Seasoned Saints is a series of stories on Atlanta seniors who have helped shape the way the city is seen through local media, community activism, and a national lens. These stories are representative of Black History Month and the people who helped make Black history every day. Some are well-known the world over, while others’ names might only ring a bell within their respective communities. Black history is all around us.
This is part three of the four-part series.
-D. Suggs
The Atlanta Voice
The artifacts and mementos of a long life can be seen all over the office of former automotive dealership owner and auto industry executive Donald P. Tinsley. Now living in metro Atlanta, the 87-year-old Tinsley pulled up a chair and pointed to a slip of paper in a frame on the east wall of his office. The paper, dated July 1927, was a pay slip of his late father’s work week at a coal company in Kentucky.
That nearly 100-year-old piece of history is just one of the conversation pieces Tinsley has around his office and his home. A child of a teacher, Tinsley enjoys talking about history and has a respect for memories.
“Time is very valuable,” Tinsley said. “I’ve got stuff everywhere in here.”
Tinsley and his wife Helen had two children, Don, Jr. and Melissa, during what continues to be a 68-year marriage. The pair married when they were 18 years old, respectively, on December 23, 1956, in Union County, Indiana.
“The only reason we got married at 18 was because in Indiana I couldn’t get married below the age of 18,” said Tinsley, who was born in Pineville, Kentucky in 1938.
The marriage certificate, which remains in the original binding and cover, is kept safe in a drawer in Tinsley’s office. He’s always been a collector, someone who understands that documents like marriage certificates, vintage family documents, and photos are instrumental to maintaining a family’s history.
“I can’t remember everything,” Tinsley jokes.
Asked what the secret to a long marriage is, Tinsley smiled.
“Love has to come in there, but love doesn’t carry you 68 years because you’re two individuals,” he said. “It takes patience and understanding.”
Long ago, the Tinsleys agreed to never go to bed angry, he said.
“We wouldn’t start another day without solving the problem we had, because we had them in 68 years,” Tinsley said. “It takes both sides.”
A lover of automobiles since he was a boy -Tinsley said he owned his first car at age 12. He bought it with the money he saved from shoveling snow and curing grass in the winter and summer. He hid the purchase from his parents and only shared his secret illegal purchase with his brother Bill, who was nine years older.
“I wouldn’t take it home because my parents were strict. I would park the car three blocks from the house and walk home,” Tinsley.
Donald and Bill Tinslet were always close despite the age difference and the brothers would continue that bond throughout their lives. They vacationed with their families in Hawaii on their birthday, which is on the same day, for example.
The brothers even owned a car dealership together in Redwood City, California. The Tinsley Buick-Opel dealership was a rarity, both in Redwood City and California as a whole. Asked if he could have co-owned a car dealership of a major and popular brand like Buick in any other place other than California in the 1970’s, Tinsley was very clear with his answer.
“No. It had to be California,” he said.
The auto industry was similar to many other businesses in America during the 1960’s, 1970’s, and even the 1980’s: racism often dictated who was given the opportunity to run a business. The Tinsley brothers were able to get the loans necessary to start a dealership because they had the backing of Buick, a major brand. Without it there was no way to get the business off the ground, says Tinsley.
General Motors, one of the largest automotive manufacturers in the world, even made a film about Tinsley Buick-Opel because of how diverse the staff was there.
“We had Blacks, Koreans, Hispanics working as dealers and mechanics, it was the United Nations,” Tinsley jokes. “It had to be in California, that was the only way we could have had the diversity we had.”
Tinsley helped co-found the National Association of Minority Automobile Dealers (NAMAD) in 1980. The 501 (c) (3) Maryland-based organization was created to increase the number of minority-owned dealerships around the country. When Tinsley became the owner of the Legacy Ford dealership in suburban Ohio, he broke ground as one of the automobile giant’s first Black dealership owners.
The Tinsleys count former NBA legend Bill Russell and PGA legends Lee Elder and Charlie Sifford, all long since passed, as family friends. Tinsley enjoyed playing golf for decades before multiple major surgeries and a battle and victory over bladder cancer, which took place when he was in his 70’s, slowed him down a bit.
These days he still enjoys family vacations to Lake Sardine in Tahoe National Forest. The Tinsley family and by extension through marriage, the Cates family (Melissa married Edward Cates II), have been spending time at Lake Sardine for more than six decades, according to Tinsley.
“We took our son there when he was a month old, that’s how young he was the first time,” Tinsley said of the annual family trips to Lake Sardine.
Asked what the secret to a long life is, Tinsley first answered that he didn’t know. Then he thought some more. He no longer has back pain, heart issues, and is a cancer survivor.
“I probably feel better in the last two years than I have since I was 20 years old,” he said. “I guess the secret is to see a doctor when you don’t feel good.”