Engineering
After graduating from LSU, Erickson lived briefly in Philadelphia. There Erickson worked as an engineer until losing his job for refusing to fire a woman who was suspected of being a communist. In the early 1950s Erickson returned once again to Baton Rouge, where he resumed working in the family business and started an independent company, Southern Seating, making stadium bleachers.
After Robert Erickson's death in 1962, Erickson inherited a major interest in the family enterprises, Schuylkill Products Co., Inc., and Schuylkill Lead Corp., and ran them successfully until selling them to Arrow Electronics in 1969 for approximately $5 million. Erickson continued to be financially successful, eventually amassing a personal fortune estimated at over $40 million, most of which came from canny investments in oil-rich real estate. Over a period of years, Erickson's ongoing income was often hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.
Read more about this topic: Reed Erickson
Famous quotes containing the word engineering:
“Mining today is an affair of mathematics, of finance, of the latest in engineering skill. Cautious men behind polished desks in San Francisco figure out in advance the amount of metal to a cubic yard, the number of yards washed a day, the cost of each operation. They have no need of grubstakes.”
—Merle Colby, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)