By Bruce Barton
William Ross Aiken, an accomplished electrical engineer who served 10 years on the Los Altos Hills City Council, died Feb. 26 at his home in Paradise after a long illness. Mr. Aiken was 88.
Born in Maui, Hawaii, Mr. Aiken showed his engineering aptitude early on, winning the Bausch and Lomb Science Award at Glendale High School in Southern California. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in electrical engineering.
After working as director of communications at a Richmond shipyard during World War II, Aiken founded Ross Radio, an early version of high-fidelity sound that was high quality at the time.
Later, he was senior engineer at the University of California Radiation Laboratory. He met his wife of 54 years, Harriette, at the laboratory.
He also worked on the federal government’s Project Greenhouse in 1951, where he designed the telemetry for the hydrogen bomb.
Mr. Aiken went on to work for Kaiser Aircraft and Electronics in Palo Alto as director of research. He was the inventor of the Kaiser-Aiken thin cathode ray tube.
Settling into Los Altos Hills around the time of its 1956 incorporation, Mr. Aiken came in on the tail-end of a community debate over reducing lot sizes from 2-acre to 1-acre minimums.
“A group of citizens came and asked him to run,” Harriette recalled. “They wanted someone strong on holding the zoning.”
Mr. Aiken served from 1960 to 1970, the last two years as town mayor.
“He enjoyed it immensely,” Harriette said. “He had felt he had served long enough and it was time for someone else to take over. … He said he was not very good at playing God for everyone else’s business.”
Among his accomplishments, Harriette pointed to Mr. Aiken’s devising the crosswalk on El Monte Road at Foothill College.
She said Mr. Aiken was known as fair minded, even to those who initially opposed him. She recalled a town group that “told lies about him” during a campaign. But once he was elected, members of that same group told him, “We were wrong about you,” Harriette recalled.
After living in Los Altos Hills for 25 years, the family sold their Magdalena Avenue home in 1980.
They built a house on Maui, where they lived for several years. They moved to Paradise in 1998.
“He was an engineer - very capable, practical, inventive,” she said. “His problem was, he was always ahead of the pack.”
In addition to Harriette, Mr. Aiken is survived by two daughters, Cindy Lange of Redding and Madaline Beema of Berry Creek, five grandchildren and one great-grandson.
A service is scheduled 2 p.m. Saturday at Trinity Presbyterian Church, 2350 Foothill Blvd. in Oroville. Donations can be made in Mr. Aiken’s memory to Paradise Hospice Health.
