Andrew Toti; Inventor Designed Mae West Vest
LA Times
Andrew Toti, who designed the Mae West flotation vest that saved thousands of downed World War II pilots, including former President George H.W. Bush, has died. He was 89.
Toti died March 20 at his rural Modesto home of unspecified causes.
“Please tell [your father] a grateful Navy man who benefited from his invention sends his best wishes,” Bush wrote Toti’s daughter, Andrea Pimental of Sacramento, last fall when the inventor opened his Andrew Toti Museum of Innovations near Modesto.
Bush was wearing a Mae West vest when, as a torpedo bomber pilot, he was shot down over the Pacific during World War II.
The vest came into being because Toti’s mother was a worrier. At 16, the youth had acquired a boat and built the engine into a powerhouse, and, because he couldn’t swim, she feared he might drown.
To reassure her, Toti invented a personal life preserver.
“The first one was filled with duck feathers,” he told the Modesto Bee at the museum’s opening. “That was too bulky and heavy, so I switched to air.”
The life vest consisted of two pneumatic compartments of rubber-coated yellow fabric that could be inflated separately by blowing into a tube, plus automatic carbon-dioxide inflation systems operated by pulling respective cords. The vest was anchored by waist and crotch straps.
The War Department heard about the invention and paid Toti $1,600 for the rights to what was dubbed the Mae West vest, after the buxom film star.
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