Sitting on the running board of his father Frank's car is my father Lt. Ernest Anders Erickson after a pheasant hunt along the Missouri River in North Dakota in the Fall of 1944. Photograph was taken along side of the family home at 801 Jefferson Avenue in Bismarck.

My father was on leave visiting his family after spending most of 1944 stationed at Horham Airfield in England with the 8th Air Corps - 95th Bomb Group - 334th Squadron. He had completed his thirty five missions over Europe as a pilot of a B-17 and at the time of this photograph was a pilot instructor at airbases in Yuma and Miami. He would serve out his time in the Air Corps throughout the war and after leaving the service he would arrive home to Bismarck in the Summer of 1945.

His return homecoming in Bismarck was an enormous relief to his mother Clara, who had never been comfortable with my father’s decision to fly bombers. He spent time with the family and getting reacquainted with his five year-old sister Dian, who was just a small child when he left for the Air Corps in 1942 and on his only leave he had in October of 1943.

Before winter descended on the Great Plains, Ernest and a close friend who had served in the Pacific during the war, hit the road in a converted 1939 Series 80 Touring two door Sedan Oldsmobile, dubbed, "The Dakota Sleeper,” embarking on a "Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassidy On The Road” trek across the U.S. Traveling around the country, the two had time to reflect on their days in the service, and wind down a bit from the stresses of the early 1940s.

They returned to Bismarck in the late Spring of 1947, where my father lived till 1948 when he enrolled at the University of Colorado at Boulder to study aeronautics and jet design. His future began at Colorado that would eventually take him to Southern California where for 45 years he world work for Lockheed Aircraft and eventually become an integral part of their top secret outfit, the Skunks Works.