Jul 31, 2022 10 min read

Don Yenko lived an interesting, diverse and prolific life – albeit a short one.

Packed in his 59 years was an excellence and an exuberance for flying airplanes, driving race cars, playing the piano, innovating while constructing fast vehicles and running a successful business.

He worked fast and his outcomes were precise and efficient.

Speed was always at the core, but it was more than just that.

Don Yenko perished, along with three others March 5, 1987, when his Cessna 210 crashed while landing near Charleston, W.Va.

“My dad was raised in the car business,” said Lynn Yenko, his daughter, “but before he was legal to drive, at the age of 12 – after having traditional piano lessons – he was bored and impatient and went down to the local burlesque house and learned to play jazz from an expert black jazz piano player.”

Playing piano was more passion than hobby.

“At 14-years-old, he was washing airplanes at the local airport, so that he could get flying lessons,” his daughter added. “On his third lesson, there was a substitute flight instructor who asked him whether he was ready to fly solo. He said he was and so he began his flying career, even before he could drive.

“Dad was the class president and very well-liked by his classmates. He was a leader to them and always had the latest hot rod from the dealership, which became a new Corvette every year. He would race around the back roads of Bentleyville and Washington learning how to drive fast, even down Interstate Route 70 before it was completed.”

Yenko graduated from Bentworth High School and Penn State University. {span}Yenko’s daughter, Lynn, accepted a Special Honoree plaque in her father’s honor at the Washington-Greene Co. Chapter of the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame induction banquet in June.

He gained international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s for racing Corvettes in regional races and prestigious endurance contests – including the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He was a four-time Sports Club of America national driving champion.

Don Yenko set up a performance shop for Chevrolet vehicles and others at his Canonsburg-based family dealership, where he is best known for creating the Yenko Camaro – a high-performance version of the Chevrolet Camaro.

Yenko’s former wife, Hope, and mother of his daughters Lynn and Terri Yenko Gould, said “cars were in (Don’s) blood.”

He was born into a car dealership family,” said Hope Yenko. “His father (Frank) would take Don to the Indianapolis 500 when he was a boy. Don was 12-years-old when his father took him to Akron for the soap box derby race. He came in second place (in Class B competition). Frank supported Don in his car racing later. Frank was even a grid marshal at Don’s races.”

“My dad learned everything he knew about cars from his dad, but when his mother and father made him partner in the Chevy dealership, he took it to another level,” Gould said. “But initially, running a dealership was not his first choice.

Business not as Usual

After the war and a brief stint in the Army, Don Yenko attended Washington & Jefferson College.

“But that also was brief,” Gould said. “What he really wanted to do was become a jazz piano player in New York City. So, without his parents’ blessing, he moved to New York to try to break in. He had some opportunities to play, sometimes subbing for other musicians, but the competition was pretty tough and he ran low on cash.

“I remember he told me that he was living in a low-rent apartment and spotted a great piano player walking down the hall of his building. My dad asked him what he was doing there and the guy said, ‘I live here.’ My dad said, ‘It was then that he knew he was in trouble.'”

Added Hope Yenko: “He called his parents to ask if they could send him rent money. What they sent him instead was a one-way, non-refundable plane ticket home.”

“That was the end of my father’s New York career as a jazz musician, but not the end of his passion for jazz and his desire to play,” Gould said.

Don Yenko transferred to Penn State, where he met Hope, and got a degree in commerce and finance. He did attend graduate school to study music briefly, but he was needed elsewhere, so he married Hope and they moved to Bentleyville.

“To get my dad acclimated to the car business, he attended a program with GM that was called something like Dealers sons’ training program.”

In Bentleyville, Frank and Don Yenko were the dealers, Martie (Don’s mom) was the bookkeeper, and Hope worked in the billing department until she had children. It was a family affair.

“We bought our home in Washington when they moved the business to Canonsburg,” Hope Yenko said.

Gould added that her dad “wasn’t the kind of guy who would be fine sitting at a desk in an office day after day.”

“He must have made some kind of deal with my grandparents, because a second story was added on the roof of the Canonsburg building to accommodate his office,” Gould explained. “It was the only place in the building that had air conditioning, and for an office in a car dealership, it had style and a cool vibe.”

Lynn Yenko said a turning point came soon after her father and mother were married.

“They took a trip in his brand-new street legal Vet to Daytona Beach, where he tasted true racing along the beach for the first time,” she said. “He was hooked and asked how he could get into racing further. He was given a contact for Roger Penske, who introduced him to the SCCA l.

“My dad was subsequently introduced to Grady Davis, the Vice President of Gulf Oil and the man responsible for their racing team. He consigned my dad as a driver for their Corvette in the late 1950s and he won the SCCA national championships for B production in 1960 and ’61. He would have won it for 1962, but he had a questionable black flag on one of the races.”

To relax, Don Yenko would play the piano wherever he went. Davis surprised him and flew a piano into the paddock for him at the Daytona raceway.

Yenko Chevrolet was expanding to its new location in Canonsburg, and it was Don’s job to put the business together.

“In the early 1960s, he noticed the Chevrolet Corvair and raced it several times, but didn’t like being passed by the Cobras and Corvettes,” Lynn Yenko said. “He asked the SCCA, what it would take to make a new class of racing for the Corvair and they told him that there would have to be 100 modified identical cars.

“He found the COPO (corporate office production order) program, which was mainly for ordering fleet vehicles and ordered 100 modified 1966 Yenko Stinger Corvairs for racing with special brakes, shifters, exhaust systems and a custom paint job with stripes that were factory warrantied and were able to qualify for insurance. He changed the COPO program forever but surprised my father with the influx of 100 new vehicles in December of 1965, when the dealership usually only sold 150 units per year.

Both of Don Yenko’s daughters said Ralph Nader eventually killed the Corvair “with his inaccurate articles of ‘Unsafe at any speed.'”

That didn’t stop their father, who expanded his muscle car modification to involve the newer models of the Camaro in 1967 through 1969, Yenko Deuce Nova 1968 and 1969, the Yenko Chevelle and finally the Turbo Yenko Camaro in 1981.

“He continued racing with different teams; those sponsors included Best Photo, BF Goodrich, and SunRay Dx to name a few,” Lynn Yenko said. “He won the Citrus 250 24 hours at Daytona in 1969 and had famous co-drivers that included Dickie Smothers and Paul Newman.”

Mike Hostinsky worked for Don Yenko many years and the two became good friends.

“Don was an interesting guy,” Hostinsky said. “He was intelligent, an innovative kind of guy. Anything he had, he tried to fix it up. He always tried to make things better, modify and make them special.”

Hostinsky and Yenko were brothers-in-law for eight years.

“We did a lot together,” Hostinsky added. “Don knew so many people and a lot of people knew him. He was a down-to-earth person. He raced all over the world – Daytona, Watkins Glen and in France. His basement was full of trophies.

Hostinsky said Don Yenko probably did not receive the adulation and publicity he truly deserved.

But Hope said “he did receive a lot of attention at the time. He was always in the limelight and he really enjoyed it.”

Gould said her father still “had more to do, but his time was cut short.

“I’ve had many people ask me if I’m related to Don Yenko,” she added. “There are folks out there who still admire him. Something about the brevity of his life and the rarity of his cars make his talent and contribution more precious.”

Bob McClung wrote a book titled “Yenko: The Man, the Machines, the Legend,” which was published by Car Tech, 2010.

Speculation continues about the possibility of a movie on Yenko’s life being made.

Don Yenko had a lot going for him.

“He was very intelligent and he always had good people working for him,” Hope Yenko said.

“He was super charming, and funny,” added Gould.

“My dad ended up sitting in with Duke Ellington’s band as a piano player for one night (in New York),” Lynn Yenko said.

Listening to Don Yenko play the piano was a family favorite.

“He played the piano all the time,” Gould said. “The first thing he’d do when he got out of bed, even before getting dressed, was sit and start to play.”

The airplane, the racing, were all a means of getting places faster. The shorter the travel time, the better.

Don Yenko just liked to move fast.

“The racing wasn’t limited to the track,” according to Gould. “He knew all the speed traps on the highways near home and even got into CB radio in the 1970s to find out where the “smokies taking pictures” were.

“He did something that blows my mind to this day. We lived off Country Club Road in South Strabane, where the closest freeway entrance was either Meadowlands or off Route 19. Both entrances took at least 15 minutes out of the way to get there from our house. But the freeway passed very near our house and what my dad did on occasion was make “his own” freeway entrance from under an overpass on Country Club Road. The police never caught him doing it, but they were on to him. One day, a fence went up closing the Don Yenko interchange for good.”

“He was entertaining and fun. You wouldn’t be bored. That’s for sure.”

Lynn Yenko said a comment her father made to a racing magazine writer the day before the fatal accident summed his life up so well.

“The (journalist) was asked to write my dad’s memoirs and one of the things my dad said was: ‘Life has been a real gas.’

“His wonderful life was at an end. But he enjoyed speeding through it.”

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