Abbye “Pudgy” Stockton

by Al Thomas 

            It would be impossible for historians (or “herstorians,” if you prefer) of bodybuilding to exaggerate Abbye Stockton’s importance. She is beyond cavil the sport’s “foremother.”

If bodybuilding’s women have been too busy to trace genealogies, it’s clear that the roots of their family tree are deeply set in the hot sands of old Muscle Beach, where for a moment all too brief, Abbye and her famed “barbelles” first dramatized the perfect compatibility of womanly muscle and strength with “athletic femininity,” in Abbye’s phrase. Much remains to be said about Mrs. Stockton’s impact upon the women of her time, her relevance to the modern-day sport (and whatever future it may have), and everything she embodied five decades ago.

She and her barbelles, for all their media-seizing charisma, provided a classic example of a phenomenon ahead of its time. The world was simply not ready for them.

When women’s bodybuilding gets its act together, Abbye Stockton cannot fail to be seen as a force to be reckoned with in determining what bodybuilding is, should be, and someday will be.

The boys who drifted into the iron game in the 40’s and 50’s are now its chairmen of the board and chief executive officers. And somewhere, tucked away in these graying sensibilities, resides a vision of the golden creature who bestrode that auroral patch of sand, the very name of which still clangs a fire bell in the hearts of many grizzled sometimes-iron pushers.

For such men, when the syllables collide to form the phrase Muscle Beach or Santa Monica, the experience evoked isn’t sand or surf, but the blonde cynosure of their boyish hearts: Abbye Stockton.

She was sexy – let’s get that one out of the way up front. If she provided an aesthetic, almost moral, focus for her sisters, she was also a vision of “athletic femininity” to the opposite sex.

Mrs. Stockton was a unique, a nonpareil, the standard metre against which the centimeters and inches of her peers’ athletic femininity were measured. There hasn’t been anybody since her who has dominated the field so completely, and there won’t be anybody who ever will again.

Like Grimek’s, her impact on an audience was direct and unmediated by muscle mag hype. On a platform or in person, deep spoke to deep, spontaneously and immediately. No manipulatable abstraction was Abbye, orchestrated in the boardroom of the muscle moguls.

In Pudgy’s simpler time, responses were in Nature and were not the function of muscle mag rhetoric. Hers was the impact which is implicit to any sensitive observer’s confrontation with a cleanly breadth of muscularly pulchritudinous womanhood – at once complex and simple. Sexy of course, but much more since the confrontation spoke as much of discipline and self-control and self-respect as of womanly beauty.

She was a tumbler, a hand-balancer, a strongwoman. A fine Olympic lifter, she was also a magnificent topmounter in hand-balancing – and no less impressive as an understander.

           At 5’1” and 117 pounds, she held her 180-pound husband, Les, in a high hand-to-handstand. Try it. (I once did, with a 175-pound sailor “topmounter” on the deck of a destroyer – and got a mouth full of Navy brogans as a reward for my efforts, and I outweighed my topmounter considerably.)

A physiquewoman par excellence was Abbye. Her discovery in the Barbelles section of old Strength and Health was a breath of hope to guys, growing up in the 40’s, who’d dreamed the sweet dream that womanliness had to (simply had to) encompass something other, and better, than the broad-beamed and muscle-less Hazels and Gertrudes who plumped up and down basketball floors and hockey fields.

The gods in our Pantheon were Grimek (who inexplicably and unconsciously preferred York to Eldorado, but remained the infallible god in our Pantheon, despite this distinctly human aberration) – and this golden one who reigned where goddesses should, upon that sand-duned Olympus along the Strand: our “darling Pudgy.”

“Pudgy,” indeed! This was a whole other matter. When twitted about the impropriety of referring to our heroine by this distinctly ungoddess-like and “too-familiar” nickname, we smiled the smile of the initiate, taking a page from old Satchmo who bemoaned the hopeless “unteachability” of those who questioned the purpose of jazz.

“Pudgy”: A name no less sweet for having been appended in gentle good fun. An epithet which is “too familiar” and “inappropriate” only to those ignorant of the familiarity bred by admiration – so different from the coarse sort bred by contempt. Pudgy, it is. It’s a grand old epithet. Now and forever more. World without end. Amen. Pudgy. And again, Pudgy.

My own Hejira to the fabled Muscle Beach-as-Mecca was destined never to be. Oh, bless your heart, I got to the beach at Santa Monica, but by then just the beach at Santa Monica, not the beach of our boyhood dreams. A thrill it was, mind you. How could it be otherwise?

A thrill – but no apotheosis. Pudgy and her barbelles were no longer at play by the sea. Hal, Bruce, and Les – even Russ and “Moe” (except on the weekends) – had “grown up” and deserted their scenes of earlier glory, taking up the toys of responsible middle age. Even the muscle chaps had retired from the field, having bivouacked upon the next-beach-down-the-Coast, at Venice: “Coney Island-West.”

“You were spared,” soothed the voice from the “world-of-outer-dark.”

“You can’t go home again – and especially not the ‘home’ of your boyhood dreams. Look at you. You’re an old man. Do you think time has stopped somehow for Pudgy and her playmates?”

Time surely doesn’t stop. That it doesn’t is a blessing. Peter Pan’s estate was not a happy one. Wrinkles insinuate themselves into the loveliest of flesh, making it lovelier yet (except to those who’ll never understand that the dream doesn’t grow old – preserved as it is, evergreen, in the ever-young and unwithered of the heart’s chambers).

All this aside, I met Abbye at a time later than the one worried-over by the voice from the “world-of-outer-dark,” above.

“More charming than we’d dreamed,” I subsequently penned to the grizzled old crew of iron-hefters from my youth. “More beautiful than we had the right to expect – even of a dream.”

As I read back over this rambling piece, I discover it’s as much about me and my friends as about “our Pudgy.” How could it be otherwise? A doctoral dissertation, this is not!

Pudgy is more than merely a character from history. She is this, of course, and more. She is part and parcel of the very bone and muscle of a generation – in a literal sense, not in some sort of poetic or academic cliché or truism.

I’ve been hanging around gyms since my first visit to George Bothner’s on Times Square fifty-five years ago. During the past thirty years, I rarely get into a gym without some old geezer sidling up to me and confidentially “admitting” his support for the “cause” wondering in the next breath whatever happened to “Pudgy from old S. & H.”

“I ended up after the War in an L.A. area hospital,” writes one such geezer, who succinctly sums up the Stocktonian influence. “One afternoon I wandered down to Muscle Beach and saw a little blonde with the most beautiful muscles I had ever seen. I knew it had to be Pudgy Stockton. Right then and there I took ‘stock’ of myself. I’d let myself become a mess – and the damn War hadn’t helped. I went home, joined the Y, and started working out. It was that simple. I haven’t really stopped yet, and I’m pushing sixty. I had seen most of the Mr. Americas up to that time, and I’ve seen many since. But they were just guys with lots of muscle, and I was immune to all that, skinny as I was. But that one woman, that one afternoon of my life, helped me to change my life around, even though nothing else ever had. Because of her, I’m a different man.”

The immediacy and power of Pudgy’s influence couldn’t have been summed up better. “Part and parcel of a generation’s muscle” was Pudgy – and in no merely poetic or theoretical sense.

Like all the other galoots, my life is different because of Pudgy’s influence. With almost sixty years of training behind me, I look forward (if Fate is kind) to many more. If I’ve thought as infrequently as I have about Pudgy these past years, it’s because the physical and psychic systems with which her influence is entangled are my healthiest and most smoothly working. They rarely break down, generating rarely so much as a twinge. And being so smoothly working they get precious little of my thought. All the worse for me, of course. Here, if anywhere, are sources of real energy whenever I elect to plug-in to them. Would that some of my other deep systems were so healthily grounded!

When memories return of Pudgy, they’re happy ones, reminding me of my youth, still green and growing, trailing streams of glory. They make me feel good and smile.

This little remembrance, Pudgy, is on behalf of the boys. Fifty years of them. If on occasion we’ve gone slightly to flesh and paunch, we can assure you we’ll “get after it” straight away.

Coming into our lives as you did, early, but not too early – in our springtimes, as it were – you’ve turned out to be (and I hadn’t really understood this before) one of the last discoveries, one of the last sweet visions, commensurate with our still innocently-masculine capacity for wonder. And that, dear Pudgy – that has made all the difference.