Pudgy Stockton, who loved to throw around her boyfriend for sport

I was glancing through some historical stuff today, and wanted to say a word for my lifting OG, Abbye "Pudgy" Stockton. She was a fixture of Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach in its earliest days inthe 1930s, and the first woman who got famous for being just a regular-degular gal who did strong things.

In the world Pudgy was born into, there were strong women, like The Great Sandwina and Vulcana. But they were literal circus sideshow acts, and treated like freaks of nature—super strong freaks who received glamour shots and the ardent admiration of fans who, in all likelihood, desired these women to step on them, but freaks nonetheless.

By the time Muscle Beach popped up in 1934, strength training was becoming slightly more of an everyday thing. Before there was even a gym setup, Muscle Beach was most famous as a destination to see men do various gymnastic spectacles: standing on top of each other’s shoulders, pressing and even throwing each other into the air. There weren’t many women, but Pudgy caught the lifting bug badly enough that she wanted to defy the demographics (it helped that her eventual husband, Les Stockton, was a bodybuilding fixture). She and her husband were two of the original Muscle Beachers; according to the book Picturing the Modern Amazon, their favorite date was to go to the beach and throw each other around, gymnastically. (Not just strength legends, but proponents for unstructured play and PvP.)