Frederick Erickson was born in Wisconsin in 1941 and raised in rural Minnesota.  He attended Northwestern University,  receiving bachelors, master’s and  Ph.D.  degrees there.  He became an applied anthropologist and applied linguist,  working primarily in schools of education.  He is also a clergyman,  ordained in the Episcopal Church as a permanent deacon.  Teaching at a number of research universities,  he retired in 2011 from the University of California in Los Angeles,  where he also served as archdeacon for deacons in the Episcopal Church there.   In 2023 he and his wife Joanne Straceski moved from Washington DC to the Seabury retirement community in Bloomfield.