December 21, 2021 • 41 mins
The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders uniform is iconic, a symbol of Texas culture for half a century. But its origin story remains remarkably unsettled. For episode transcripts and bonus content related to the show, visit texasmonthly.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Texas Monthly. I've spent a lot of time talking to
people about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, and it didn't take
long to notice a pattern. No matter who I was
talking to or what they thought of the cheerleaders, the
conversations always seemed to return to one subject, the uniform.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
The uniforms were so artful.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
This is the Dallas author Ben Fountain. He wrote an
award winning novel called Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk that
takes place during a Cowboys game.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
It's almost like if the male brain was a pinball machine.
The way those uniforms were designed, it's like boobs ding
ding ding ding ding ding ding, you know, shoulders ding
ding ding ding ding, tummy and then all the way
down to the boots. I mean, the boots were like kaboom, kaboom, kaboom.
It's like you're running up points.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
It was a uniform that launched a million fantasies. Women
dream of putting that uniform on, and men dream of
taking that uniform off.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
You look around the league now, and to show lots
of flesh is I mean, it's normal, and it would
be weird if they were more covered up. And so
I think it's just, you know, it's become part of
the culture now, whereas in the seventies it was like
extremely bracing, you know, it's something that made you sit
(01:30):
up and notice.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Ben grew up in the South in the sixties and
the dress code at his sister's school was so strict
she was sent home for wearing collots. If you missed
the collote moment, they're these baggy split skirts that often
come past the knee.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
So by the time the Cowboys cheerleaders showed up on
my radar, even then, the uniform was quite something. I mean,
this was like sex on a billboard.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
And the cultural impact of this.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I think he can't measure it. I mean, just to
where America was going starting in the late sixties and
into the seventies.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
It's just the.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Exaggeration of sports, commerce, sex, and I think that Dallas
Cowboys cheerleaders were a huge part of that.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
There's no one reason the cheerleaders became the force that
they did. But if I had to give an answer,
just one answer, it might be that uniform, the blue
crop top tied at the center, the fringed vest with
blue stars, those tense white hot pants and boots It's
a simple look, but one cheerleader I spoke with compared
(02:40):
it to a superhero costume. In fact, the uniform is
so iconic, so singular in the pop culture landscape, that
in twenty eighteen, it was inducted into the Smithsonian National
Museum of American History, a treasure alongside Dorothy's red slippers,
Abraham Lincoln's top hat, and Jonas Salk's original Leo vaccine.
(03:04):
To celebrate the uniform's induction, there was a gathering for
press and close friends inside the museum in a small
auditorium where the uniforms were up on the stage. Charlotte
Jones spoke that day. She's the executive vice president of
the team and the president of the cheerleaders. She's also,
of course, the daughter of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
This is such an incredible opportunity. And when we look
at all of the archives, not only the ones that
you shared behind the vault with us today, but throughout
this entire museum, I mean they resemble American history.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
She told the audience. We are a game of unity.
We're about bringing people together. But somewhat important had been
left out that day. The woman who more than anyone
else is responsible for bringing us that uniform. On this
week's episode, a story about who actually created the cheerleaders,
(04:00):
what gets left out of the history books, and what
that iconic uniform really cost.
Speaker 5 (04:06):
I just saw, I saw, I Saw from Texas Monthly.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
I'm Sarah Huppolo and this is America's Girls, Episode four,
The Union. There's an origin story people like to tell
(04:45):
about the inspiration for this famous uniform. It's November nineteen
sixty seven. There's a big Cowboys game on Sunday, and
fans came straight from church, still dressed up. Back then,
the Dallas Cowboys played at the Cotton Bowl, which held
around seventy five thousand people. Nineteen sixty seven was turning
out to be a good season for the Cowboys, so
(05:06):
a big crowd, and the way a lot of people
tell it, what happened that day was the big bang
that created the modern Cowboys cheerleaders.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
My seat was on about the thirty yard line on
the Cowboys side of the field.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
This is Greg Skinner, a retired consultant in Dallas who
happened to be there that day.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
And at some point there was a commotion in the
crowd and everybody starts standing up, and it looks like
the wave that people do, except as going in both
directions at the same time. And people are standing up
and gawking and saying what's going on?
Speaker 1 (05:45):
And Greg, who's fourteen years old at the time, he's
in the middle of this sea of big shoulders, dying
to get a look. Not at the action on the field,
but it's something happening in the stands.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
I managed to warm my way between some people show
and I look over and on the fifty yard line,
walking from the top, going down toward the cowboy bench,
is this woman, a curvacious woman with the big blonde
hair that Dallas women were known for in the sixties.
(06:19):
And I believe she either had on shorts or short skirt.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
It was a leopard print mini but Greg wasn't tall
enough to see.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
But what I definitely remember is she's walking down the
steps carrying two bright pink cotton candies right in front
of her breast, and she's sashing down the aisle and
everybody's standing up trying to see what's going on. In fact,
the guy next to me's punching me in the arms, saying, hey, kid,
(06:47):
can I boar your binoculars. It's like time stopped. The
Cowboys coaches and players on the sideline turned around to
see what was going on. It just stared at this
woman in her bright pink cotton candies.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Greg didn't know it at the time, but this was
Bubble's cash, a stripper in Dallas who'd gotten tickets to
the game from Cowboys players who'd seen her at the
club where she danced. By today's standards, what Bubbles was
wearing wasn't racy at all. But Bubbles was also an
early adopter of a procedure that would become very popular
in Dallas over the next decades, breast implants, which doctors
(07:29):
in Houston had just developed.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
Dallas was very conservative in the sixties. I mean it
was a church going uptight, buttoned down world.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
The boobs, the mini skirt, the bright pink cotton candies.
It made an impression.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
I didn't come home and say, hey, mom, Meredith threw
a touchdown pass, or you know, Dan Reeves ran for
a touch I said, you're not going to believe this
woman with the cotton candy.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
And what did your mom say when you told her that?
Speaker 3 (07:59):
She said, really, cotton candy? What do you think she
was doing. I didn't say, my mom, but my thought
was working it. I mean, you know that's what she
was doing.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Greg wasn't the only one who kept telling the story.
You could say Bubbles went old school viral.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Next morning, she wakes me up for me to get
ready to go to school, and she says, what do
you think's on the front page of the paper. Yeah,
I don't know your friend from the Cotton Bowl, And she.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Was Bubbles Cash became a media sensation. Shots had been
fired and the sexual revolution was coming. For doubts, Oh
and what happened in the sixty seven game?
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Who won? I don't even know who they played. I
don't have no no idea.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
That's so funny. They played the Atlanta Falcons. Good for them.
She became a fixture at Cowboys game after that. During
the week, she danced at the burlesque club to growing crowds,
and on Sunday she watched the Cowboys play. This was
great publicity on both sides.
Speaker 6 (09:10):
She became a celebrity. She was flown to out of
town games to go watch the Cowboys. You know, she
became the Cowboys sweetheart for a nanosecond.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
This is Joe Nick Patowski, the journalist you heard in
the first episode, He wrote a book about the history
of the Dallas Cowboys.
Speaker 6 (09:28):
Bubbles inspired a whole wave of copycats, and generally they
were women who were strippers, not just in Dallas but
all of the United States. They wanted to get in
on the acts, so women started jumping out on the
field to kiss players, to kiss coaches, and basically it
was very disruptive, but it was part of the show. Now,
(09:50):
so Tex is no fool and puts two and two together.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Tech Shram the Cowboys visionary general manager. He had an
eye for spec and in a world before jumbotrons, before iPhones,
before a million forms of eye candy, bubbles cash was
surely a lesson in the power of a beautiful woman
scantily clad.
Speaker 6 (10:12):
There is a phenomenon that's beginning to occur, and it
helps establish the Cowboys as something more than a football
franchise in many respects. I look at bubbles as validating
the Cowboys as a way of life. And it's not
just going to watch a football game. It's going to
be in the middle of it happening. You never know
(10:33):
what's going to happen when you go to the Cowboys games.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
The Bubbles Cash incident was a real moment, and when
the new Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders made their big debut in
nineteen seventy two, Bubbles like to say she was the inspiration,
and that idea gained a lot of traction over the years.
Who could resist it. The story that a stripper is
the inspiration behind America's Sweethearts is too delicious. I love
(10:58):
the tale of Bubbles Cash, a colorful, self made woman
who blazed her own path. Later, she had a brief
b movie career in films like Mars Needs Women, and
even ran for governor. But there is really only one
person who could tell me about Bubble's role in inspiring
the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. And when I tracked her down,
(11:20):
this is what she said. Have you heard of Bubble's Cash? No?
Speaker 7 (11:25):
I never heard of her. Wow, Okay, it's probably she
never heard of me either.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
But this is d Brock. She's ninety one years old
and she's one of the last living members of that
early cowboy era. I have to admit I'd never heard
of d Brock when I started this project. She only
gets a passing mention on the cheerleader's Wikipedia page, where
Bubble's cash gets almost a full paragraph. But meeting her
(11:51):
change the way I saw the creation of this squad.
I'll let her introduce herself.
Speaker 7 (11:57):
My name is d Brock, and I was the founder
of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Dee lives in Tyler, a city in East Texas. I
drove out to visit her, thinking I was meeting a
sweet old lady who had played a passing role in
a global phenomenon. Instead, I met a dynamic woman whose
place in the Cowboys history has mysteriously shrunk over the decades.
I'd read about Dee in Joe Nick's book, but in
the popular lore, her role has been very much overshadowed
(12:31):
by Suzanne Mitchell, the force of nature who took over
in nineteen seventy six, and by tex Shram, who generally
gets credit for bringing the cheerleading craze to the NFL.
I found the nineteen eighty four History of the Cowboys,
and the chapter on the cheerleaders starts like this quote.
The cheerleaders began as the creation of one man, Texas E. Shram,
(12:54):
And that's one way to tell the story. But here's another.
Speaker 7 (12:58):
Tech Shram had nothing to do with starting and except
finally give us permission.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
I wonder if I'd initially dismiss Dee because some of
the stories that did mention her only referred to her
as a sponsor of the squad and a former model,
But she was so much more. What did you think
you were gonna be when you grew up?
Speaker 7 (13:18):
I thought I was going to be a professor at
who lived in New York City and wore only green.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Dee was teaching high school English when she came on
to the Cowboys. She was a mother of three boys,
married to a Dallas Times Herald writer, Bob Brock. They
mixed with a swank social scene and met fascinating characters
like Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who shot Lee Harvey
Oswald in that other epic story of Dallas in the
(13:48):
nineteen sixties, And though she had never heard of Bubble's Cash,
she did meet the woman who inspired Bubbles, Candy bar
Candy was a famous stripper and was Jack Ruby's frequent
companion in those days.
Speaker 7 (14:00):
I've really liked Candy Moore, you know. I was always
admired her because she had a lot of spunk.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
D also modeled for Neiman Marcus, the luxury store that
put Dallas on the fashion map. She told me about
one show where she and her long Christian door dress
got kind of a starring role.
Speaker 7 (14:19):
I had the V dress and I opened the show.
Mister Marcus himself picked me out and he said, you know,
I don't really like girls and have that much breast,
And I said, well, I'm sorry, but there they are.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
And as we're talking, I keep noticing the hundreds of
books behind her, And then I learned she also has
a PhD in English. She had a master's and was
teaching community college while she was running the cheerleaders. Oh
d I feel like you're underplaying yourself a little here.
(15:02):
Just told me that you just studied English. It just
seemed real, like, yeah, no big deal. Okay. So this
woman is a mother, a model, an academic, a teacher,
and by the way, helped start the first community college
in Dallas. And as she's talking, it starts syncing in
she pretty much built the engine of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.
(15:23):
How would I missed that? How had history missed that?
That's after this Let's roll back the clock to nineteen sixty,
to the very start of the franchise. Back then, in Texas,
college football reigned. Here's Janick Patowski again.
Speaker 6 (15:44):
If you were in Texas the National Football League, Pro
football really didn't matter in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
But that year Dallas got two professional teams, the Cowboys
and the Texans, and they were competing for a slim audience.
Speaker 6 (15:58):
So the running joke, you know, did you hear about
the guy that left four Cowboys tickets on his dashboard
of his car and someone smashed in his windshield and
left four more. No one wanted to go to that game.
They couldn't give away tickets.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
So tech Shram was doing whatever he could to get
people in Dallas to care. He thought some kind of
sideline entertainment made sense.
Speaker 6 (16:22):
In nineteen sixty, when the Cowboys started, tech Shram went
to d Brock, who was a model for the Kim
Dawson Agency.
Speaker 7 (16:31):
I went there and he said he wanted to hire
models to be the cheerleaders.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
D stopped him right there. Models would cost money. Plus
they don't move much.
Speaker 7 (16:45):
Because I've sort of laughed at him when he said
models as believing models don't lead chairs.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
She had another idea, how about high school cheerleaders from
the local schools. Shram agreed and put her in charge
of building the squad, and she bargained her annual salary
up to nine hundred dollars from his original offer, which
was nothing.
Speaker 7 (17:06):
He said, I didn't think i'd have to pay anything.
I thought you'd just be glad to do it. And
I said, well, you were right, I would be glad
to do it. But I'm a working woman. You know,
I don't put on shelves for free.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Where did you find the courage to negotiate with this man?
I mean, women weren't taught to do that back then.
Speaker 7 (17:31):
I don't know, it just came naturally to me.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
She put out a call to the Dallas High schools
and seventy girls tried out. De dressed the chosen twelve
and white button downs and a kerchief tied around their necks,
so when the cowboys took the field, they had teenagers
cheering them on.
Speaker 7 (17:50):
He wanted beautiful women on the sidelines, and so he
settled for darling girls.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
These cheerleaders were not exactly a hit, but Dee kept
plugging away, shaking up the look, adding dances, trying to
improve the formula. She operated on her own. During these years.
She didn't see tech Shram much at all. He was
busy building a football team. At one point, she added
boys for an experiment in co ed cheerleading. There's a
(18:25):
video of the tryouts for the squad in nineteen sixty
nine archived at SMU. A group of high schoolers lined
up in a gymnasium taking turns before the judges. A
lot of handclaps and stiff arm movements, very traditional. One
(18:46):
PR guy dubbed them the Cowbells and their Bows.
Speaker 7 (18:52):
That was one of my embarrassing moments.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
D really hates that name, which got slapped on her legacy.
Speaker 7 (18:59):
I think that is just disgusting, but I am really
sorry that that ever happened.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
They didn't use the nickname for long, but a number
of histories refer to the entire pre nineteen seventy two
era as the Cowbells and their Bows. D had plenty
of triumphs. Then she integrated the squad in nineteen sixty five,
when the football team had a handful of black players
but much of Dallas was still segregated. It's a move
(19:32):
that shaped the early look of the squad in a
profound way. In nineteen seventy one, half the cheerleaders were black.
She had teamed up with a teacher named Francis Roberson,
who worked at one of the black schools in Dallas.
Speaker 7 (19:45):
And my convincing mister Schram to have mixed girls on
the field was just maybe the hardest thing I've wanted
that I had to work so hard for. I think
it was really shock because nowhere else in Dallas at
the time that I know of, had any thought of
(20:08):
integrating the races.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
And she was doing this without much support from other
arms of the organization. The main PR guy for the Cowboys.
Speaker 7 (20:17):
He didn't like the cheerleaders. He didn't think cheerleaders added
anything to the game, and he thought all the attention
should go to the players.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
When the Cowboys made it to their first Super Bowl,
she says, Tech Shram refused to pay for the cheerleaders travel,
so d went on a local TV show to ask
for money, and she got it. When the Cowboys went
back to the Super Bowl the next year, same thing.
Listening to D, I couldn't help wondering if the cheerleaders
made it through that decade, not banks to the Cowboys,
(20:50):
but in spite of them. Probably more true is that
very few people in that football franchise thought about them
at all. The team, by the way, was getting really good.
They'd been to the Super Bowl two years in a row,
and they won that second one in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Dallas Cowboys within now only five seconds of the championship
of the National Football League, winner of the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
They had moved from the Cotton Bowl into their new home,
Texas Stadium. It was the first stadium built specifically for
professional football. It had luxury boxes and a signature look
a roof with a hole in it, as the saying went,
so God can watch his favorite team, and D starts
thinking it's time for a big change. She wanted more dancing,
(21:44):
so she turned to a choreographer, a woman she knew
with New York theater experience, Texi Waterman, who brought Broadway
to the AstroTurf. D is the one who found her
and hired herd says Shran wouldn't pay for that either,
so D split her own salary, which had been knocked
down to six hundred dollars. So there you go, three
hundred dollars for each woman to launch a legendary team.
(22:08):
But of course they needed to change their image, a
new look, a new era show biz.
Speaker 7 (22:15):
I went to mister Shram and I said, I think
we need to get an older group of girls. He said, old,
We're not going to have old women out there. No,
I'm thinking that eighteen and the above. And I wanted
to have a sexier costume.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Did you use the word sexier?
Speaker 7 (22:35):
No, not that, but it was in my mind. I
wanted the girls to show off, and I wanted people
to look at them and notice they were there.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Deane knew a few things about getting noticed. She told
me a story about acting in a summer musical back
in the fifties where she had to wear a racy bikini.
It was almost like her own Bubbles Cash.
Speaker 7 (22:58):
Story was really just strug across the stage in a
bathing suit, and my bikini was extremely scarce on materials,
but it made me sort of famous on one side
of modeling.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Funny thing about that story. The other woman who dared
to wear a bikini on stage that night was Texi Waterman.
That's actually how Dan Taxi met and so the power
of the scantily clad woman. D knew it firsthand, and
she wanted those cheerleaders to get the attention they deserved.
But this next part, this is where things get tricky
(23:38):
because what d is about to tell me doesn't match
up with the official history. So then where does the
uniform come from?
Speaker 7 (23:47):
Well, it really came from my imagination. I drew as
a skitch of what I thought it should look.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Like, the uniform, the one in the Smithsonian. This would
be the moment when the cheerleaders as we know them came.
Speaker 7 (24:04):
To be Well, I wanted it to have a more
of a cowboy look, and I wanted it to be sexy.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
And remember how Bubble's Cash electrified Dallas wearing a mini skirt.
This is just five years later with the cheerleaders at
hot pants and crop tops be too sexy.
Speaker 7 (24:24):
I admit they are sexy, but so many things that
we like about our lives are sexy, So why would
one want to criticize a healthy sexy attitude.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
It just flourish me, So, she says, she sketched out
this uniform on a yellow notepad.
Speaker 7 (24:47):
And I took it to a dressmaker.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
That texts from knew is that Paula von Wagoner?
Speaker 7 (24:55):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (24:58):
And the rest, As they say, He's a totally confusing mess.
Speaker 8 (25:03):
Paula.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Yes, I'm so sorry, I'm late.
Speaker 9 (25:07):
No, that's okay.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
I visited Paula at her apartment in Dallas.
Speaker 5 (25:12):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
She met me at the door in a cowboys jersey
with a sparkly number on the front.
Speaker 9 (25:17):
And h cheerleader had their rookie year on it.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Hey, you're so seventy two. Yeah, because that's your alumni here. Yeah.
If you google who designed the cheerleader's uniform, the answer
you get is Paula van Wagner. Paula grew up in Dallas.
She danced on the drill team in high school Thomas Jefferson,
the same school where d had taught. As a girl,
Paula dreamed of being a designer.
Speaker 9 (25:43):
Even as a child. I would go out in the
yard and pull pedals off flowers and leaves and sew
them together at Mike Dolls Clothes.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
After graduating, she went to the Fashion Institute of Technology
in New York City. She came back to Dallas, where
she lived with three other young women in a two
bedroom apartment, and she landed a job designing clothes for
an apparel company called lorch Lester Melnick, a Dallas retail
giant who also happened to be golfing buddies with Tex
(26:14):
Shram connected Sham with Van Wagner's boss.
Speaker 9 (26:17):
And my boss came in and said, do you want
to design a uniform for the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders? And
I said sure.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
I wanted to know how she remembered the uniform coming together.
Speaker 9 (26:30):
Well, first we went out to talk to de Brock
and tex Stram. With the cowboys, they get an idea
of what they wanted, which was these would not be cheerleaders.
These would be beautiful dancing girls. And they wanted them
to be sexy, but they wanted them to be in
(26:50):
good taste.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
By the way, Paula made two uniforms in nineteen seventy two.
One had a swishy white fringe skirt and a long
sleeved turtleneck, but that version never made it past the
first few years. The other one, well, it became one
of the most recognizable uniforms of the late twentieth century.
Paula says she spent two days working up the designs
(27:12):
and brought the finished product to the cowboys. I asked
what inspired her.
Speaker 9 (27:17):
I was really lucky because it fit in with the times.
That was a time of shorts and go go boots,
and then the cowboy influence was the stars and the
vest and the blue and white. For Texas, it just
fit in with the times.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Where this story gets tense is who first sketched those uniforms.
Dee says she showed up to that meeting with her
sketch and gave it to Paula. But Paula doesn't remember
it that way. So I'm going to read you what
she said so that you can respond to it. Okay, Okay,
So she says, it really came from my imagination. I
drew this sketch of what I thought it should look.
Speaker 7 (27:58):
Like, and I took it to a dressmaker that text
shram knew. So I went to see her and I'd
do some things on a yellow notepad. Well, my sketch
was of these two uniforms.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Okay, So can you respond to that?
Speaker 3 (28:21):
No?
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Can can you tell me anything more?
Speaker 6 (28:27):
It just didn't happen that way.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
As I dug further into this, I discovered that over
the decades, the story of who first hatched the uniform
has actually shifted. A newspaper story from nineteen seventy nine
calls Paula the sole designer but Dee gets credit for
the sketch and the Cowboy's own official history book from
twenty ten called America's Team, and in Joe Nick's book
(28:52):
from twenty twelve, and then some sources just pass it
off to tech shram er Lester Melnick like no women
or involved whatsoever. Paula says, a few different people have
claimed credit over the years.
Speaker 9 (29:05):
Even on Wikipedia. There is a designer that I used
to work with that was still claiming that she designed
the cheerleader uniform, and the cheerleaders would go in and
change it to my name, and within a week it
would be changed to her name again.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Part of what makes this so hard to decipher is
that nobody knew they were making history at the time.
People can hardly agree on what happened yesterday, and this
is fifty years ago. That uniform became priceless, But once
upon a time it was just another day's work. Do
you remember how much you got paid for this?
Speaker 7 (29:44):
Oh?
Speaker 9 (29:44):
Nothing? Nothing?
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Ever, that was.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Part of that was part of my job.
Speaker 9 (29:53):
No, I never got paid anything for it.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
I'm gonna have to take a minute. You'll have to
excuse that laugh. But that's the sound of me realizing
that the uniform the one that brought glamour and sizzled
to the superbrand that is the Dallas Cowboys and launched
a wave of imitations across sports and fashion. The Cowboys
got it for free.
Speaker 9 (30:18):
If I'd gotten paid a penny for each one over
the years.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Paula didn't share my frustration about this. It strikes me
what's sort of made worse and not worse, but like
harder to untangle, is the Cowboys themselves not giving you
guys credit, you ladies, credit for what you were doing
in the first place. It seems like it would have
been made easier if they had called it, you know,
(30:45):
a design by Paula van Wagner from the beginning.
Speaker 9 (30:49):
But I believe what they really wanted was they copyrighted it,
so it was their design, and they still at the
copyright on it.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
And we can argue about who designed it, but we
can say that neither of you got paid.
Speaker 9 (31:12):
Right, so they never needed to give any credit to anybody.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Paula says after she handed them the uniform that would
shape their brand, she had no contact with the Cowboys
for more than forty years. She left fashion design, which
she found stressful, started a Needlepoint Company. Once she read
in the paper that the cheerleaders were looking for uniforms
to wear during the winter, and she reached out to
someone at the Cowboys to offer her services. And what happened, Well,
(31:41):
I didn't hear anything from them. They have a way
of not responding to people. Yeah, But in twenty sixteen,
Paula was brought back into the fold. Her niece, Inga,
who was a Cowboys cheerleader in nineteen ninety five, had
been advocating on her behalf, and Paula was celebrated at
a big Alum night bash where she finally got to
(32:01):
hear directly from cheerleaders who told her what that uniform meant.
The team honored someone else that night too, d Brock.
Perhaps it was dawning on the organization that honoring these
two pioneers was long overdue, But of course there was
still this one problem. The two pioneers had competing storylines,
(32:24):
and so in twenty eighteen, when the Smithsonian event ruled around,
Paula van Wagner was the one on that stage. She
flew up in Jerry Jones's private jet.
Speaker 9 (32:36):
It was beautiful.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
It was beautiful. What's inside pictures?
Speaker 9 (32:41):
Of cowboys. It was very spacious, nice jet.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
And found herself at the center of a press bonanza.
Speaker 9 (32:48):
In fact, that there was when we were all up
on the stage when it finished, it was press from
everywhere sitting down in front of us. Strange feeling. I've
never been through anything like that before. And then we
got back on the plane and flew back home.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
For a woman who never expected much from that assignment,
this was a payment money couldn't touch.
Speaker 9 (33:12):
I think the thing that has always struck me is
to sit down and design one thing in a very
short amount of time that lasted fifty years, and what
are the chances of doing that, and then for it
to also end up in the Smithsonian after forty eight years?
(33:35):
And wouldn't people say it's an honor? It really is
an honor.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
D wasn't invited to the Smithsonian. She was gracious about this,
But I find it hard to believe the woman whose
enterprising work paved the way for the modern cheerleader era
wouldn't be on that stage, especially when for some reason,
the man who designed the cheerleader's belt buckles was I
reached out to the Cowboys to find out more about this,
(34:04):
but they didn't want to participate in this podcast. We
may never know exactly how this happened. Many of the
people who witnessed this moment have passed away. Tech Shram
died in two thousand and three. A woman named Levita
Krager who stitched the uniforms at home for twenty four
years using patterns cut from Kroger bags. She died in
(34:26):
two thousand and three as well. I did speak to
one other person who was around back then, and what's
your understanding of who designed that uniform?
Speaker 10 (34:37):
A d Brock.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
This is von siel Baker. You'll remember her from the
first episode, one of the original seven cheerleaders in nineteen
seventy two. Do you remember her sketching it?
Speaker 9 (34:49):
Yes?
Speaker 10 (34:49):
I sure do. I mean she just sit there. One
day we were rehearsing with TEXI and she had a
yellow notepad, you know, legal notepad, and it was just
doing stuff and she would turn the page and she
would sit there like this, and one time she would
I asked.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Her why nobody else I interviewed told me this story.
They weren't there. Our stories get lost and embellished and
twisted around. What my own years in journalism have shown
me is that we're all unreliable narrators.
Speaker 10 (35:23):
Is she still alive?
Speaker 3 (35:24):
She is?
Speaker 10 (35:25):
I wish you could convey that to her. Well, this
how I feel about her and what she talked to
me as a young lady, and that I said, who
actually sketched it? And you should let her know. Every time,
every time I was interviewed and they asked about the uniform,
I said, deep rock.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
And what do they say?
Speaker 10 (35:47):
They say, oh, we haven't heard of her. I say, well,
she did it in nineteen seventy two. That's where it
came from. It came from her heart and her soul.
I saw sketching it.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Pontil. How did this How did this history get lost?
Speaker 10 (36:04):
I don't know. I really don't know.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Art and commerce are filled with these disputes. Who made what,
Who gets the credit? What part is inspiration and what
part the creation itself. D left the Cheerleaders around nineteen
seventy five and moved to Washington, DC. She became a
senior vice president at PBS. She was developing ways to
(36:31):
teach classes on the TV screen, something that strikes me
is very ahead of its time in this zoom era
when classrooms are mostly screens. She followed the cheerleader's meteoric
rise over the years, but at a distance. Have you
ever watched the reality show?
Speaker 7 (36:47):
Lil?
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Did you know that there was a reality show?
Speaker 5 (36:50):
Lo?
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Yeah, it's been on for fifteen years.
Speaker 7 (36:58):
Actually, what is the reality show?
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Sometimes I worried I was bothering D with all my questions.
She taught so many students, she raised three boys, and
the lady with a microphone keeps asking about the cheerleaders.
But I wanted so badly to reconcile this unresolved history.
Speaker 7 (37:19):
I just made the sketches, and they couldn't have moved
forward without a beginning. But it is just the beginning.
I mean, it was just a sketch, and so she
was very talented and being able to take that sketch
and come up with patterns of really cute uniforms.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Clearly I moved. I offered to play the tape of
my interview with Paula so D could respond, but she
didn't want to hear it.
Speaker 7 (37:54):
I'm afraid if I hear what she says that it
will just make me feel sad.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
I don't want to pit these two women against each
other any more than they want to be pitted against
each other. I'd been chasing a question of who made
those uniforms, But at some point I realized, maybe that's
not even the right question. Maybe the question goes more
like this. Why were two women so instrumental in building
this image, an image that the Cowboys fought to protect,
(38:26):
that they sued over and profited massively from. Why were
these two women scrapping for recognition in the first place.
It's like the Cowboys had outsourced all the work and
kept all the glory. I asked d how much she
was paid for her years with the cheerleaders. We did
some quick back of the envelope math and determined it
(38:47):
was less than ten thousand dollars total for starting the
Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and leading them for more than a
dozen years. It seems to me that you were a
little under compensated.
Speaker 10 (39:03):
Just a little.
Speaker 7 (39:06):
I was definitely under compensated, except for the fact that
I love doing it.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
I know, so.
Speaker 7 (39:14):
I would have done it for nothing.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
I heard these words from a lot of women I interviewed.
I would have done it for nothing. The Cowboys became
the most powerful and lucrative name in sports, and those
women were proud to have played a role It's no
small thing to be a part of history. But it's
about time that history gives them their due. Next time
(39:42):
on America's Girls.
Speaker 8 (39:44):
Hypee having a rehearsal the dance studio and Jerry Jones
would come down with his friends and his cocktails and
clinking the ice, watching the girls.
Speaker 6 (39:58):
You know, rehearse and it wasn't to learn the latest
dance staff. It wasn't to learn what the halftime routine
was going to look like.
Speaker 8 (40:07):
And it was just I'm just like apples. This is
not like the old day.
Speaker 5 (40:12):
I just.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
So you can read more about the stories in this
episode in Joe nick Potowski's book on the Cowboys, The
Dallas Cowboys, The Outrageous History of the biggest, loudest, most hated,
best loved football team in America. For a transcript of
(40:38):
this episode, visit Texasmonthly dot com slash America's Girls. America's
Girls is a Texas Monthly production. I'm your host writer
and reporter Sarah Heflo. Executive producer is Megan Kriich. Produced
and edited by Patrick Michaels and edited by JK.
Speaker 6 (40:55):
Nichol.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Produced and engineered by Brian Standifer, who also wrote the music,
additional research and audio editing by podcast intern Harper Carleton.
America's Girl's art is by Emily Kimbrough and Victoria Milner,
and marketing by Tory mow. Our theme song is Enough
by the bra Lettes. If you like the show, please
subscribe and visit our page at Apple Podcasts and rate
(41:18):
the show there. See you next week.
Texas Monthly. I've spent a lot of time talking to
people about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, and it didn't take
long to notice a pattern. No matter who I was
talking to or what they thought of the cheerleaders, the
conversations always seemed to return to one subject, the uniform.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
The uniforms were so artful.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
This is the Dallas author Ben Fountain. He wrote an
award winning novel called Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk that
takes place during a Cowboys game.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
It's almost like if the male brain was a pinball machine.
The way those uniforms were designed, it's like boobs ding
ding ding ding ding ding ding, you know, shoulders ding
ding ding ding ding, tummy and then all the way
down to the boots. I mean, the boots were like kaboom, kaboom, kaboom.
It's like you're running up points.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
It was a uniform that launched a million fantasies. Women
dream of putting that uniform on, and men dream of
taking that uniform off.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
You look around the league now, and to show lots
of flesh is I mean, it's normal, and it would
be weird if they were more covered up. And so
I think it's just, you know, it's become part of
the culture now, whereas in the seventies it was like
extremely bracing, you know, it's something that made you sit
(01:30):
up and notice.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Ben grew up in the South in the sixties and
the dress code at his sister's school was so strict
she was sent home for wearing collots. If you missed
the collote moment, they're these baggy split skirts that often
come past the knee.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
So by the time the Cowboys cheerleaders showed up on
my radar, even then, the uniform was quite something. I mean,
this was like sex on a billboard.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
And the cultural impact of this.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I think he can't measure it. I mean, just to
where America was going starting in the late sixties and
into the seventies.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
It's just the.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Exaggeration of sports, commerce, sex, and I think that Dallas
Cowboys cheerleaders were a huge part of that.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
There's no one reason the cheerleaders became the force that
they did. But if I had to give an answer,
just one answer, it might be that uniform, the blue
crop top tied at the center, the fringed vest with
blue stars, those tense white hot pants and boots It's
a simple look, but one cheerleader I spoke with compared
(02:40):
it to a superhero costume. In fact, the uniform is
so iconic, so singular in the pop culture landscape, that
in twenty eighteen, it was inducted into the Smithsonian National
Museum of American History, a treasure alongside Dorothy's red slippers,
Abraham Lincoln's top hat, and Jonas Salk's original Leo vaccine.
(03:04):
To celebrate the uniform's induction, there was a gathering for
press and close friends inside the museum in a small
auditorium where the uniforms were up on the stage. Charlotte
Jones spoke that day. She's the executive vice president of
the team and the president of the cheerleaders. She's also,
of course, the daughter of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
This is such an incredible opportunity. And when we look
at all of the archives, not only the ones that
you shared behind the vault with us today, but throughout
this entire museum, I mean they resemble American history.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
She told the audience. We are a game of unity.
We're about bringing people together. But somewhat important had been
left out that day. The woman who more than anyone
else is responsible for bringing us that uniform. On this
week's episode, a story about who actually created the cheerleaders,
(04:00):
what gets left out of the history books, and what
that iconic uniform really cost.
Speaker 5 (04:06):
I just saw, I saw, I Saw from Texas Monthly.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
I'm Sarah Huppolo and this is America's Girls, Episode four,
The Union. There's an origin story people like to tell
(04:45):
about the inspiration for this famous uniform. It's November nineteen
sixty seven. There's a big Cowboys game on Sunday, and
fans came straight from church, still dressed up. Back then,
the Dallas Cowboys played at the Cotton Bowl, which held
around seventy five thousand people. Nineteen sixty seven was turning
out to be a good season for the Cowboys, so
(05:06):
a big crowd, and the way a lot of people
tell it, what happened that day was the big bang
that created the modern Cowboys cheerleaders.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
My seat was on about the thirty yard line on
the Cowboys side of the field.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
This is Greg Skinner, a retired consultant in Dallas who
happened to be there that day.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
And at some point there was a commotion in the
crowd and everybody starts standing up, and it looks like
the wave that people do, except as going in both
directions at the same time. And people are standing up
and gawking and saying what's going on?
Speaker 1 (05:45):
And Greg, who's fourteen years old at the time, he's
in the middle of this sea of big shoulders, dying
to get a look. Not at the action on the field,
but it's something happening in the stands.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
I managed to warm my way between some people show
and I look over and on the fifty yard line,
walking from the top, going down toward the cowboy bench,
is this woman, a curvacious woman with the big blonde
hair that Dallas women were known for in the sixties.
(06:19):
And I believe she either had on shorts or short skirt.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
It was a leopard print mini but Greg wasn't tall
enough to see.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
But what I definitely remember is she's walking down the
steps carrying two bright pink cotton candies right in front
of her breast, and she's sashing down the aisle and
everybody's standing up trying to see what's going on. In fact,
the guy next to me's punching me in the arms, saying, hey, kid,
(06:47):
can I boar your binoculars. It's like time stopped. The
Cowboys coaches and players on the sideline turned around to
see what was going on. It just stared at this
woman in her bright pink cotton candies.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Greg didn't know it at the time, but this was
Bubble's cash, a stripper in Dallas who'd gotten tickets to
the game from Cowboys players who'd seen her at the
club where she danced. By today's standards, what Bubbles was
wearing wasn't racy at all. But Bubbles was also an
early adopter of a procedure that would become very popular
in Dallas over the next decades, breast implants, which doctors
(07:29):
in Houston had just developed.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
Dallas was very conservative in the sixties. I mean it
was a church going uptight, buttoned down world.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
The boobs, the mini skirt, the bright pink cotton candies.
It made an impression.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
I didn't come home and say, hey, mom, Meredith threw
a touchdown pass, or you know, Dan Reeves ran for
a touch I said, you're not going to believe this
woman with the cotton candy.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
And what did your mom say when you told her that?
Speaker 3 (07:59):
She said, really, cotton candy? What do you think she
was doing. I didn't say, my mom, but my thought
was working it. I mean, you know that's what she
was doing.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Greg wasn't the only one who kept telling the story.
You could say Bubbles went old school viral.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Next morning, she wakes me up for me to get
ready to go to school, and she says, what do
you think's on the front page of the paper. Yeah,
I don't know your friend from the Cotton Bowl, And she.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Was Bubbles Cash became a media sensation. Shots had been
fired and the sexual revolution was coming. For doubts, Oh
and what happened in the sixty seven game?
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Who won? I don't even know who they played. I
don't have no no idea.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
That's so funny. They played the Atlanta Falcons. Good for them.
She became a fixture at Cowboys game after that. During
the week, she danced at the burlesque club to growing crowds,
and on Sunday she watched the Cowboys play. This was
great publicity on both sides.
Speaker 6 (09:10):
She became a celebrity. She was flown to out of
town games to go watch the Cowboys. You know, she
became the Cowboys sweetheart for a nanosecond.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
This is Joe Nick Patowski, the journalist you heard in
the first episode, He wrote a book about the history
of the Dallas Cowboys.
Speaker 6 (09:28):
Bubbles inspired a whole wave of copycats, and generally they
were women who were strippers, not just in Dallas but
all of the United States. They wanted to get in
on the acts, so women started jumping out on the
field to kiss players, to kiss coaches, and basically it
was very disruptive, but it was part of the show. Now,
(09:50):
so Tex is no fool and puts two and two together.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Tech Shram the Cowboys visionary general manager. He had an
eye for spec and in a world before jumbotrons, before iPhones,
before a million forms of eye candy, bubbles cash was
surely a lesson in the power of a beautiful woman
scantily clad.
Speaker 6 (10:12):
There is a phenomenon that's beginning to occur, and it
helps establish the Cowboys as something more than a football
franchise in many respects. I look at bubbles as validating
the Cowboys as a way of life. And it's not
just going to watch a football game. It's going to
be in the middle of it happening. You never know
(10:33):
what's going to happen when you go to the Cowboys games.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
The Bubbles Cash incident was a real moment, and when
the new Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders made their big debut in
nineteen seventy two, Bubbles like to say she was the inspiration,
and that idea gained a lot of traction over the years.
Who could resist it. The story that a stripper is
the inspiration behind America's Sweethearts is too delicious. I love
(10:58):
the tale of Bubbles Cash, a colorful, self made woman
who blazed her own path. Later, she had a brief
b movie career in films like Mars Needs Women, and
even ran for governor. But there is really only one
person who could tell me about Bubble's role in inspiring
the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. And when I tracked her down,
(11:20):
this is what she said. Have you heard of Bubble's Cash? No?
Speaker 7 (11:25):
I never heard of her. Wow, Okay, it's probably she
never heard of me either.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
But this is d Brock. She's ninety one years old
and she's one of the last living members of that
early cowboy era. I have to admit I'd never heard
of d Brock when I started this project. She only
gets a passing mention on the cheerleader's Wikipedia page, where
Bubble's cash gets almost a full paragraph. But meeting her
(11:51):
change the way I saw the creation of this squad.
I'll let her introduce herself.
Speaker 7 (11:57):
My name is d Brock, and I was the founder
of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Dee lives in Tyler, a city in East Texas. I
drove out to visit her, thinking I was meeting a
sweet old lady who had played a passing role in
a global phenomenon. Instead, I met a dynamic woman whose
place in the Cowboys history has mysteriously shrunk over the decades.
I'd read about Dee in Joe Nick's book, but in
the popular lore, her role has been very much overshadowed
(12:31):
by Suzanne Mitchell, the force of nature who took over
in nineteen seventy six, and by tex Shram, who generally
gets credit for bringing the cheerleading craze to the NFL.
I found the nineteen eighty four History of the Cowboys,
and the chapter on the cheerleaders starts like this quote.
The cheerleaders began as the creation of one man, Texas E. Shram,
(12:54):
And that's one way to tell the story. But here's another.
Speaker 7 (12:58):
Tech Shram had nothing to do with starting and except
finally give us permission.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
I wonder if I'd initially dismiss Dee because some of
the stories that did mention her only referred to her
as a sponsor of the squad and a former model,
But she was so much more. What did you think
you were gonna be when you grew up?
Speaker 7 (13:18):
I thought I was going to be a professor at
who lived in New York City and wore only green.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Dee was teaching high school English when she came on
to the Cowboys. She was a mother of three boys,
married to a Dallas Times Herald writer, Bob Brock. They
mixed with a swank social scene and met fascinating characters
like Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who shot Lee Harvey
Oswald in that other epic story of Dallas in the
(13:48):
nineteen sixties, And though she had never heard of Bubble's Cash,
she did meet the woman who inspired Bubbles, Candy bar
Candy was a famous stripper and was Jack Ruby's frequent
companion in those days.
Speaker 7 (14:00):
I've really liked Candy Moore, you know. I was always
admired her because she had a lot of spunk.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
D also modeled for Neiman Marcus, the luxury store that
put Dallas on the fashion map. She told me about
one show where she and her long Christian door dress
got kind of a starring role.
Speaker 7 (14:19):
I had the V dress and I opened the show.
Mister Marcus himself picked me out and he said, you know,
I don't really like girls and have that much breast,
And I said, well, I'm sorry, but there they are.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
And as we're talking, I keep noticing the hundreds of
books behind her, And then I learned she also has
a PhD in English. She had a master's and was
teaching community college while she was running the cheerleaders. Oh
d I feel like you're underplaying yourself a little here.
(15:02):
Just told me that you just studied English. It just
seemed real, like, yeah, no big deal. Okay. So this
woman is a mother, a model, an academic, a teacher,
and by the way, helped start the first community college
in Dallas. And as she's talking, it starts syncing in
she pretty much built the engine of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.
(15:23):
How would I missed that? How had history missed that?
That's after this Let's roll back the clock to nineteen sixty,
to the very start of the franchise. Back then, in Texas,
college football reigned. Here's Janick Patowski again.
Speaker 6 (15:44):
If you were in Texas the National Football League, Pro
football really didn't matter in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
But that year Dallas got two professional teams, the Cowboys
and the Texans, and they were competing for a slim audience.
Speaker 6 (15:58):
So the running joke, you know, did you hear about
the guy that left four Cowboys tickets on his dashboard
of his car and someone smashed in his windshield and
left four more. No one wanted to go to that game.
They couldn't give away tickets.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
So tech Shram was doing whatever he could to get
people in Dallas to care. He thought some kind of
sideline entertainment made sense.
Speaker 6 (16:22):
In nineteen sixty, when the Cowboys started, tech Shram went
to d Brock, who was a model for the Kim
Dawson Agency.
Speaker 7 (16:31):
I went there and he said he wanted to hire
models to be the cheerleaders.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
D stopped him right there. Models would cost money. Plus
they don't move much.
Speaker 7 (16:45):
Because I've sort of laughed at him when he said
models as believing models don't lead chairs.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
She had another idea, how about high school cheerleaders from
the local schools. Shram agreed and put her in charge
of building the squad, and she bargained her annual salary
up to nine hundred dollars from his original offer, which
was nothing.
Speaker 7 (17:06):
He said, I didn't think i'd have to pay anything.
I thought you'd just be glad to do it. And
I said, well, you were right, I would be glad
to do it. But I'm a working woman. You know,
I don't put on shelves for free.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Where did you find the courage to negotiate with this man?
I mean, women weren't taught to do that back then.
Speaker 7 (17:31):
I don't know, it just came naturally to me.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
She put out a call to the Dallas High schools
and seventy girls tried out. De dressed the chosen twelve
and white button downs and a kerchief tied around their necks,
so when the cowboys took the field, they had teenagers
cheering them on.
Speaker 7 (17:50):
He wanted beautiful women on the sidelines, and so he
settled for darling girls.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
These cheerleaders were not exactly a hit, but Dee kept
plugging away, shaking up the look, adding dances, trying to
improve the formula. She operated on her own. During these years.
She didn't see tech Shram much at all. He was
busy building a football team. At one point, she added
boys for an experiment in co ed cheerleading. There's a
(18:25):
video of the tryouts for the squad in nineteen sixty
nine archived at SMU. A group of high schoolers lined
up in a gymnasium taking turns before the judges. A
lot of handclaps and stiff arm movements, very traditional. One
(18:46):
PR guy dubbed them the Cowbells and their Bows.
Speaker 7 (18:52):
That was one of my embarrassing moments.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
D really hates that name, which got slapped on her legacy.
Speaker 7 (18:59):
I think that is just disgusting, but I am really
sorry that that ever happened.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
They didn't use the nickname for long, but a number
of histories refer to the entire pre nineteen seventy two
era as the Cowbells and their Bows. D had plenty
of triumphs. Then she integrated the squad in nineteen sixty five,
when the football team had a handful of black players
but much of Dallas was still segregated. It's a move
(19:32):
that shaped the early look of the squad in a
profound way. In nineteen seventy one, half the cheerleaders were black.
She had teamed up with a teacher named Francis Roberson,
who worked at one of the black schools in Dallas.
Speaker 7 (19:45):
And my convincing mister Schram to have mixed girls on
the field was just maybe the hardest thing I've wanted
that I had to work so hard for. I think
it was really shock because nowhere else in Dallas at
the time that I know of, had any thought of
(20:08):
integrating the races.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
And she was doing this without much support from other
arms of the organization. The main PR guy for the Cowboys.
Speaker 7 (20:17):
He didn't like the cheerleaders. He didn't think cheerleaders added
anything to the game, and he thought all the attention
should go to the players.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
When the Cowboys made it to their first Super Bowl,
she says, Tech Shram refused to pay for the cheerleaders travel,
so d went on a local TV show to ask
for money, and she got it. When the Cowboys went
back to the Super Bowl the next year, same thing.
Listening to D, I couldn't help wondering if the cheerleaders
made it through that decade, not banks to the Cowboys,
(20:50):
but in spite of them. Probably more true is that
very few people in that football franchise thought about them
at all. The team, by the way, was getting really good.
They'd been to the Super Bowl two years in a row,
and they won that second one in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Dallas Cowboys within now only five seconds of the championship
of the National Football League, winner of the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
They had moved from the Cotton Bowl into their new home,
Texas Stadium. It was the first stadium built specifically for
professional football. It had luxury boxes and a signature look
a roof with a hole in it, as the saying went,
so God can watch his favorite team, and D starts
thinking it's time for a big change. She wanted more dancing,
(21:44):
so she turned to a choreographer, a woman she knew
with New York theater experience, Texi Waterman, who brought Broadway
to the AstroTurf. D is the one who found her
and hired herd says Shran wouldn't pay for that either,
so D split her own salary, which had been knocked
down to six hundred dollars. So there you go, three
hundred dollars for each woman to launch a legendary team.
(22:08):
But of course they needed to change their image, a
new look, a new era show biz.
Speaker 7 (22:15):
I went to mister Shram and I said, I think
we need to get an older group of girls. He said, old,
We're not going to have old women out there. No,
I'm thinking that eighteen and the above. And I wanted
to have a sexier costume.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Did you use the word sexier?
Speaker 7 (22:35):
No, not that, but it was in my mind. I
wanted the girls to show off, and I wanted people
to look at them and notice they were there.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Deane knew a few things about getting noticed. She told
me a story about acting in a summer musical back
in the fifties where she had to wear a racy bikini.
It was almost like her own Bubbles Cash.
Speaker 7 (22:58):
Story was really just strug across the stage in a
bathing suit, and my bikini was extremely scarce on materials,
but it made me sort of famous on one side
of modeling.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Funny thing about that story. The other woman who dared
to wear a bikini on stage that night was Texi Waterman.
That's actually how Dan Taxi met and so the power
of the scantily clad woman. D knew it firsthand, and
she wanted those cheerleaders to get the attention they deserved.
But this next part, this is where things get tricky
(23:38):
because what d is about to tell me doesn't match
up with the official history. So then where does the
uniform come from?
Speaker 7 (23:47):
Well, it really came from my imagination. I drew as
a skitch of what I thought it should look.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Like, the uniform, the one in the Smithsonian. This would
be the moment when the cheerleaders as we know them came.
Speaker 7 (24:04):
To be Well, I wanted it to have a more
of a cowboy look, and I wanted it to be sexy.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
And remember how Bubble's Cash electrified Dallas wearing a mini skirt.
This is just five years later with the cheerleaders at
hot pants and crop tops be too sexy.
Speaker 7 (24:24):
I admit they are sexy, but so many things that
we like about our lives are sexy, So why would
one want to criticize a healthy sexy attitude.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
It just flourish me, So, she says, she sketched out
this uniform on a yellow notepad.
Speaker 7 (24:47):
And I took it to a dressmaker.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
That texts from knew is that Paula von Wagoner?
Speaker 7 (24:55):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (24:58):
And the rest, As they say, He's a totally confusing mess.
Speaker 8 (25:03):
Paula.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Yes, I'm so sorry, I'm late.
Speaker 9 (25:07):
No, that's okay.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
I visited Paula at her apartment in Dallas.
Speaker 5 (25:12):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
She met me at the door in a cowboys jersey
with a sparkly number on the front.
Speaker 9 (25:17):
And h cheerleader had their rookie year on it.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Hey, you're so seventy two. Yeah, because that's your alumni here. Yeah.
If you google who designed the cheerleader's uniform, the answer
you get is Paula van Wagner. Paula grew up in Dallas.
She danced on the drill team in high school Thomas Jefferson,
the same school where d had taught. As a girl,
Paula dreamed of being a designer.
Speaker 9 (25:43):
Even as a child. I would go out in the
yard and pull pedals off flowers and leaves and sew
them together at Mike Dolls Clothes.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
After graduating, she went to the Fashion Institute of Technology
in New York City. She came back to Dallas, where
she lived with three other young women in a two
bedroom apartment, and she landed a job designing clothes for
an apparel company called lorch Lester Melnick, a Dallas retail
giant who also happened to be golfing buddies with Tex
(26:14):
Shram connected Sham with Van Wagner's boss.
Speaker 9 (26:17):
And my boss came in and said, do you want
to design a uniform for the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders? And
I said sure.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
I wanted to know how she remembered the uniform coming together.
Speaker 9 (26:30):
Well, first we went out to talk to de Brock
and tex Stram. With the cowboys, they get an idea
of what they wanted, which was these would not be cheerleaders.
These would be beautiful dancing girls. And they wanted them
to be sexy, but they wanted them to be in
(26:50):
good taste.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
By the way, Paula made two uniforms in nineteen seventy two.
One had a swishy white fringe skirt and a long
sleeved turtleneck, but that version never made it past the
first few years. The other one, well, it became one
of the most recognizable uniforms of the late twentieth century.
Paula says she spent two days working up the designs
(27:12):
and brought the finished product to the cowboys. I asked
what inspired her.
Speaker 9 (27:17):
I was really lucky because it fit in with the times.
That was a time of shorts and go go boots,
and then the cowboy influence was the stars and the
vest and the blue and white. For Texas, it just
fit in with the times.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Where this story gets tense is who first sketched those uniforms.
Dee says she showed up to that meeting with her
sketch and gave it to Paula. But Paula doesn't remember
it that way. So I'm going to read you what
she said so that you can respond to it. Okay, Okay,
So she says, it really came from my imagination. I
drew this sketch of what I thought it should look.
Speaker 7 (27:58):
Like, and I took it to a dressmaker that text
shram knew. So I went to see her and I'd
do some things on a yellow notepad. Well, my sketch
was of these two uniforms.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Okay, So can you respond to that?
Speaker 3 (28:21):
No?
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Can can you tell me anything more?
Speaker 6 (28:27):
It just didn't happen that way.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
As I dug further into this, I discovered that over
the decades, the story of who first hatched the uniform
has actually shifted. A newspaper story from nineteen seventy nine
calls Paula the sole designer but Dee gets credit for
the sketch and the Cowboy's own official history book from
twenty ten called America's Team, and in Joe Nick's book
(28:52):
from twenty twelve, and then some sources just pass it
off to tech shram er Lester Melnick like no women
or involved whatsoever. Paula says, a few different people have
claimed credit over the years.
Speaker 9 (29:05):
Even on Wikipedia. There is a designer that I used
to work with that was still claiming that she designed
the cheerleader uniform, and the cheerleaders would go in and
change it to my name, and within a week it
would be changed to her name again.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Part of what makes this so hard to decipher is
that nobody knew they were making history at the time.
People can hardly agree on what happened yesterday, and this
is fifty years ago. That uniform became priceless, But once
upon a time it was just another day's work. Do
you remember how much you got paid for this?
Speaker 7 (29:44):
Oh?
Speaker 9 (29:44):
Nothing? Nothing?
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Ever, that was.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Part of that was part of my job.
Speaker 9 (29:53):
No, I never got paid anything for it.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
I'm gonna have to take a minute. You'll have to
excuse that laugh. But that's the sound of me realizing
that the uniform the one that brought glamour and sizzled
to the superbrand that is the Dallas Cowboys and launched
a wave of imitations across sports and fashion. The Cowboys
got it for free.
Speaker 9 (30:18):
If I'd gotten paid a penny for each one over
the years.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Paula didn't share my frustration about this. It strikes me
what's sort of made worse and not worse, but like
harder to untangle, is the Cowboys themselves not giving you
guys credit, you ladies, credit for what you were doing
in the first place. It seems like it would have
been made easier if they had called it, you know,
(30:45):
a design by Paula van Wagner from the beginning.
Speaker 9 (30:49):
But I believe what they really wanted was they copyrighted it,
so it was their design, and they still at the
copyright on it.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
And we can argue about who designed it, but we
can say that neither of you got paid.
Speaker 9 (31:12):
Right, so they never needed to give any credit to anybody.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Paula says after she handed them the uniform that would
shape their brand, she had no contact with the Cowboys
for more than forty years. She left fashion design, which
she found stressful, started a Needlepoint Company. Once she read
in the paper that the cheerleaders were looking for uniforms
to wear during the winter, and she reached out to
someone at the Cowboys to offer her services. And what happened, Well,
(31:41):
I didn't hear anything from them. They have a way
of not responding to people. Yeah, But in twenty sixteen,
Paula was brought back into the fold. Her niece, Inga,
who was a Cowboys cheerleader in nineteen ninety five, had
been advocating on her behalf, and Paula was celebrated at
a big Alum night bash where she finally got to
(32:01):
hear directly from cheerleaders who told her what that uniform meant.
The team honored someone else that night too, d Brock.
Perhaps it was dawning on the organization that honoring these
two pioneers was long overdue, But of course there was
still this one problem. The two pioneers had competing storylines,
(32:24):
and so in twenty eighteen, when the Smithsonian event ruled around,
Paula van Wagner was the one on that stage. She
flew up in Jerry Jones's private jet.
Speaker 9 (32:36):
It was beautiful.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
It was beautiful. What's inside pictures?
Speaker 9 (32:41):
Of cowboys. It was very spacious, nice jet.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
And found herself at the center of a press bonanza.
Speaker 9 (32:48):
In fact, that there was when we were all up
on the stage when it finished, it was press from
everywhere sitting down in front of us. Strange feeling. I've
never been through anything like that before. And then we
got back on the plane and flew back home.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
For a woman who never expected much from that assignment,
this was a payment money couldn't touch.
Speaker 9 (33:12):
I think the thing that has always struck me is
to sit down and design one thing in a very
short amount of time that lasted fifty years, and what
are the chances of doing that, and then for it
to also end up in the Smithsonian after forty eight years?
(33:35):
And wouldn't people say it's an honor? It really is
an honor.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
D wasn't invited to the Smithsonian. She was gracious about this,
But I find it hard to believe the woman whose
enterprising work paved the way for the modern cheerleader era
wouldn't be on that stage, especially when for some reason,
the man who designed the cheerleader's belt buckles was I
reached out to the Cowboys to find out more about this,
(34:04):
but they didn't want to participate in this podcast. We
may never know exactly how this happened. Many of the
people who witnessed this moment have passed away. Tech Shram
died in two thousand and three. A woman named Levita
Krager who stitched the uniforms at home for twenty four
years using patterns cut from Kroger bags. She died in
(34:26):
two thousand and three as well. I did speak to
one other person who was around back then, and what's
your understanding of who designed that uniform?
Speaker 10 (34:37):
A d Brock.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
This is von siel Baker. You'll remember her from the
first episode, one of the original seven cheerleaders in nineteen
seventy two. Do you remember her sketching it?
Speaker 9 (34:49):
Yes?
Speaker 10 (34:49):
I sure do. I mean she just sit there. One
day we were rehearsing with TEXI and she had a
yellow notepad, you know, legal notepad, and it was just
doing stuff and she would turn the page and she
would sit there like this, and one time she would
I asked.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Her why nobody else I interviewed told me this story.
They weren't there. Our stories get lost and embellished and
twisted around. What my own years in journalism have shown
me is that we're all unreliable narrators.
Speaker 10 (35:23):
Is she still alive?
Speaker 3 (35:24):
She is?
Speaker 10 (35:25):
I wish you could convey that to her. Well, this
how I feel about her and what she talked to
me as a young lady, and that I said, who
actually sketched it? And you should let her know. Every time,
every time I was interviewed and they asked about the uniform,
I said, deep rock.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
And what do they say?
Speaker 10 (35:47):
They say, oh, we haven't heard of her. I say, well,
she did it in nineteen seventy two. That's where it
came from. It came from her heart and her soul.
I saw sketching it.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Pontil. How did this How did this history get lost?
Speaker 10 (36:04):
I don't know. I really don't know.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Art and commerce are filled with these disputes. Who made what,
Who gets the credit? What part is inspiration and what
part the creation itself. D left the Cheerleaders around nineteen
seventy five and moved to Washington, DC. She became a
senior vice president at PBS. She was developing ways to
(36:31):
teach classes on the TV screen, something that strikes me
is very ahead of its time in this zoom era
when classrooms are mostly screens. She followed the cheerleader's meteoric
rise over the years, but at a distance. Have you
ever watched the reality show?
Speaker 7 (36:47):
Lil?
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Did you know that there was a reality show?
Speaker 5 (36:50):
Lo?
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Yeah, it's been on for fifteen years.
Speaker 7 (36:58):
Actually, what is the reality show?
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Sometimes I worried I was bothering D with all my questions.
She taught so many students, she raised three boys, and
the lady with a microphone keeps asking about the cheerleaders.
But I wanted so badly to reconcile this unresolved history.
Speaker 7 (37:19):
I just made the sketches, and they couldn't have moved
forward without a beginning. But it is just the beginning.
I mean, it was just a sketch, and so she
was very talented and being able to take that sketch
and come up with patterns of really cute uniforms.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Clearly I moved. I offered to play the tape of
my interview with Paula so D could respond, but she
didn't want to hear it.
Speaker 7 (37:54):
I'm afraid if I hear what she says that it
will just make me feel sad.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
I don't want to pit these two women against each
other any more than they want to be pitted against
each other. I'd been chasing a question of who made
those uniforms, But at some point I realized, maybe that's
not even the right question. Maybe the question goes more
like this. Why were two women so instrumental in building
this image, an image that the Cowboys fought to protect,
(38:26):
that they sued over and profited massively from. Why were
these two women scrapping for recognition in the first place.
It's like the Cowboys had outsourced all the work and
kept all the glory. I asked d how much she
was paid for her years with the cheerleaders. We did
some quick back of the envelope math and determined it
(38:47):
was less than ten thousand dollars total for starting the
Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and leading them for more than a
dozen years. It seems to me that you were a
little under compensated.
Speaker 10 (39:03):
Just a little.
Speaker 7 (39:06):
I was definitely under compensated, except for the fact that
I love doing it.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
I know, so.
Speaker 7 (39:14):
I would have done it for nothing.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
I heard these words from a lot of women I interviewed.
I would have done it for nothing. The Cowboys became
the most powerful and lucrative name in sports, and those
women were proud to have played a role It's no
small thing to be a part of history. But it's
about time that history gives them their due. Next time
(39:42):
on America's Girls.
Speaker 8 (39:44):
Hypee having a rehearsal the dance studio and Jerry Jones
would come down with his friends and his cocktails and
clinking the ice, watching the girls.
Speaker 6 (39:58):
You know, rehearse and it wasn't to learn the latest
dance staff. It wasn't to learn what the halftime routine
was going to look like.
Speaker 8 (40:07):
And it was just I'm just like apples. This is
not like the old day.
Speaker 5 (40:12):
I just.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
So you can read more about the stories in this
episode in Joe nick Potowski's book on the Cowboys, The
Dallas Cowboys, The Outrageous History of the biggest, loudest, most hated,
best loved football team in America. For a transcript of
(40:38):
this episode, visit Texasmonthly dot com slash America's Girls. America's
Girls is a Texas Monthly production. I'm your host writer
and reporter Sarah Heflo. Executive producer is Megan Kriich. Produced
and edited by Patrick Michaels and edited by JK.
Speaker 6 (40:55):
Nichol.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Produced and engineered by Brian Standifer, who also wrote the music,
additional research and audio editing by podcast intern Harper Carleton.
America's Girl's art is by Emily Kimbrough and Victoria Milner,
and marketing by Tory mow. Our theme song is Enough
by the bra Lettes. If you like the show, please
subscribe and visit our page at Apple Podcasts and rate
(41:18):
the show there. See you next week.
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