Oral History Program Dr. Lea E. Erickson Interviewed by Katie Poulsen 24 March 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Dr. Lea E. Erickson Interviewed by Katie Poulsen 24 March 2017 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Erickson, Lea E., an oral history by Katie Poulsen, 24 March 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Lea Erickson Circa 1985 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Dr. Lea E. Erickson, conducted on March 24, 2017, in her office at the University of Utah, by Katie Poulsen. Dr. Erickson discusses her life and experiences as a minority leader in Northern Utah. KP: Can you start by telling us a little bit about your background, where you came from and things like that? LE: I am from Pocatello, Idaho. I would say I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. I came from a very poor family. My father did not graduate from high school and my mother had some business training after high school. I was the first in my family to be educated, but somehow it never occurred to me that it wasn't an option. I always had big dreams. When I was a little girl, I always imagined I was a princess. I read the story of the Princess and the Pea. I would put something under my mattress in the middle of the night. I woke up the next morning and I was clearly not a princess. KP: What about your education? Where did you get your undergraduate degree? LE: Always teachers were so important to me. School was really where I found meaning and where I found success and so it was easy to build on that. I had a big dream of being a physical therapist. My mother had polio when I was a baby and had some disabilities. The physical therapist that took care of her was a hero in our family. My youngest sister was named after her. So that was my big dream, but I [knew the] reality of where I came from, and I married young and started a family young, so I went to the 1 local college—Idaho State University. I became a dental hygienist almost by accident, because I wanted health science and because I had a baby and it was a good way to get an education. Of course, I thought I was done with my education. I liked dentistry, I liked what I was doing, and well, that is another part of the story. I ended up going to dental school in Maryland and did a master’s degree afterwards—a master’s in public health at the University of Utah and studied geriatrics. I had wonderful experiences. KP: What experiences did you have that led you believe that you could be a leader? LE: I never really thought of myself as a leader, but I think back as a kid, I was the one who was engineering the tent in the backyard, putting on the play, and creating the parade that we were walking down the street. I spent time in Job’s Daughters and spent time in 4-H. I learned how to manage a schedule, meet deadlines, speak publicly—which has turned out to be a very useful skill for me, generally: how to successfully complete projects. Those sort of directed the skills that I’ve needed as an adult. KP: With that, what do you believe your core values are? What do you hold dear to your heart? LE: Obviously, caring and compassion are at the top of the list. I am in a healthcare profession. I am a caregiver by nature. I am a mom and I do all of those things. I keep up with my friends, not all the time because I lead a busy life, but I'm always in kind of the caring role. My role here at the 2 school—one of my roles—is the Assistant Dean for Student Affairs. I’m the one the student comes to with their issues. Of course, I took care of patients for years, so the caring piece is a big piece. But I think a bigger piece than that is integrity. I commit to doing things. I do what I tell people I'll do, and I'm honest in my dealings with people, but it’s more than just not telling lies and not doing crooked things. I am honest in my intentions and my willingness to do what I am committed to doing. I have courage, and when I was young, I wouldn't have said that. I think I was maybe a little too naive to know that what I was doing was courage, but I’ve done a lot unusual things that required some courage. KP: I noticed that you were one of the first female dental residents at the VA [in Salt Lake City]. I don't know any other attributes as that, but that takes courage to be in at that point in a man's world, right? How has dentistry changed since then? LE: I was very much a lone woman in a man’s world. I was the first female resident at the VA, but I was also one of their first residents. When I came to Utah to practice, there were two other women who came the same year I did. We were the first women to practice in Utah, and we were the only women for a significant period of time. I was one of the first women on the Utah Dental Association Board and the Salt Lake District Dental Society Board. I was oblivious, sitting in the room, and I was often invisible. People sort of pretended I wasn't there. They kind of walked around; they would sit in other places. So, I often had a sense of invisibility. 3 That changed overtime, whether I made myself visible, or whether I just continued to be there, or my presence was just there. But I think that people began to notice that I brought something to the table, just because the thing that I talked about earlier, in terms of, somebody asks me to do something, I committed to do it and did it—well, eventually, that was noticed, and they forgot I didn't fit and they didn't know [what] to do with me. Now I was just part of the community. Utah still has the lowest percentage of dentists in the country, and we struggle in the school to get qualified women students to apply, but the ones who have applied have been phenomenal. KP: Name a person who has had a tremendous impact on you as a leader. How did this person impact your life generally and your leadership abilities specifically? LE: I couldn't come with just one. There are three that are really important to me. I am going to start with the first one. His name was Jean Fisher; he was VA Dentist that I meet when I was a hygienist. I was just having a conversation with him, and he said he taught at the dental school parttime. He was telling me about a student [who], every time he criticized her, she burst into tears. So, it was really kind of a hostile story, and yet that was when the light went on: a female dentist, I didn't know there was such a thing. I didn't know it was an opportunity, and it was pretty much a beeline from there to dental school. It was two years, I think, from that dental hygiene meeting in Houston to my starting dental school. 4 He became my greatest cheerleader, and he became my greatest fan; he always buoyed me up. He opened windows and doors, in terms of opportunities for me, but also in terms of what my world could be. My world had been so much smaller growing up, as I said, in a little house on the end of the road in Pocatello, Idaho. He gave me a new world. The two other people were really models for me in how to be a dentist, but he allowed me to become a dentist. The other two were how to be a dentist. One was John Costley, who was chief of the dental service at the VA and [was a] model for me being bold. It took me a long time to learn that, being bold. He modeled for me how to be bold, caring, and compassionate at the same time. Then I compare that with my other model, who is Dr. Jay Aldous, who was the residency director at the University for many, many years. He applied the same caring and compassion with a very gentle way of interacting. Embodying as much as I could from those three dentists really helped to at least create a vision of what I wanted to be. KP: So, what do you see as the biggest challenge to overcome in terms of being a woman, specifically in northern Utah? How do you think you can overcome these challenges? LE: Because I ended up in geriatric dentistry, there aren’t a lot of us who are in that field, so it gave me this very small pond. It was easy for a plain old fish to become a big fish because the pond was so little. It really is an opportunity for women in Northern Utah. Because we are a small pond, 5 we really have an opportunity to have a big impact. I think some of the challenges: I think there is still the issue of a little bit of invisibility. Frankly, every time I’ve tried to get women dentists together, because of everyone juggling life issues, I think it’s more difficult for women to juggle their family issue and be involved in the greater dental community. We’ve not been successful at creating a community together, so anything I think we can do to support each other is important. We have to be interested in the great dental community, whether that means being a part of the Salt Lake Dental Society or the local dental society or the Utah Dental Association. At the very least, be involved with Give Kids a Smile, being visible where you can. [It’s] service to the community, but visibility is the key. I think a piece that is really important is for people to find their niche, for women to find what their passion is. If your passion isn't dentistry, don't be here. Even in dentistry, there are a whole lot of ways to practice, so find your niche. You’ll end up where you belong. Private practice was not my niche; I was not well-suited for it. I did it well, I took good care of my patients, but it wasn't necessarily good for me. After I went back and did geriatrics, the VA was wonderful because I got to do dentistry every day, and I got to take care of an underserved population that had complex difficult needs. I had a wonderful career at the VA and I got to work with amazing professionals, where in my private practice it was just me in the office. That wasn't a good place for me. Now I’m in education, which is even more fun than the VA because I have 6 students and residents and everything is new every day. It makes me feel alive. So, the key message I would say is, “Find what you love and do what you love.” I have worked with women who said, “It’s unfair to me, I am not treated equally. I’m not treated fairly,” but they don’t do anything to change it. They whine. Whining doesn’t change it. What changes it is that we are in there with our sleeves rolled up and we are working right next to our male colleagues, because that’s what they are, our colleagues. We are working towards the same goal. I always describe myself as a person who likes to lead from the back of the room. I would rather be the one who jumps up to the whiteboard and starts writing the notes, organizing, putting them together and summarizing. Someone else is standing in the front of the room running the meeting. That doesn’t work when you’re good at it. When you’re good at it, pretty soon they’ve moved you to the front of the room. We have to work in our comfort zones, but know that we eventually are going to have to move out of that comfort zone. If our comfort zone is sitting quietly in the back of room, then we are going to make no changes. If we are sitting quietly in the back of the room making contributions, then do that with our full enthusiasm, and be prepared that eventually, we have to be in the front of the room. Those of us that have skills need to be in the front of the 7 room, and those that just want sit in the back and serve, we need those people too. I'm not the one who’s going to be the person who I just described, who is always upset because she is not respected, or she is not given this role or that role. I will politely ask for what I need or advocate for myself, but I’ll do it very politely. I will be patient waiting for a response and I’ll persevere. I will go back, and I will ask again, and I will ask again, and that has served me very well. This is another maybe gender issue. It took a long time for me to learn that it is okay for me to ask for what I needed or what I wanted—and when I say I, I don’t necessarily mean myself, personally. Advocating for dentistry at the VA my inclination was okay. We worked really hard and we do our job and it will come our way. I work really hard and I do my job and they’ll give me a raise when it’s appropriate. Whether I am talking corporately or whether I am talking for just myself, it didn’t seem like I had permission to ask. I did learn to ask, and I learned to ask over and over. I have also learned to be patient and persevere and eventually I got there. Occasionally, it doesn't happen. I had an experience where I discovered that I was being paid about 25% less than another person with fewer credentials and less education. I did advocate for that, because by then, I had learned how, and it didn’t happen, so I moved on to a different position. We have to take care of ourselves. 8 KP: Thank you for letting me come visit with you. It’s been really insightful for me. LE: My pleasure. 9