Real Women

It was 1936 and Mary, my mom, was playing high school basketball in Rochester, NY. Though only 5’4” she was quick and had a good two-hand set shot. And she loved the game. Her sisters Grace and Gloria also played sports and the three were good lookers to boot.

On the Lama side, my fathers sister’s all looked like German farm women. Francis was built like a linebacker but Dolly and Virginia were petite while Judy, Marie and Maybelle were tall, athletic, blond and beautiful. Aunt Bello was a ballerina and Broadway show star until she married and moved back to Rochester to raise her kids. To keep in shape she opened a dance studio and all my cousins, boys included, were required to take lessons. I was 10 and it was an experience I’d like to forget.

What got me thinking about these real women was the obit in today’s la times. She was called "the First Lady of Iron," "America's Barbelle" and "the Queen of Muscle Beach." Abbye "Pudgy" Stockton, a pioneer female weightlifter who helped put Santa Monica's Muscle Beach on the map died Monday at her home in Santa Monica. She was 88.

"In those days, lifting weights was considered unfeminine," Stockton told Sports Illustrated. "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."

These were women who grew up during the Great Depression, married and had children while their husbands went to war, and took jobs to aid the war effort. These were the women of the Greatest Generation.

The Santa Monica-born Abbye Stockton was a 19-year-old telephone operator in the late 1930s when she and future husband Les Stockton began frequenting the area just south of the Santa Monica Pier established for devotees of "physical culture." She had earned the nickname Pudgy as a young child, but she soon developed what many considered the most impressive female body on Muscle Beach. She and Les performed various routines, including the crowd-pleasing "high press," in which Pudgy lifted a 100-pound barbell over her head while balancing atop Les' upstretched hands.

My Mom and Aunts Grace and Gloria are still with us, as are Aunts Judy, Maybelle and Marie. Bless them and the other real women who never accepted that work and sports were unfeminine, or that raising children was unfullfilling.