Cowboys’ history books won’t tell you the true origin story of the cheerleaders. “The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders began as the creation of one man: Texas E. Schramm,” reads a 1984 tome on the Cowboys. Nope, try again. General manager Tex Schramm, who helped launch the franchise, in 1960, was a visionary, a former CBS executive who saw that the future of professional sports was television. And it’s true he kept the squad alive during the years when born-again coach Tom Landry wanted them gone. But the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are actually the creation of a few women, whose innovative ideas and contributions have mostly been forgotten.
Dee Brock was a woman of the world when the world could be quite small for women. She got her PhD in literature at the University of North Texas after marrying longtime Dallas Times Herald columnist Bob Brock, with whom she had three sons. She taught high school English, though she’d later become a founding faculty member at the city’s first community college, El Centro. She was uncommonly beautiful—blond and five feet seven—and she modeled on the side. She also had a sense of humor. “I don’t really like girls that have that much breast,” Brock remembered legendary clothier Stanley Marcus once telling her as she prepped for a Neiman Marcus fashion show. “Well, I’m sorry,” she replied. “But there they are.”
Sometime before the Cowboys’ second season, in 1961, Schramm tapped her for a Big Idea: beautiful models on the sidelines. Respectfully, Brock told him this dog wouldn’t hunt. Models didn’t move much, and they required money, something Schramm didn’t like to spend. She hatched a different plan. Recruit local high school girls. Pay them with a couple of tickets to the game, give them some kerchiefs and pom-poms. It’s free! Schramm placed her in charge, and she spent the next decade trying to make this formula work, though it ultimately did not. She recruited teenage boys for an experiment in coed cheerleading remembered mostly for its dumb name: the Cowbelles and Beaux.
“That is one of my embarrassing moments,” Brock, now in her early nineties, told me at her home in Tyler. The name was a PR guy’s stunt, and, sadly, it stuck. “My teams were strong. They were not Belles and Beaux.” She practically spat that last part.
Brock had long been a woman ahead of her time. She integrated the squad in 1965, with the help of a local Black teacher named Frances Roberson. The Cowboys had several Black players by then, but much of Dallas was still segregated. In 1971, half of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders were Black.
The following year, a skimpier uniform, an age bump, and an open audition marked the start of a brave new era. “I think we need an older group of girls,” Brock remembers telling Schramm.
“Old?” He was not convinced.
Older, she explained. Eighteen and above. “And I wanted them to have a sexier costume,” she said.