Scientist Don Keller, founder of K-tech, dies in ABQ at age 90
Grew company into one of Sandia’s biggest subcontractors
Don Keller was something of a Renaissance man.
He was a scientist, businessman, athlete, photographer and world traveler.
Founding a small high-tech company with just a handful of employees, he grew it into one of the largest subcontractors with Sandia National Laboratories.
Keller died in Albuquerque on March 12. He was 90.
“Don was passionate about skiing and skied really well until he was 80 and had a hip replaced,” said his wife of 22 years, Sheila Keller.
“He couldn’t ski anymore, which really irritated him, so he started playing tennis and became a great player, even competing in the Senior Olympics,” she said. “He was always reading and trying to learn something new. He even learned to play the piano the last years of his life.”
Born in Washington state, Keller was always interested in science and constantly curious, said his wife. He attended Harvard on an academic scholarship and got an undergraduate degree in physics in 1952 and then earned a Ph.D. in high-energy particle physics from Berkeley in 1957. He was among 16 finalists in 1965 for the position of scientist-astronaut in NASA’s Apollo program.
Keller founded Effects Technology in California in 1969, which simulated nuclear weapons effects on materials in the laboratory and at the Nevada Test Site. He then established Ktech Corp. in 1971, specializing in shock physics and weapons testing.
After receiving a government contract to operate a materials facility at Kirtland Air Force Base, Keller moved the company to Albuquerque in 1973, and by 1979 Ktech was operating, maintaining and designing experiments for Sandia’s Pulsed Power Research Center as well as performing experiments on Sandia’s ion beam fusion accelerators.
Over the years, he grew Ktech from a modest threeperson weapons testing lab into a 600-employee subcontractor that owned related companies. These included Poly-Flow Engineering, which made devices used to clean equipment in semi-conductor manufacturing, and TechReps, which created communications products for use in large exhibits, reports, brochures and websites.
In 1998, Keller began offering an employee stock option program at no cost to the employees, said Sheila Keller. “So every year they worked there they got more stock in the company.”
Keller retired in 2005, and by the time Raytheon purchased the company in 2011 “many of the longtime employees had a lot of stock, which was pretty valuable, and they walked away with a lot of money,” she said.
“Don was just an extraordinarily happy, positive person and we lived a very simple life, although we did travel quite a bit.” Those trips were chronicled in the images he captured as a talented photographer, she said.
“He was a people person and when he walked the dog all the neighbors knew him and the dog’s name. He might be gone for hours and I’d be getting worried about him, but he was just talking to the neighbors.”
As an athlete, her husband never let his competitive nature overwhelm his enjoyment for whatever sport he was engaged in, “and he was confident enough in his abilities and smart enough to figure anything out.”
Sheila Keller recalled her husband’s passion for helicopter skiing and remembered a time he had scheduled a trip to Canada. In the days before he was to leave, a number of people on the mountain where he was to ski died in an avalanche.
“I thought, and hoped, he would cancel his trip, but he went anyway,” she said. “Nothing was going to stop him from skiing on untracked snow. He lived life to the fullest and was never afraid of anything.”
In addition to his wife, Keller is survived by daughter Leslie Sutherland, son Tom Keller and sister Natalie Holp.