The story goes that the young Judy Crowder had dreams of being a painter, but when a photographer saw her work and then met the artist in person, he had other ideas for her career. With a little coaxing, he talked her into a photo session, the results which appeared in SCENE, December 1960. She was 18-years-old. As a result, Miss Crowder became one more in the long line of glamour models posing for pinups and magazine pictorials in the 60s. The feature also mentions that "she wants to follow her sister, actress Louise Stewart, to Hollywood" (another article names her as Ann Stewart).
During her relatively brief modeling career, Crowder was featured in numerous men's magazines such as FIGURE QUARTERLY Vol. 32 (1961), NUGGET, KNIGHT, HI-LIFE and PICTURE SCOPE.
There is scant biographical information about her and it's mostly found within the pages of said magazines. It was a common practice that the text accompanying the photographs would be largely made up to further titillate the reader. If any of the information is accurate several magazines boasted of her 37-24-36 figure and that she hailed from Taylorville, Illinois. Another magazine went on about how she loved clam chowder (!) and claimed she had 20 different recipes. This is likely made up, all so the writer could use the tagline of her name rhyming with New England's favorite soup (see below) .
Her sister's acting career appeared to have fizzled, and Judy's didn't fare much better. She did guest on an episode of Boris Karloff's THRILLER, so that qualifies her as a THH, a tangential horror hottie! Other than that, her acting career was over. I'm guessing that she went back to painting.
You're probably wondering about now where I'm going with all this. Well, what got Judy Crowder as the topic of this post today is a photo identifying her as wearing one of Keith Ward's Topstone masks sometime in the 1960s. If there's any doubt about the claim, while I was preparing this post, I unearthed a second photo of her with the mask pulled up over her head. No doubt, it's Judy Crowder under it.
| From a Topstone mask collection. |
Most of her photos are in considerably better taste than many models who posed unabashed in their birthday suits. In this gallery, you can see that she was nevertheless talked into showing a little more.