Hometown Headliners
Material for Headliners vignettes was gathered from various sources including Wikipedia, Baseball Reference, Princeton, IMDB, Poison: Official Website, SRU Athletics, Oberg Industries, the New York Times and the University of Michigan.
1948 —Carl Yankowski is a businessman who was born in Butler in 1948.Yankowski graduated from Butler Senior High School in 1966 and went on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, Yankowski earned degrees in electrical engineering and management.Upon graduation, Yankowski worked as a systems analyst for Proctor & Gamble, but discovered a passion for marketing.In his early career, he developed new products and promotional campaigns for Pringles and Duncan Hines.Yankowski went on to develop the first high-performance cassette tapes at Memorex and worked on the promotional campaign “Is It Live Or Is It Memorex” with Ella Fitzgerald.He then joined PepsiCo, where he expanded Mountain Dew and launched two liter plastic bottles and back-lit vending machines. He also worked on the three-year Pepsi Challenge campaign that was the first time PepsiCo has consistently beaten Coca-Cola in market share.He also worked at General Electric and Cadbury Schweppes.Yankowski joined Polaroid in 1988 as a corporate vice president and eventually moved to Hong Kong for the corporation's Asia/Pacific region.He returned to the United States and became the president and COO of Sony Electronics.While Yankowski was there, Sony almost doubled its U.S. business by $5 billion and launched PlayStation, VAIO, CDMA phones, DVD, Direct TV and Web TV.Yankowski became president and CEO of Reebok in 1998, refocusing the brand on women and fitness.In 1999, Yankowski joined 3Com as the head of its Palm division, and would go on to work for Westerham Group, Majesco, Novell and CRF Health.Since 2003, he has been a non-executive director of Informatica and Chase Corporation. Yankowski also has board positions with the Boston College business school and the MIT Sloan School of Management.
