"We were well aware that the avionics folks would be putting a bunch of gadgets in the airplane, which would increase weight and decrease performance. We stacked the deck. We made the airplane so dense that there wasn't room for all that stuff."

The date was 5 December 1941. ...He was hurrying back to Los Angeles for his wedding. "That afternoon, I boarded the Steamship Lurline bound for San Francisco," Erickson says as he reaches into his scrapbook for a program from his fiftieth wedding anniversary. "Thirty-six hours out to sea, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor."

"You have achieved so much. Your country is a mighty world power. So you tend to see everything as proof of your own achievements. You express self-pride at the expense of self-criticism. Americans have always underestimated the skills of foreigners — Asians, Europeans, everyone else."