Local World War II veteran Tom Yingst turned 99 on Friday, Feb. 21, and gathered with friends at the Manada Hill Diner in Hershey to celebrate the milestone “100 – 1” birthday.
Birthday celebration organizer Tom Ehrhart said that his friend’s legacy is even more profound than we know, calling him “one of the world’s unsung heroes.”
Yingst grew up in East Hanover Township and attended the Hemperly one-room schoolhouse, where he recently returned for another photo.
Yingst graduated from Hershey High School’s vocational school in 1943 and joined the Army Air Corps in April 1944. According to a biography published in the Lebanon Daily News, Yingst wanted to be a pilot but color identification issues instead saw him sent to aircraft mechanics school instead at Amarillo, Texas. He ended up at Lockheed Air Force Base in California where he trained on the B-17 Flying Fortress. In 1945 he was first assigned to a weather reconnaissance mission on Guam and then to the 317th Bomb Squadron on Saipan, where he worked on B-29 Super Fortresses through the end of the war helping get them ready to fly back to California.
After working at Hershey Foods while he graduated from Hershey Junior College with a focus on electronics engineering, Yingst went on to spend decades in broadcast manufacturing at companies like RCA, Eimac/Varian, and Harris Broadcast.
Before Silicon Valley became the epicenter of the technological revolution, the digital age sprouted from the seeds of Bell Labs and took hold in places like Lancaster, PA (home to RCA’s tube production plant) and Quincy, Illinois (home to Gates Radio/Harris Broadcast).
At RCA, Yingst not only saw the shift from analog vacuum tubes to transistors, but he played an important role in the shift. RCA Lancaster was a nexus for development of very high power radio frequency transmitters, like RCA’s “Barbara,” the 7,500-watt mobile shortwave transmitter that took Radio Free Europe onto the air.
“His technology is still used in the broadcast industry,” said Ehrhart. “The next time you watch TV, listen to the radio, or use a smartphone, thank Tom Yingst.”
Yingst lives in Hershey. He and his late wife Cloma, who died in 2017, have a son, Tom, and two daughters, Dian and Leslie, who both accompanied Tom and his motorhome on a camping trip this past fall.
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