In 1978, Byron Donzis walked into a Houston hospital looking for Dan Pastorini, the Houston Oilers’ prized quarterback who was laid up with three broken ribs from a recent game. Donzis was wearing a trench coat and carrying a large bag. He was accompanied by an associate wielding a baseball bat.

They sweet-talked their way past the nurses and into Pastorini’s private room. The quarterback thought the two strange men must have lost money on the game and had come for revenge.

Instead, Donzis instructed his friend to smack him across his rib cage as hard as he could with the bat. His buddy hit him four or five times but Donzis didn’t flinch. When he pulled back his coat to reveal a garment that looked like a life jacket, Pastorini was agog.

“I said, ‘I’d like to have one of those,’” Pastorini recalled telling Donzis. A few days later, the National Football League star donned Donzis’ “flak jacket” in a big game and led his team to the playoffs.

The flak jacket became standard gear in the NFL and the greatest success in Donzis’ prolific and sundry career as an inventor-entrepreneur.

Donzis, 79, who died Jan. 4 in Landrum, S.C., after a stroke, turned his ideas into useful products in fields as diverse as sports equipment, cosmetics, floristry and medicine.

“He just wanted to know how things worked and what he could do to make things better,” said his wife, Martha Gibson Donzis.

His name appears on more than 35 patents, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. His inventions include a prefabricated tennis court, inflatable running shoes, stadium seats with solar panels and an X-ray machine for detecting leaky oil pipelines.

Like many inventors, he had more ideas than successes and lost a number of fortunes.

“It’s almost a curse,” Sue Shaper, a Houston intellectual property attorney who represented Donzis for many years, said Thursday about the personality of inventors. “They see so many things and they can’t pursue them all.”

Before the flak jacket, Donzis developed running shoes with air chambers inflated by a built-in pump and acquired a patent on the system in 1972. Two decades later he successfully sued sports shoe maker Reebok for infringing on his patent when it marketed its “Pump” sneaker.

Donzis also discovered the wrinkle-reducing capability of a chemical compound called beta-glucan, which he marketed to leading cosmetics companies, including Estee Lauder and Mary Kay. Licensed under the name Nayad, it won favorable reviews: Vogue magazine described it as “a superstar natural ingredient of the ’90s.”

He once dismissed his inventions for lacking “any social relevance whatever,” and said his real motivation was finding a cure for cancer. Although that goal eluded him, he was an early and important benefactor of the Sunshine Kids Foundation, a Houston-based nonprofit that supports children with cancer.

Donzis was married twice but had no children.

 

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