The gymnastics champion sprang to stardom at the 1984 Olympics, where she became the first American woman to win a gold medal in the all-around competition. Her family is raising money online, saying she lacks health insurance.
May Lou Retton at the 1984 Olympics, where she won five medals.
Mary Lou Retton, who became one of the most popular athletes in the country after winning the all-around women’s gymnastics competition at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, has pneumonia and is “fighting for her life” in the intensive care unit, her daughter said in a statement this week.
Retton’s daughter McKenna Lane Kelley said on Instagram that her mother “is not able to breathe on her own” and that she had been in the intensive care unit for more than a week.
Kelley asked for donations to help pay for her mother’s hospital bills, saying her mother lacked health insurance. By Wednesday, she had raised more than $260,000 online from more than 4,600 donors.
She did not share more specific information about her mother’s condition, though she said that her pneumonia was “a very rare form.” It was not clear what hospital Retton was in.
Kelley, who was a gymnast at Louisiana State University, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, another daughter, Shayla Kelley Schrepfer, released a video on Instagram thanking people for “all the love and support that you’ve given to my mom.”
“She’s still fighting,” Schrepfer said. “It’s going to be a day-by-day process, and we hope that you guys will respect her boundaries, as we want to keep the details between her and our family right now. She has been treated with the best of the best professionals here, and it has been such a blessing to have their hands on her.”
At the 1984 Olympics, Retton became the first American woman to win the all-around gold medal or any individual Olympic medal in gymnastics. Going into the final rotation of the competition, she was five-hundredths of a point behind Romania’s Ecaterina Szabo, and the only way she could beat Szabo was to score a perfect 10 on vault.
Retton scored a perfect 10.
She won five medals in Los Angeles, including two silvers, for team and vault, and two bronzes, for uneven bars and floor exercise.
Though there was an asterisk by Retton’s victory in the history books — the Soviet Union, which was the most dominant force in women’s gymnastics at the time, boycotted the 1984 Games — it nonetheless made her a sports hero in the United States. In addition to earning her the traditional trappings of Olympic gold, like appearing on a Wheaties box, she was widely viewed as an inspiration to a new generation of American girls entering gymnastics.
Even as the American gymnastics program grew and the country won more medals, including the team gold in 1996, Retton’s prominence remained: For 20 years, Retton, now 55, was the only American woman to win the all-around title, until Carly Patterson became the second in 2004.
Retton was born in Fairmont, W.Va., and got her start early, like many top gymnasts. By the time Retton was 7 years old, she was training in gymnastics full-time.
Retton’s talent had been apparent from the start, but a big break came at an Olympics elimination tournament in Reno, Nev., in 1982, where she impressed Bela Karolyi, who would go on to coach her in the 1984 Olympics.
“I immediately recognized the tremendous physical potential of this little kid,” Karolyi said in a March 1984 interview.
Retton appeared in a number of films and TV shows in the late 1980s and 1990s, including the comedy film “Scrooged.”
After her athletic career, Retton became a motivational speaker to promote the benefits of proper nutrition and regular exercise.
The whole internet coIIaborated to determine what this kitchen tooI was
The whole internet collaborated to determine what this kitchen tool was.
The mixer with rotating parts was patented in 1856 by Baltimore, Maryland, tinner Ralph Collier. This was followed by E.P. Griffith’s whisk patented in England in 1857. Another hand-turned rotary egg beater was patented by J.F. and E.P. Monroe in 1859 in the US.
Their egg beater patent was one of the earliest bought up by the Dover Stamping Company, whose Dover egg beaters became a classic American brand.The term “Dover beater” was commonly in use in February 1929, as seen in this recipe from the Gazette newspaper of Cedar Rapids, IA, for “Hur-Mon Bavarian Cream,” a whipped dessert recipe featuring gelatin, whipped cream, banana and gingerale.\
The Monroe design was also manufactured in England.[4] In 1870, Turner Williams of Providence, R.I., invented another Dover egg beater model. In 1884, Willis Johnson of Cincinnati, Ohio, invented new improvements to the egg beater.
The first mixer with electric motor is thought to be the one invented by American Rufus Eastman in 1885.The Hobart Manufacturing Company was an early manufacturer of large commercial mixers,] and they say a new model introduced in 1914 played a key role in the mixer part of their business.
The Hobart KitchenAid and Sunbeam Mixmaster (first produced 1910) were two very early US brands of electric mixer.Domestic electric mixers were rarely used before the 1920s, when they were adopted more widely for home use.
In 1908 Herbert Johnston, an engineer for the Hobart Manufacturing Company, invented an electric standing mixer. His inspiration came from observing a baker mixing bread dough with a metal spoon; soon he was toying with a mechanical counterpart.
By 1915, his 20 gallon (80 L) mixer was standard equipment for most large bakeries. In 1919, Hobart introduced the Kitchen Aid Food Preparer (stand mixer) for the home.
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