You're listening to an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue here on our American stories.

And next we bring you the story of Martin Licious and his company, Tempest Tours,

an unconventional Texas-based tour company.

I first became interested in severe weather growing up in North Texas,

where we have big storms on a regular basis when I was a kid.

Probably about four or five years old.

We would have storms that come through that the lightning would hit so close to our house

that our whole house would shake.

Also, right down the street from our house was a TV station called WBAP TV.

Harold Taft was the meteorologist on staff, and Harold is actually credited with creating the

American weather cast, TV weather cast. Before him, they would simply read the text. They had read the forecast off a piece of paper and then he,

being a full-blown meteorologist, decided to use maps to describe to the viewers what was happening.

Believe me, we're going to, the computer will paint this on. Kind of fun to watch it, so let's just do that for a second. See? All the color comes on, all the symbols. All right. Still getting a little light freezing drizzle up here in Gage, Oklahoma. So I'd watch him a lot, and they had this old-fashioned black and white radar. And he'd show that quite a bit as well.

And I think that was kind of when I really became interested in weather.

And then when I was about 12 years old,

I asked my mom if I could build a weather station on top of our house.

She said, sure, just be careful. And I started plotting storms

as they came through on a map. And I entered a science fair and won the competition. I built a 3D

model of a supercell thunderstorm. Eventually I got a car and decided that I'd go out in film storms and then about the same time that I did that, I heard that there was these guys called Storm Chasers, and I met some of them.

And then from there, at that point on, I did it quite a bit.

Eventually, for Tempest tours, that came about in...

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