Pudgy Stockton

11 August 1917 – 26 June 2006 · California → Santa Monica

Abbye "Pudgy" Stockton was the best-known woman of the Muscle Beach scene in Santa Monica and the most widely photographed female lifter of 1940s American physical culture. Her "Barbelles" column in Strength & Health ran for a decade, and she helped organise the first AAU-sanctioned weightlifting contest for women in 1947.

Origins

She was born Abbye Eville in California on 11 August 1917 and moved to Santa Monica in 1924. The childhood nickname "Pudgy" stuck, although as an adult she stood about 5 ft 2 in and weighed around 115 lb. In her last year of high school she began dating Les Stockton, a UCLA student; they married in 1941 and had a daughter.

The work

The Stocktons were regulars at Muscle Beach, where they worked mainly on acrobatics and hand-balancing; in their best-known feat Pudgy was the "understander", supporting the 180-lb Les overhead in a hand-to-hand stand. She became a press favourite, appearing in Life and other magazines, in newsreels and in advertisements, and estimated that she had been on forty-two magazine covers by the end of the 1940s. She posed with leading physique men of the day, including John Grimek and Steve Reeves. From 1944 to 1954 she wrote "Barbelles", a regular column on women's training, for Strength & Health.

Notable feats

• At the 1947 AAU-sanctioned women's contest, which she helped organise: press 100 lb, snatch 105 lb, clean and jerk 135 lb, at a bodyweight of about 115 lb.
• Supporting her husband Les, about 180 lb, overhead in a hand-to-hand balance at Muscle Beach.
• "Miss Physical Culture Venus", 1948 — her only physique title, at a time when such contests for women were almost non-existent.

Method

Stockton trained with barbells and dumbbells alongside her acrobatic work, and her column argued that women could train with weights without losing their health or femininity — a view widely contested in the popular press of the period. As she put it in 2002: "People used to say that if women worked out, they would become masculine-looking or wouldn't be able to get pregnant. We just laughed because we knew they were wrong."

Legacy

Stockton is regarded as a forerunner of modern women's weight training and bodybuilding. She received the Steve Reeves International Society Pioneer Award in 1998 and was inducted into the IFBB Hall of Fame in 2000. Les Stockton died in 2004; Pudgy died in Santa Monica on 26 June 2006, aged eighty-eight, of complications of Alzheimer's disease. Jan Todd's research in Iron Game History remains the principal scholarly account of her career.

Disputed and unresolved

Stockton's lifting figures outside the 1947 contest are less well documented than her visibility, partly because women's lifting in the 1940s had almost no competitive framework in which to record them. Her birthplace is sometimes given as Santa Monica; other accounts say she was born elsewhere in California and moved there as a child.