Dee Brock, a high school English teacher and model who started the original Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, who would become known worldwide for their sexy sideline dancing in blue tops, star-spangled vests and shorts and white boots, died on Wednesday in Tyler, Texas. She was 96.
Her friend Linda Resnik confirmed the death, in hospice care.
In 1961, Tex Schramm, the Cowboys’ president, hired Ms. Brock and told her he wanted to stock the squad with models. It was the second year of the team’s existence, following its winless debut as an N.F.L. expansion team in 1960.
“I said what every model always asks, ‘How much does it pay?’” she recalled to KLTV, a television station in Tyler, Texas, in 2009. But Mr. Schramm was unwilling to pay the models, which Ms. Brock called a non-starter.
She suggested recruiting local high school cheerleaders — girls at first, then boys, for a few years starting in 1964 — to add gymnastic stunts to the traditional cheers. For a time, they were known as the Cowbelles and Beaux, which Ms. Brock hated. They wore mostly white outfits that didn’t show much skin.
The group evolved under Ms. Brock: She integrated the cheerleaders in 1965, hired a choreographer and, by her account, sketched designs for “much more abbreviated” costumes — though “not quite as abbreviated as they are now” — and started recruiting women over 18 in open auditions that proved the transition between tame high school cheerleading and the sexier, attention-getting era.
(When the cheerleaders’ classic uniform was added to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History collection in 2018, the design was credited to Paula Van Wagoner.)
By the early 1970s, the cheerleaders looked much as they do today, appearing with the Cowboys at two Super Bowls.
Ms. Brock did it all while directing the cheerleaders part time, a job she held until 1975. She continued teaching in Dallas and earned a doctorate and later became a public television executive.
“Dee Brock was a woman of the world when the world could be quite small for women,” Texas Monthly wrote in 2022.
The cheerleaders performed well beyond the Cowboys’ sidelines, most notably on dozens of U.S.O. tours.
They have also been the subject of TV movies in 1979 and 1980, a documentary in 2018 and the reality TV series “America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders,” that debuted in 2024.
Dorothy Faye Sala was born on June 7, 1930, in Covington, Okla., and grew up in Wright City, in eastern Texas. Her father, Lester, was a union organizer at Sinclair Oil; he later ran a jukebox business and owned a drug store. Her mother, Vera Mae (Bowers) Sala, was a bank teller and cashier.
After graduating from high school in New London, Texas, where she was a cheerleader, she attended North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas). She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English there, in 1950 and 1956 (and would receive a Ph.D. in American literature in 1985).
In Dallas, she taught high school history, then English, for more than a decade while modeling.
She told Texas Monthly that while preparing for a fashion show at Neiman Marcus, Stanley Marcus, the store’s president, said to her, “I don’t really like girls that have that much breast.”
She replied, “Well, I’m sorry But there they are.”
In an interview, Ms. Resnik said that Ms. Brock and her husband, Bob Brock, an entertainment reporter and columnist at The Dallas Times Herald, “were out and about in Dallas” and most likely knew someone aware of Mr. Schramm’s desire to start the cheerleaders group.
For Ms. Brock, though, the cheerleaders were something of a hobby, for which her salary early on was a reported $600 a year.
In 1966, she joined El Centro College (now Dallas El Centro Campus, part of the Dallas College network of community colleges) as one of its founding faculty members.
At El Centro, Ms. Brock became involved in distance learning — developing college-level courses that were carried on local television. She created and produced the first course, in English composition.
“Students who took the course did as well as, and sometimes better than, their counterparts in the classroom,” she told The Associated Press in 1981.
In 1980, Ms. Brock brought that work to PBS, where she was hired as director of adult programming to develop courses for college students and other viewers no longer in school. Within her first year, she helped create classes in business, American history, psychology, health, teacher training and the arts.
In the 1982-83 academic year, more than 75,000 viewers registered for college credit for one or more of the 20 televised courses carried by PBS, up from 55,000 the previous year, United Press International reported in 1984. The courses were shown on 250 public television stations and 750 colleges and universities were licensed to give credit for them.
In 1990, Ms. Brock retired from PBS as a senior vice president and became a consultant to colleges, TV stations and production companies.
She is survived by her sons, Baron, Bishop and Bevin; three grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Her marriage to Mr. Brock ended in divorce.In 2022, past and current cheerleaders traveled on a Cowboys team bus to Ms. Brock’s home in Tyler to present her with a lifetime achievement award, in the form of a glittering rhinestone football.
Eunice Taylor Cicero, one of the first two Black cheerleaders in the troupe, told The Longview News-Journal, “Dee will never know the strength she gave me as a young kid to believe in myself, to believe what I could do.”
Ms. Brock, who was about to turn 92, said, “I hadn’t realized I had made such a good impression,” then added in an interview with KETK, a TV station in Tyler: “It makes me very proud to know I got it started and they’ve taken it on, and doing a great job. So, I would say just keep on loving the Cowboys, and keep on cheering all you can.”
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