Mayon Plastics

Christian Barnard, world famous surgeon who performed the first heart transplant used Mayon Plastic surgical tubing during that famous surgery.

C. Walton Lillehei was a heart surgeon at the University of Minnesota in the 1940s. Dr. Lillehei challenged Mayon Plastics to develop tubing that might be less stiff, and therefore more comfortable for patience requiring medical tubing. Mayon Plastics re-engineered tubing originally developed for the beer industry, and these new tubes were implemented with great success.

Mayon Plastics, inc. is celebrating its 64th year in the flexible vinyl tubing business (1946 to 2010). After World War II when rubber garden hoses were scarce, Mayon Plastics made plastic garden hoses for Montgomery Wards, May Company of Cleveland and Marshall Fields of Chicago. Two shifts a day would run tubing for garden hose. When the winders came to work in the morning the tubing was stacked almost ceiling high. We began making surgical tubing in 1948 when Dr. C. Walton Lillehei asked us to make flexible surgical tubing for lung intestinal tubes. From then on the literature expanded the export market on these surgical tubings. Today we supply open heart surgical tubings, Mayon Plastic beverage tubings approved by Anheuser Busch and Adolph Coors, Eastman Kodak photographic tubings; and tubings for ice cream mixes, water softeners, kites, dental equipment, and battery handles. Now we are looking forward to the potential of further new vinyl tubing usages.

A special thanks to you, a valued customer, who helped us along the way. Without you we could not have attained a successful 60+ years in business.

Dear Ray,

I thought you may want to know that Mayon Tubing was used in this epoch-making operation, which has had so much publicity. I do not know if you ever met Chris Barnard who spent several years with Lillehei (The Cover Story – Time Magazine).

Kindest regards – in haste,

Yours sincerely,
H.J. Kretschmer