After a career spent in industrial electronics, Coulter Young D. III retired and now spends his time pulling together his various interests in art, collecting, and electronics to create the 3-D assemblages he calls SK-8 Art.
Born September 5, 1946 in New York City, Coulter spent his first nine years in New Rochelle. At the age of 9, he moved to Westfield, New Jersey where his lifelong interest in building, electronics, mechanics and the visual‐spatial aspects of objects began. He spent his free time building models of airplanes, boats, military vehicles and see‐through plastic replicas of engines.
In high school Coulter took up photography and spent hours in the dark room. He attended the University of South Carolina for two years but left when he could not find an academic program that interested him. He went to work at Ward Electronics, a company that manufactured language labs, television stations and routing switchers, and never returned to the university. Instead he attended night school for two years at Radio, Electronic, Technology School (RETS) and received an Associate's degree in Industrial Electronics while he continued at Ward as an engineering assistant, service manager and systems engineer. That work took him to Westchester Medical Center Mental Retardation Institute (MRI), a University Center for Excellence in the field of developmental disabilities. He installed a state‐of‐the‐art closed‐circuit system in classrooms and interview rooms so that students and professors could observe and learn teaching and interviewing strategies. He stayed there for 28 years before retiring in April, 2003. While at MRI, which later changed its name to the Westchester Institute for Human Development (WIHD), Coulter worked as a Media Specialist, eventually becoming Director of Media. He produced several hundred educational videos dealing with different aspects of developmental disabilities for training and recruitment purposes. He also did photography and prepared the visual formats for research presentations.