Here below is Lt. Ernest Anders Erickson's September 27th, 1944 Officers Pay Data Card. In the sum of $271. and in 1944 that was a nice amount of money. He regularly sent about 70% of his pay back to his folks in Dakota. Some was for them to use and the rest would be deposited into his bank account.

When my father returned home in August of 1945 he had a small fortune in the bank. It made for easier times in Bismarck for the family. Ernest Anders went off to college in 1948 at the University of Colorado in Boulder to study aeronautics. He applied for the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, a law passed that provided educational and other benefits for people who had served in the armed forces. It was referred to as the G.I. Bill.

With the money he had saved and earned in the mean time along with securing the G.I Bill my dad was set. He earned his multiple degrees in drafting, stress analysis and ultimately a Masters Degree in jet design by 1952. His education would lead him into the early 1950s where he began a long career at Lockheed Aircraft. That developed by the late 1960s into his joining the famed secret workshop at Lockheed called 'The Skunk Works.'

On the margins of his Officers Pay Data Card in typical fashion of my father, it shows his handwritten calculations in pencil. Those figures increased the amounts typed on the card. The pencil was his choice always over a pen. It took me years to see his way was the best in so many cases.