Former and current Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders visited the Tyler home of team founder Dee Brock on Saturday to mark the group’s 60th year.
People gathered at Brock’s home to share memories, past and present, about their time with the organization and celebrate with the woman who started it.
Kat Puryear, who is going on her fourth year as a Cowboys cheerleader, said she is thankful for all Brock did to form the squad.
“I’m just so happy and so blessed,” Puryear said. “My best friends are on this team, and I’m so grateful to be here and just be in this room with you guys.”
Brock founded the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders in 1960. She said she believed being able to have cheerleaders on the field and be noticed would be nice, so she sold the idea to Tex Schramm, the Cowboys’ president and general manager at the time.
“It just seemed to me that was the thing to do,” she said. “You have a team playing on the field, you should have excitement off the field, too.”
When starting the cheerleading team, Brock said she pretty much did “everything on my own.” Schramm left the formation of the squad up to her, which Brock said allowed her to form it how she envisioned.
Brock said being able to bring the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders to the field “was exciting.”
“The Cowboys team was very hot at that point ... and I just had a great time,” she said.
“You created this idea with the Dallas Cowboys, which took on a life no one could have ever expected,” Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Director Kelli Finglass told Brock.
Brock said she got to be with the team though numerous stages of growth, including getting the first uniforms, being more active on the field by dancing and then integrating the team in 1965.
Eunice Taylor-Cicero, who was a cheerleader in 1965 and 1966, was one of the squad’s first two Black members. That was all because of Brock, she said.
“Had it not been for (Brock’s) persistence in having someone of color on the team, it would have perhaps taken even longer,” Taylor-Cicero said.
Brock was kind and always encouraging, Taylor-Cicero said. As a 16-year-old high school student, she said the thoughtfulness Brock showed her meant a lot.
“(Brock) had such a warmth and such a way of making you feel part of (the team), and trust me, in the 60s, it was very different, very turbulent,” Taylor-Cicero said. “Coming into that team of cheerleaders, I felt none of that. I didn’t feel like a thumb in the midst of the fingers — I felt like one of the fingers, too.”
Taylor-Cicero said her time as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader helped shape her and lead her down the path she chose in life.
“Dee will never know the kind of strength she gave me as a young kid to believe in myself, to believe what I could do,” she said. “There were no boundaries, and I thank her and I am so glad to be back in touch with her again.”
Finglass said Brock’s work forming the team made a lot of people proud.
“You were progressive with making our squad represent our population … it’s so important to so many lives you’ve touched,” Finglass said.
Brock, who was with the squad until 1975, said she cannot “help but feel a little proud” about the team she founded and what it has grown into.
During the celebration, Finglass presented Brock with a “lifetime achievement” Dallas Cowboys game football, which was bedazzled, for everything she did to start the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders’ legacy.
