Iconic 1977 Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders poster will hang in the Smithsonian (2024)

The Dallas Cowboys have in their possession but a single copy of the first poster to feature the team’s cheerleaders, which sold an estimated million copies upon its release in 1977. Charlotte Jones Anderson, the team exec tasked with managing the brand name, says it hangs, framed, in the Cowboys’ practice facility in Frisco. I told her Friday that if she needs another, a few posters are available on eBay for around $60 to $115. I also offered to sell her, at a very reasonable price, the one I bought last weekend at the Half-Price Books mothership for three whole dollars (#blessed).

She passed, politely. At the moment, Anderson is not looking to add to the scant collection. In fact, on Monday she's actually giving away one of the posters that decorated my bedroom wall during the Carter administration, hanging alongside KISS' "Spirit of '76" tour keepsake and Farrah Fawcett in that red bathing suit now in the Smithsonian.

Anderson is donating the cheerleaders' poster to the same institution — specifically, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, whose mission is to "help people understand the past in order to make sense of the present and shape a more humane future."

Heady stuff for a poster you could buy at Spencer Gifts in the '70s.

"It's monumental," the Cowboys' executive vice president said Friday. "I can't believe we're doing this."

Anderson will bring with her more than just the poster: The Smithsonian is also taking one of designer Paula Van Wagoner's original crop-top-and-hot-pants unis; the 2011 update; and the Barbie dolls Mattel released in 2007. All they're missing is a videocassette of the 1979 made-for-TV movie Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, starring Bert Convy, Jane Seymour and, for some reason, New York Yankee Bucky Dent.

But the poster, the brainchild of original Cowboys president and GM Tex Schramm that was once available at every 7-Eleven, is the collection's centerpiece — in part because it defined the image of America's Team when the nickname hadn't yet become America's epithet. And, mostly, because "it sold more pieces than any other thing we've ever sold as a storied organization," Anderson said.

It was, at the time, considered a racy — to some, even obscene — marketing tool. The New York Times wondered whether the poster — featuring, from left, Syndy Garza, Suzette Russell, Suzie Holub, Cynde Lewis and Debbie Wagener — was "sexist or just sparkling?" A former cheerleader, Merry Sales, told The Times she was not a fan: "My mother saw that picture and said, 'Dear, I'm sure glad you're not a cheerleader now.'"

The poster expedited the cheerleaders’ ascension from sideline to spotlight and heralded what Joe Nick Patoski, writing in Texas Monthly, would later call the “Age of Jiggle.” And it came to define the Cowboys of the ‘70s as much as any Hail Mary, Doomsday Defense or Super Bowl win.

"For us, that was such an iconic part of our history during that era: They were America's Team and America's Sweethearts," Anderson said. "It was the building of our legacy and what we are today, and in that, Tex was known for pushing the envelope in terms of what football would be and could mean on this level."

The poster was released just a month after a cheerleader graced the October 1977 cover of Esquire beneath the headline, "The Dallas Cowgirls (The Best Thing About the Dallas Cowboys)." The man who shot that cover and the inside spread was responsible, too, for coming up with the concept for the poster: Bob Shaw, at the time a Dallas freelance photographer who'd persuaded Esquire to do a feature on the women who worked full-time hours and were paid a mere $15 a game — before taxes — to bounce for the TV cameras.

Shaw had become tight with Schramm — so close, Shaw said this week, "I got so comfortable in his office I felt like I could put my feet on his desk." Before sending the Esquire shoot to New York, Shaw stopped by the boss's office.

"I was showing Tex the photos, and he said, 'Those aren't our girls, are they?" Shaw said Friday from his Arkansas home. "He really liked the pictures I was doing at that point. And he said, 'Do you think you could do a poster like that Farrah Fawcett poster?"

Anderson and Kelli McGonagill Finglass, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders' director, will join the museum's director and curator for a donation ceremony Monday afternoon. Shaw, who found out about the nod only last week, will not. But he is deeply proud of the "great accolade," his once-disposable piece of pop culture now enshrined at the Smithsonian.

"Wow, we're in the Smithsonian," Anderson said Friday.

She reminded me that in 1989, she left Washington, D.C., where she was an administrative assistant to an Arkansas congressman, to work for her dad after Jerry Jones considered changing Schramm's cheerleader outfits — from hot pants to biker shorts. Cheerleaders walked out; their director quit. Anderson was dispatched to quell the revolt.

“We know the influence of our game on American culture, but the cheerleaders themselves being so iconic to our culture is an entirely different pinnacle of accomplishment,” she said. “And why? Piece it together: success on the field and on television, reaching a new audience, the sparkle, even that little bit of the controversy. All those elements led to them becoming a piece of pop culture. And it’s pretty amazing.”