Larry Kilgallen was a son of Joe and Rinda (Shutts) Kilgallen and grew up in Albany, N.Y. He graduated from Albany Public Schools and went on to MIT to study electrical engineering, where he also enjoyed its many clubs and the student radio station. Rock and roll. That was interrupted by Viet Nam and the draft, and he served in the US Army from 1967 to 1969. He served as a radio teletype operator with an artillery unit, and--although he didn't want to be there--tried to learn something about another interest, cryptography, while he was there, saving his money to buy a red Thunderbird when he got back home.

He returned to MIT but soon found a computing job more attractive and made a career in systems programming and data security/privacy. Larry loved Boston and Cambridge. He continued his interest in radio as a "civilian volunteer" state house reporter for the MIT radio station and learned to sail at Community Boating, where he later took advanced courses in sailing, building a resume as a skipper. The Appalachian Mountain Club had a subgroup for sailors, and he joined them during many February School Vacations on bareboat charters in the Caribbean. He also joined a sailing club on Boston Harbor where he enjoyed crewing for racing skippers and learning the tactics on weeknights. Possibly his exposure to the Massachusetts state house is what led him to join the National Organization for Women. And the computing continued on Digital Equipment Corporation computers and his participation in the DEC User Society.

One day, he thanked a colleague for finding a bug in his work, and she realized what a special man that made him. They were married in 1985 and eventually moved to Newton, where he added square dancing to his interests, primarily with the Great Plain Squares in Needham and the Tech Squares at MIT. He was still dancing at the end of January 2011, but he died from liver cancer a few weeks later in the Tippett House Hospice in Needham.