For more than 60 years, one thing remained true: if the Dallas Cowboys were playing, Carolyn Price was cheering.
Known as the Cowboys’ No. 1 fan, Price became a familiar face to players, coaches and generations of North Texas football fans. She died in February after a battle with pancreatic cancer.
Now, her daughter, Charmayne, is opening up about the woman behind the legend and what life has been like without her.
Price’s Lancaster home tells much of her story. Pictures preserve decades of memories and reveal the order in which she lived her life: faith first, then family, then Cowboys football.
“She put God first every single time,” Charmayne said.
Five years ago, Price described her priorities herself: “I don’t care about anything much other than God, family and the Cowboys winning.”
Charmayne took many of the pictures that now fill her mother’s home, but there is still one door she has trouble opening: the door to Price’s bedroom.
“I cry. It’s hard for me to go into her room. I smell her.”
NBC 5 cameras were inside that room in 2022 as Price packed her Prescott jersey and prepared for another trip to Cowboys training camp, something she had done every summer for more than 30 years.
Price’s connection to the team went back much further, a fan since the Cowboys were founded in 1960, tailgating outside the Cotton Bowl in homemade T-shirts.
Two years later, she had Charmayne, who grew up immersed in her mother’s Cowboys fandom.
“I was taught go Cowboys before I knew my ABCs,” Charmayne said.
The decades brought five Cowboys Super Bowl championships, and Price saw them all.
Charmayne inherited the loyalty, though she said her mother’s passion was on another level:
“Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll cut you over the Cowboys. I love them just as much as she does. But I didn’t. I didn’t have the passion that she had,” she said.
For Price, being a Cowboys fan extended far beyond the players on the field.
“Mother really loved them. She loved the parking lot attendant. She loved a concession stand, the referees, the ushers. Oh, and the cheerleaders. Oh my God. She thought she was fine as they were,” Charmayne said.
Last summer, however, something changed. When it was time to pack again for training camp, Charmayne noticed her mother slowing down.
“I knew it was something; that’s my mother, ” Charmayne explained.
Price did not make the trip.
Then, in October, came the diagnosis.
“She had pancreatic cancer, which hit her organs.”
Price spent the following months in and out of the hospital. But there was one date she was determined not to miss: a Cowboys game on Thanksgiving, which also fell on her birthday.
“She was super sick. She was in the hospital, but they released her. I gotta go to the game, Charmaine, and it fell on her birthday. And it was Thanksgiving, and we won. We beat the Chiefs. 42”
It would be Price’s final Cowboys game.
“It was her very last one.”
As her mother became sicker, Charmayne became her nurse. When she posted a simple request online asking people to pray, word spread quickly.
Fans did more than leave comments.
They came to the hospital.
“It was overwhelming,” Charmayne said.
She explained that the attention became so intense that her mother eventually had to be admitted under the name Jane Doe. The password used to protect access to her room was fitting:
“I said, of course it’s Cowboys,” Charmayne laughed.
Price returned to the hospital in January.
After her death, tributes poured in from fans, former players and celebrities. For Charmayne, the response reflected the way her mother treated the people she met.
“I gotta respect the love bc mother made everybody feel like they were #1,” she said.
But when she thinks about what she misses most, it is not the games, the tailgates or the Cowboys traditions; it is the mornings.
“Mother called me every morning, and she would say, ‘Feet hit the floor, make this day count.’ She harassed me, every morning,” she said.
For Charmayne, those mornings are different now.
“Nothing has been the same, literally. When my day started now, it feels like a dream still. I still expect her to call me,” she explained.
For more than six decades, North Texas knew Price for her big voice, her love for the Cowboys, and a passion she never tried to hide. Charmayne saw something more: a mother getting to live the life she wanted.
“I enjoyed watching Mother live her dream, if that makes sense. That’s why she named her book, The Priceless Dream,” she said.
Price will be honored on national television at a Cowboys game this season, and Charmayne plans to be there to help pay tribute.
“No one can fill her shoes,” Charmayne said, but for one night she will stand in the spot where her mother once stood; and someday, she may be ready to open that bedroom door again.