I told Dee Brock once, “You were a woman of the world when the world could be small for women,” and she smiled, and she said she liked that line. We were sitting on her back patio in Tyler during one of my overnight visits, when I drove two hours from Dallas to chat and have dinner and dig through her voluminous archives with her friend Linda, who’d spent years in Dallas journalism (mostly broadcast) and had her own lore to share.
Dee founded the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, an epic legacy, but the boxes of pictures were filled with shots of her modeling (total babe) and smiling alongside celebrities with her then-husband Dallas Times Herald columnist Bob Brock and working in Washington, D.C., at PBS, which hired her in 1980 to bring educational programming to the masses via public TV stations, an idea that was, like Dee, ahead of its time.
I got to know Dee a few years ago while working on a podcast about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders for Texas Monthly called America’s Girls. Dee was in her early 90s, and bits of her own history were slipping from her fingers. It took her a moment to remember the town in East Texas where she went to high school, but after we pivoted to other topics, the name popped up: New London, which turns out to be the site of a 1937 natural gas explosion that killed hundreds of students and teachers, a tragedy that led to changes in Texas regulation, and I tell you this to explain how, even when Dee was talking about other things, she was teaching me.
Dee Brock was a mother, a teacher at Thomas Jefferson, a college professor at El Centro, a writer, a reader, and my friend. She meant the world to me, and I think she knew that but didn’t really understand it, even if I did. She died on Wed., Sept. 23, at the age of 96, but she will never leave me — or so many others.