Abbye "Pudgy" Stockton

Abbye Eville was born on August 11, 1917, and moved to Santa Monica, California, in 1924. She acquired the nickname "Pudgy" as a child, and the name stuck, even though she weighed approximately 115 pounds at a height of 5'2". She began dating UCLA student Les Stockton during her senior year of high school; they were married in 1941. ==Career==

Stockton and her husband were frequent visitors to Muscle Beach, where they primarily worked on acrobatics and gymnastics. One of their most famous feats involved Pudgy serving as the "understander", supporting Les (180 pounds) over her head in a hand to hand stand. Pudgy quickly became a media favorite, and was included in pictorials in Life, Pic, and Laff. She was also featured in the newsreels Whatta Build and Muscle Town USA, as well as ads for Ritamine Vitamin Company and the Universal Camera Company. She estimated that she was featured on the cover of forty-two magazines by the end of the 1940s. She posed with many of the top male bodybuilders of the time, including John Grimek and Steve Reeves. From 1944 to 1954, Stockton wrote a regular column on women's training, "Barbelles", in Strength & Health magazine, Abbye died on June 26, 2006, at the age of 88 from complications due to Alzheimer's disease. ==Legacy==

Stockton is regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of female bodybuilding. Writing for Barbend, Brooke Siem wrote, "Abbye was the role model women from the 1940s had been thirsty for — strong, independent, successful, and feminine. In 2002 she summed up her life in two sentences that still ring true today, '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.'" ==References==