Despite the isolation, or maybe because of it, he grew up imbued with a lively interest in the outside world. I had a fascination with other people and places. My mother was a school teacher, and my parents put a high value on travel. Before I went away to college, I had been to the East, and to the West several times. I made sense of a lot of what I saw in economic terms.
Farmers are entrepreneurs, of course.
I watched my father make decisions all the time, about marketing, production . . . I looked at how other people made decisions, too. It was no surprise when, as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, Erickson decided on a major in geography with a minor in economics. He stayed to take a master's degree with urban geographer John Borchert. For his Ph.D., heeding Borchert's advice, Erickson went to the University of Washington to study with regional economic theorist Morgan Thomas, and there he intensified what has become a career-long interest in understanding the forces that drive economic development on a regional scale.