Remembering the TWISTEX Team: Carl Young

Carl Young, self portrait.
Photograph by Carl Young.

Though Tim was the founding member of the TWISTEX team, he wasn't the only member. Tim took much pride in his team and since the last two posts were geared more towards him and his contributions, I would like to talk a little bit about Paul and Carl today. I've been reaching out to friends and acquaintances of these men to try to share some more intimate information about them. The knowledge you aquire on the internet about them are things that are just so generic and I feel it just doesn't sum up what these two extraordinary men were really like. I want to be able to get up close and personal and teach you about the compassion that these men had for what they did. I will have to separate this into two posts, one for Paul and one for Carl. I found myself acquiring a lot more information that I had previously thought possible, with the help of a few acquaintances, of course!

Let's start with the generic information that can be found on the internet using the Discovery webpage. Mr. Carl Young first started his endeavors with Tim when they met at a meteorological conference. It was at this very conference that Tim encouraged Carl to collect data from inside tornadoes as the main focus of his thesis research, which I am assuming was research for his master's degree. Carl then began to head out to the plains states every spring with Tim, starting in 2003, where they successfully tracked down over 125 tornadoes together.

Carl wasn't always in the meteorology field. He actually got his start working on Hollywood film crews. The year 2000 is when he decided to head east and take a two month storm chasing adventure with his sights set on spotting a few tornadoes, if he was lucky. To his surprise he ended up catching over a dozen tornadoes during that trip. It is said that the raw force of mother nature was no match for the Hollywood pyrotechnics that he was used to. This exact trip is when Carl decided that he wanted to pursue a career in meteorology. He studied tornado dynamics and received his master's degree in Atmospheric Science from the University of Nevada, Reno.

Now, I am not quite satisfied with the information that the internet gives about Carl. It gives no insight into who Carl Young is, but rather tells us about his professional career. I am interested to learn about who Carl was outside of his career. I feel there's so much more to be said about him and his personality than what is portrayed through the media. I reached out to my acquaintance Melissa June Daniels, who was a very close friend of Carl's, to tell me a little bit more about him. After a quick talk with her I learned so many new and fascinating things about him that I might have never found out otherwise.

Photograph by Carl Young

Melissa told me that Carl loved to smile and laugh. He had a brilliant mind and that it was tough to keep up with. His knowledge was pretty much endless and he knew a lot about many things. When Carl was not out on the road with Tim and TWISTEX, he would actively take classes at Lake Tahoe Community college to learn more about acting, which he also had a knack for. Melissa said that his mind for memorizing things was astounding. There was one particular instance where Carl stood up on the church at Julia Morgan's Asilomar and recited all of Shakespeare's Hamlet to her, she said she will never forget that moment. Not only was he passionate about the weather and acting, but he was also passionate about music. Carl's music interests were endless, but he really seemed to love movie soundtracks, Depeche Mode, and lots of 80's bands. From what I understand, he was also a fabulous photographer and much like Paul, had an artistic eye for the perfect shot. This shows in the many photographs of his that you can find floating around the internet. Last but not least, Carl was a fabulous dancer, a sharp dresser, a very kind hearted man, and was very romantic.

I am glad that I got the opportunity to talk to Melissa today and I am thankful that she was willing to share some of her personal knowledge about Carl. I really wanted to get more information out there about how wonderful Carl was, and I think this post just might have accomplished that.

Stay tuned for a post about Paul Samaras! That's the next blog project endeavor!