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Business View Magazine
“Yellow Jacket,” a wood-hull boat known for its speed
and durability. The boats were assembled in Texas
by the Yellow Jacket Boat Company, whose one-time,
part-owner was the popular cowboy and TV star, Roy
Rogers. “That’s how we got in the boating business,”
says Youker. “And then, a guy by the name of Bob Ham-
mond ran into my father. He and three other guys were
beginning to build one of the very first fiberglass boats
called the ‘Glastron.’” Hammond and his partners, Bill
Gaston, Bob Shoop, and Guy Woodward, founded the
Glastron Boat Company in Austin, in 1956; the firm
eventually became one of the largest boat manufactur-
ers in the world. “We were one of the very first to have
fiberglass boats back in the mid ‘50s,” says Youker.
Rob joined the company and took over the San Benito
store in 1972, after graduating from the University of
Texas in Austin with a degree in marketing. He explains
how The Sportsman soon began to concentrate only on
selling shallow water boats, developing a niche market
ideally suited to the region’s particular aquatic charac-
ter. “Well, people, at the time, were catching fish, but
they had to walk quite a ways out on the shallow flats
to get out to the fish,” he says. “So, a guy in Harlingen,
Rem Elmore, a cabinet maker and fisherman, got his
buddies together and, in his shop, they built one of the
first ‘scooters.’
“A scooter was a 12-foot piece of plywood that had
sides on it and was turned up in the front. They put
a small console on the middle of it, installed a little
25-horsepower engine on the back and they would
lean the boat to turn it – they didn’t even use the mo-
tor’s tiller. And that was the first boat to get these guys
back on the flats, and that’s how we started in shallow
water boats in the area. A few years later, a local boat
