 She was adopted at the age of six weeks and raised on a farm outside of Portland by her great aunt and uncle, James Martin and Hannah (Wrolstad) Erickson.She attended the University of Oregon in Eugene on an art scholarship, working in the summers at the Commercial Iron Works shipyards in Portland as a scaler scraping ships' hulls to remove rust, and eventually as a blueprint machine operator at another shipyard ironworks, Poole McGonigle.She graduated in 1946.