Laureate David Baltimore to help him start the Whitehead Institute for Biological Research at MIT. That lead to a decades-long battle to help Baltimore clear his name against an unwarranted attack by a powerful congressman. Baltimore prevailed.
Kildow went with Baltimore to The Rockefeller University for several years when Baltimore became its President.
For another decade, Kildow worked at the University of Southern California, first as an associate dean of the school of medicine, then in a series of senior positions in public relations.
Kildow’s wife Judith retired from a long career as a professor at MIT, where she founded the National Ocean Economics Program. She moved that program to the Middlebury College Monterey Institute in California, where the Kildows lived for many years before retiring to Nevada City, California. They lived in Dallas for a few years but now live in Boothbay Harbor, Maine.
Judith and Alfred have a daughter, Meredith, and her sons, all of whom live in Marblehead, Mass. His surviving daughters from an earlier marriage are Renee, who lives in Brooklyn, NY, and Kelly, who lives in Berlin, Germany.