My father Lt. Ernest Anders Erickson kept a lot of things from his days in the Air Corps days (1942-1945) and I mean a lot! Most was well organized and labeled and we often discussed the stories behind much of his Air Corps collection.

Other things were here and there. Photographs and articles displayed on the walls of his office at Skunk Works/Lockheed Aircraft and through out our homes over the years. Air Corps patches and pins, various certificates and paperwork, his A-2 Leather Flight Jacket and uniform, multiple cigar boxes filled with photos and newspaper articles, pieces of flak he dug out the ship's fuselages of the various B-17s he flew and so much more. I call them the "Ernest Anders Erickson Archives," yet they really are so much more. They add up to a great story and a life well lived.

Then there are the 100s of letters he'd sent home to his folks in Dakota that were saved in a modified cardboard box kept on the far upper shelf of his closet in his office. I refer to it as "The Box of Letters." It has produced quite the cache of information and items I had never seen before. There is even a letter my father wrote after a mission during the Invasion on June 6th, 1944.

This page below, cut from one of his Air Corps manuals with his hand-written text is one example. Placed in a letter dated September 1943 to his folks and accompanied by a dozen photographs of my father that were taken during his Flight Training.

A short little note as my father writes:
"This is the ship like I flew at Primary, the same kind as one in enclosed pictures. Ernie"