Whatta Dame
In a comic book store in the East Village yesterday, I found a very small ‘zine (and shit! I can’t remember the name of it)that was half dedicated to naked girl art, and half dedicated to the female bodybuilders at Venice Beach in the 40s. This is where I learned about Abbye “Pudgy” Stockton.
And now you will too.
Abbye Eville was born in 1917 and raised in Santa Monica CA, where she acquired the nickname “Pudgy”, even though she was a fairly skinny girl. She met her husband in high school, Les Stockton, and after they married, they started going to “Muscle Beach” in Venice CA to work on acrobatics and gymnastics.
They started drawing crowds, so they started doing crowd-pleasing bits like Pudgy standing and holding Les above her head in a hand-to-handstand. Then magazines started showing up, and then Pudgy started getting featured in ads for things like Ritamine Vitamins. They made newsreels about her and ran them in front of movies at the theater, and though I tried desperately to find Whatta Dame and Muscle Beach USA, YouTube was not my friend.
By 1944, Pudgy was writing a regular column on women’s training called “Barbelles” in Strength & Health magazine. There were so few competitions for female bodybuilding back then that she had few titles, but it didn’t matter, as she was pretty much the face of female bodybuilding.
She retired rich and happy and died three years ago.
There’s no weird twist to this story, nothing snarky to say on my part, I just think she’s a bit of a badass, and I wanted to share her with you.
