Tag: Youth Specialties

  • Youth Specialties in Transition

    I’ve been getting phone calls from people wanting to know how I feel about the recent changes at Youth Specialties. Earlier this year, Tic Long was let go, and last week, Mark Oestreicher (Marko) was also released of his duties. I’m not sure why all of this happened, although I do know that YS was…

  • Early YFC Memories

    My friend Paul Sailhamer unearthed an old photograph that he took at a YFC gathering at Hume Lake in 1962 and sent me a copy last week. I was 17 years old in this photo, a senior in high school (in the plaid shirt with the cool flat top). To my left (or right in…

  • Salute to Tic Long

    This week is Tic Long’s last at Youth Specialties, the organization I co-founded with my old friend Mike Yaconelli. Mike and I and our friend Denny Rydberg ran YS for the first seven or eight years, and then we made the smartest decision we ever made: in 1977, we hired a 25-year-old named Ronald “Tic”…