Dee Brock died Sept. 23 at 96. Most people know what she made. Few know she walked away from it. She created the modern Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, the squad that spread through the NFL and now has its own Netflix (NFLX) reality show. She left in 1975, right as the fame hit, to build TV courses for working adults. A Ph.D. came next.
Jon Mooallem tells her story in this weekend’s Journal. In 1960 the Cowboys’ general manager, Tex Schramm, asked her to recruit models as cheerleaders. He didn’t plan to pay them. So she suggested local high-school cheerleaders instead, and she picked a new squad every year. In 1965 she hired two Black cheerleaders, long before many other Dallas institutions did. By 1971 half the squad was Black.
Then the team moved to Texas Stadium, and the squad needed to be a real show. She held open auditions ahead of the 1972 season. For choreographer she brought in Texie Waterman, who had performed on Broadway. Schramm refused to pay a dollar more. So Brock covered it herself and handed Waterman half of the $600 a year she earned. The Original Seven took the field on Sept. 17, 1972. Brock said she designed the uniform too. One of the Original Seven backs her up. “She did it. No doubt. I was there.” The Cowboys credited a Dallas designer when the Smithsonian took the uniform in 2018.
The side gig and the real job
She never stopped teaching. All through the Cowboys years she taught English at a Dallas high school and at a community college. By the end of the 1972 season she was also on the faculty at El Centro College. In January 1973 she started building a college writing course for local public TV. Writing for a Reason went on the air that September with 1,400 students. The squad needed a full-time director by then. She chose the course. She left the team in 1975, earned a Ph.D. in American literature, and joined PBS in 1980. Her Adult Learning Service reached more than 200 stations. She stayed 15 years. Her son put it simply. “She didn’t want the cheerleaders to be the story of her life.”
Our read
This is a career story, and a good one. Brock’s famous job was a side gig the whole time. She never quit the job that paid steady, the teaching. She put her own money into the thing that made the squad good, a real choreographer, when the boss wouldn’t. And when the two jobs collided, she picked the one she could still be doing decades later. That’s the part we’d copy. A spotlight job can end when someone else decides. The skill you own goes where you go. Nothing here touches a holding. Netflix (NFLX) isn’t in the book.
The thing in your plan this touches is the career line, the one that says what you’d do if the big job ended next year. Most plans have a number there and no skill behind it. One check this week. Write down the one skill you’d get paid for if your title vanished tomorrow, and the last time you put money or hours into it. If that’s a blank, that’s the review. Brock paid her choreographer out of her own pocket before anyone asked her to. The umbrella goes in the bag on a sunny morning.