About Aileen

Aileen Kilgore Henderson (1921-2023) lived and traveled extensively through much of the U.S. as well as spending time in Mexico, Canada, and Costa Rica. She wrote about many of the places she visited. Her first book was published when she was 74 and her last when she was 101. In addition to her ten books, she published a number of short stories and hundreds of articles.

Aileen especially empathized with people around the world who lack access to education or clean drinking water. “If you’ve ever had to carry water,” she said, “You’ll never take the running water in your house for granted.” She also cared greatly about nature and animals, both domestic and wild, and usually had at least one rescued cat in her home.

Aileen enjoyed making school visits. “Writing is power,” she told students. “If you can write, you are powerful. You influence the lives of people you will never meet through your writing.” She encouraged everyone she met to write or in some way record their own story. “You are unique,” she would tell them. “Nobody else in the whole wide world has the same story to tell that you do.”

Aileen believed that thoughtful reading and writing can change lives for the better. “We’re all coming to one world,” she said. “We’ve got to understand people who are different from us. Books help.”

Here’s a more detailed version of Aileen’s biography:

Aileen Kilgore Henderson was born in 1921 in an Alabama coal mining camp that no longer exists. From her earliest years she loved books but didn’t own one. She copied by hand pages from books in her school’s small library so that she could take them home and read them over and over. Though life was hard, she found it full of wonder, and kept a diary on scraps of paper in order to hold on to life’s marvels.

Aileen’s teachers encouraged her writing. Her parents managed to keep all the children in school through the Depression of the 1930s, though the school itself closed for a time because it couldn’t pay the teachers. Aileen and her siblings worked on the family farm before and after school. Following high school, Aileen ventured into the big city of Tuscaloosa to work at Kress Department Store. She later wrote about this experience in The World Through the Dime Store Door.

As World War II got underway, Aileen wanted to help the war effort, so in spite of dire warnings from some acquaintances, she joined the Women’s Army Corps. Stationed at an air base in Texas, Aileen worked as one of only six women mechanics on the flight line. She also worked as post theater manager and in the photo lab. Many of the photos on the World War II photo page of this website are from her photo lab time. Her World War II diary and letters are collected in Stateside Soldier.

After the war Aileen attended college on the GI Bill. She then taught fourth grade in Northport, Alabama. But she longed to see more of the world and found a teaching job at remote Big Bend National Park in Texas. The area and people enchanted her and she later compiled her letters from the park into Tenderfoot Teacher. She also wrote a middle-grade novel set there, Treasure of Panther Peak.

Aileen then married a young man from Minnesota that she met at Big Bend. Art Henderson was a forester, smoke jumper, and fire lookout who thrived on adventure as much as she did. The two set up housekeeping in an old hillside cabin made of chestnut wood in the North Carolina mountains, where Art was a ranger on the Blue Ridge Parkway. One of his “patrol vehicles” was a horse (see photo on North Carolina photo page.) On one particularly stormy night, Aileen and Art were so worried about the horse that they brought her into their basement where she stomped and whinnied all night.

Art was transferred to Washington D.C. and he and Aileen, now with an infant daughter, enjoyed exploring that area, until Art was transferred to Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park in North Dakota. Here Aileen found yet another world to explore: the Badlands and its people.

When Art retired from the National Park Service, the family moved to a run-down one-room old country schoolhouse in Minnesota and restored it to its former glory, even tracking down the proper shade of red paint for it. Aileen put more time into writing and began selling articles about interesting people and places in the area to local newspapers and magazines: five dollars here, ten dollars there. Gradually her markets broadened to national publications.

In the late 1960s the family moved to Southern California where Aileen volunteered at schools and museums, joined writers’ groups, and explored parks and wild lands in California and nearby Mexico. In the late 1970s with their daughter now an adult and Art’s family aging, Aileen and Art moved back to the Midwest. Aileen flourished in the vibrant college town of Northfield, Minnesota, and continued to craft her writing.

Aileen’s family in Alabama was aging, too, and in the late 1980s Art and Aileen built a home in the Alabama woods on Hurricane Creek. There, Aileen spent more time on her writing. After learning to use a computer, she completed her first novel, The Summer of the Bonepile Monster, which won the Milkweed Prize for Children’s Literature. Four more award-winning middle-grade adventure novels followed, along with four nonfiction books based on her letters and diaries, plus a biography of an early geologist who visited every county in Alabama in a mule-drawn wagon (Eugene Allen Smith’s Alabama: How a Geologist Shaped a State.)

Aileen had lost vision in one eye during childhood, and as she grew older, vision in her other eye deteriorated. She appreciated the computer, which enabled her to continue writing since she could enlarge the font. She hoped to write more books, including her North Dakota and North Carolina adventures, but ran out of time in 2023 when she passed away. She did leave several book manuscripts completed except for final editing and proofreading. Her daughter plans to make these books available in the future. Aileen’s last book was published when she was 101 years old.

Of particular importance to Aileen was kindness to animals and protecting the natural world, both for itself and for the many people around the world who depend on it. She especially valued her church community, her wildflower and native plant society friends, her fellow writers in writers’ groups such as Tuscaloosa Writers and Illustrators Guild, and her family and friends, who were always cheerleaders for her writing.

Sometimes Aileen’s plans to spend the morning on the computer did not work out because someone else was already on the computer.

Aileen on the farm at age 16 with a favorite calf named Skinny Dugan, named after a vaudeville character.

Exploring the Costa Rican rainforest at age 87