Donald D. Erwin is a retired business executive living in Lake Isabella, California. He was born in 1933 in Kansas, the youngest son of eight children of Odes and Hazel Erwin. In 1936 his parents migrated to California as part of the Dust Bowl exodus. They stayed briefly near Bakersfield, California in Weedpatch Camp, made famous by John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. After a year of homelessness as migrants working the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, he and his parents settled in Madera, California, where his father eventually obtained a small dairy farm. 

In 1948, his parents sold their holdings and returned to Kansas, where they purchased a farm outside of Neodesha in Southeastern Kansas, near the original homestead of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie.

During the return trip Donald, only fifteen, drove his own newly purchased 1930 Ford Model A Sport Coupe along Route 66, behind his parents' 1948 Willys-Overland Jeep Wagon. This became the first of many driving adventures Donald undertook in his life.  

Donald has driven trucks across Korea as a United States Marine, during the first year of the conflict. He has taxied fellow Marines from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, all over the eastern seaboard, including Washington D.C..  He was present there on November 10, 1954, the 179th anniversary of the U.S. Marine Corps, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a ceremony, dedicated the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial. 

He has toured Iceland and Europe, as an Embassy Guard, including behind the Iron Curtain where he served during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. 

As a civilian, he continued his avid traveling. He has driven through all fifty states of the USA, by car or touring motorcycle, Mexico, and Western Canada, on the Alcan Highway, reaching the Arctic Circle in Alaska.

In 2023, at the age of ninety, he is recreating his 1948 trip in a 1930 Ford Model A Coupe Roadster Deluxe from Madera, California, to Neodesha, Kansas, along Route 66 and its modern replacement highways.

Scott Patrick Erwin is an American actor and writer. He is the author of Life is Like a Fast Car, a book of essays inspired by a 3,900-mile trip taken with his Father in a brand new GT Mustang, in a reverse Okie Migration. It uses the metaphor of a fast vehicle to look at life and our mental mindsets.

He is an adventurer at heart. He has climbed Mt. Whitney, explored the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland, driven Route 66, and skydived over California. He has trained in the martial arts, and appreciates a really great craft beer.

Scott was born in the Central Valley of California and raised on Buck Owens’ “Streets of Bakersfield.”  He is a former financial professional and business school graduate of Pepperdine University and California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. 

In his first act of life, he was a CPA and has worked with companies such as Deloitte, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Castle & Cooke, Viacom, Mammoth Mountain and Aera Energy, a Joint Venture between Exxon Mobil & Royal Dutch Shell.

www.scottpatrickerwin.com

scottpatrickerwin@gmail.com