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A Celebration of Tom's Life
Thomas James Young
March 1948 - May 2033
Tom was a beloved husband, father, grandfather, and dear friend and colleague. As an impartial, fair-minded, brilliant mediator, he touched many lives.
Tom joined the CSU Stanislaus faculty in 1981 as a Professor of Communication Studies. In his role, as professor, faculty union leader and then Assistant to the President of equal Opportunity and Internal Relations at CSU Stanislaus, Tom was highly praised for his expertise at me mediating and resolving personnel conflict issues. He was a strong advocate of affirmative action, equal opportunity, and non-discrimination.
During his communication studies teaching career, Tom was the advisor to the CSU Stanislaus student newspaper, The Signal. His commitment and dedication to his students helped to build an award-winning mass media program. As President of the California Faculty Association (CFA) from 1990 to 1994,
Tom gained a reputation for helping to resolve labor conflicts. He served two years at the state level as a CFA vice president and was also a CSU Stanislaus faculty representative to the CSU Statewide Academic Senate for nine years. With all his responsibilities, Tom still found time to directly serve students by becoming co-founder of the CSU Stanislaus Faculty Mentor Program.
To had also taught communication studies for seven years at West Virginia University. He earned his doctorate in communication at the University of Oregon. He received his bachelor's degree from CSU Long Beach and his master's degree from Illinois State University. He will be missed by all who were fortunate enough to have known him.
"Tom was a very special friend and confidant. I will truly miss not being able to turn to him on a professional level. On a personal level, I will miss his true friendship, endearing personality, and marvelous sense of humor even more. He served the University well." DR MARVALENE HUGES, President of CSU Stanislaus
"Tom was an ardent spokesman for student, faculty, and our University and had a tremendous influence on my students. He had an amazing talent for effectively working well with faculty and administrators, right up to the Chancellor of the CSU. He had a bulldog tenacity when he got involved in an issue" DR FRED HIPERT, Professor of Communication Studies.
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Dinah Newman (Granafei)
What an extraordinary person. He was my first teenage crush. I never got to know him well because I was too shy.
Dinah Newman (Granafei)
Press-Telegram 5-13-03
Professor a campus mentor, advocate
Obituary: Thomas Young entered academia after disability kept him out of public teaching.
By David Rogers
Before he earned his reputation as a mentor to students and a strong advocate for fellow faculty members at Cal State Stanislaus, Long Beach native Thomas James Young was told he couldn't teach high school because of his disability.
"It was a turning point for him,' said his wife, Sandra. Tom, who as a Cal State Long Beach undergraduate student in the late 1960s, was told by a teaching credential committee (but not the university) that credentialing rules forbade him from teaching because he had epilepsy, Sandra said.
Instead, Tom earned a doctorate in communications and began teaching journalism at CSU Stanislaus in 1981, where many of his students went on to successful careers in the communications field, said university spokesman Don Hansen.
Tom also became an expert in conflict resolution, both as a leader for the California Faculty Association, and in his last post at the school, as the assistant to the president for equal opportunity and internal relations, Hansen said.
Tom died on May 9 at his Turlock home from lung cancer. A smoker, Tom was 55.
"Tom was an ardent spokesman for students, faculty, and our university,' said Fred Hilpert, a communications studies professor at CSU Stanislaus, in a university statement. "He had a tremendous influence on many students.'
As president of the CSU Stanislaus CFA from 1990 to 1994, "Tom had an amazing talent for effectively working well with faculty and administrators, right up to the chancellor of the CSU,' Hilpert said. "He had a bulldog tenacity when he got involved in an issue.'
Tom served as adviser to the university's student newspaper, The Signal, and twice served as chairman of the university's communications studies department, Hansen said.
Tom's experience in discrimination as an undergraduate student helped him in the university president's office, where he served as a key adviser on equal opportunity and nondiscrimination practices, and was a strong advocate for affirmative action, Hansen said.
Tom is survived by his wife Sandra; sons Rob, Jim and Scott; daughters Jacqueline Benner and Kelly Almeida; mother Gloria Young; sisters Patti Castro, Sherry Hargrove and Cindy Burke; and 11 grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held Wednesday at 4 p.m. in Turlock at the CSU Stanislaus campus, 801 W. Monte Vista Ave., in the pergola area next to Village Lake.
Memorial contributions may be made to the Thomas James Young Memorial Scholarship Endowment in Conflict Resolution Management, CSU Stanislaus Foundation, c/o Christine Hollister, Development and University Relations, 801 W. Monte Vista Ave., Turlock, CA 95382.
These news clips are provided by the Public Affairs Department of The California State University. They are intended for the internal use of The California State University system and should not be redistributed. Questions and submissions may be sent to publicaffairs@calstate.edu.
Michael Scott
I was taken aback by the fact that what I thought I wrote about my best friend is missing from this page. The following is an abridged version of the eulogy I shared at Tom's memorial, now 13 years past.
Tommy Boy
I do not believe in coincidence. I do not believe that the people who touch us most in life find us as a result of chance.
I believe instead in convergence and in synchronicity. . . that we find each other because we must if we are to have any hope of realizing the purpose for which each of us is born.
Tom and I found each other when we were little more than boys, raw-boned and full of attitude, just hoping to standout among the 1500 other sophomores who started Robert A. Millikan High School with us in the fall of 1963.
And with little else in common than the fact that we were both illegally off campus smoking a cigarette between classes, we not only picked each other out from the crowd . . . we began a conversation that lasted 40 years, and started a relationship that would help me in particular grow to be a man.
So what do you say about the person whose ear and counsel you've come to depend on through out the majority of your life? What can you realistically hope to share about someone who has helped you to see in yourself and others what you needed to see?
The stories I could tell. . .but won't either because I'm implicated in an unflattering manner or because Tom would want me to protect the innocent.
So I'll begin with the obvious: Tom was gifted of mind. And to suggest that he was tenacious in thought and reason would be the grossest of understatements. With the possible exception of auto mechanics and household electrical wiring he could learn most anything. Whereas most of us either run away or turn to an expert when we find ourselves confronted with unfamiliar intellectual territory, Tom took it upon himself to become the expert. Tom wasn't an attorney, for instance, but if Bill Bennett was still a betting man he would wager Tom knew labor law and its appropriate application in the academy as well a if not better than 90% of the labor attorneys within a 300-mile radius of Turlock. Tom also wasn't a CPA. But I know for a fact that on learning that he was being audited by the IRS several years back, he learned the tax code so well that by the end of the process, the Feds decided that the government owed him more money.
Yet, the gift that I think most distinguished Tom from the rest of us, the gift that I personally most envied, was this enormous ability he had for allowing others to tap into his seemingly inexhaustible supply of humanity.
To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom didn't simply listen to you," he heard you exactly as you wanted to be heard; he didn't just see you but let you know that he saw you as you would always want to be seen; and he always left you with the impression that no matter what his prejudice on a matter might be . . .it was a prejudice that was undeniably in your favor.
Nowhere was this gift more apparent than it was in Tom's classroom. For those of you who never had the privilege to either take a class from Tom or observe Tom working with students, know this: Tom didn't simply teach his students. . .Tom gave them a religious experience. He reached young, old and in-between as few can, teaching the best and the brightest students that they should never take themselves too seriously, and convincing those who doubted themselves without good reason that they didn't take themselves seriously enough.
Tom's classroom disciples are legion, and the gospel according to Tom is practiced every single day in elementary and middle schools in West Virginia and Kentucky, high schools in New York and in New Jersey, and in the classrooms found in places such as College Park Pennsylvania, College Station Texas . . .even Anchorage, Alaska.
All too often, the measure of a man or a woman is how long the list of his/her publicly recognized achievements is; for example, offices held, awards won, books and articles published, possessions accumulated. In Tom, however, it was the intangible and not easily quantified achievements in his life that were and are the most significant.
Tom would not want to us to remember and honor him primarily for what he achieved, even though his professional accomplishments were personally important to him.
Instead, the Tom Young I knew and understood best would want us to remember him and his living presence in:
The adoring eyes of Sandi, the woman who made Tom complete.
The confident voice and quiet strength he passed down to his son, Rob.
The stubborn streak and tenacity of spirit in his first born, Jacquelyn.
The bright light that shines behind the eyes of Jim, the son who knew that Tom was just waiting for him to call.
The look upon the faces of Scott and Kelly when they look into the faces of their own children.
And the visible and justifiable pride you can see in the carriage of his Mom, Gloria, and his Sisters, Patti, Sherry and Cindy when any one mentions Tom's name.
When we lose too soon the people we most love, there is a tendency for us to feel diminished and cheated. But just think how much more our lives would have been diminished. . .how much more cheated we would feel, had this remarkable man never been a part of our lives.
In closing, I want you to know that nearly 20 years ago Tom and I promised each other that barring our simultaneous death, which back then was not nearly as improbable as it might seem, one of us would eulogize the other. Then Tom, who could be disarmingly direct, asked me without batting an eye, "What will you say about me?"
I hemmed and hawed a bit, obviously taken aback by the unexpected question he had asked. Finally, I said to him what I share with you now. " Tommy Young, you are and you always will be my bridge over troubled water."
Suzanne Batcheller (Hendricks)
Mike's touching eulogy made me sad than I never knew Tom beyond High School. I admired him from afar, never in his circle.