Remember when … the Cleveland Browns had cheerleaders? Really, they did!

Bill Lubinger
The Plain Dealer
Tuesday, November 30, 2010

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Pat Otto was on a business call a few years back when she noticed the bubble-wrapped frame on the floor of her client’s Lakewood office.

“I said, ‘Oh, my God, is that…?'”

It was — in all it’s sexless glory — an old Browns cheerleader outfit. Otto, an account manager for an employee-benefits firm, hadn’t seen one since she turned hers in after the 1971 season.

She was Patti Adamson then, a 17-year-old Rocky River senior and a Cleveland Browns cheerleader. She was one of 19, or 20, or 32. It’s been so long, no one seems to remember exactly.

The Browns? They had cheerleaders?

Yes, believe it or not, but they’re a mere footnote in the team’s storied past because they vanished faster than a fourth-quarter lead.

And because the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, they were not.

“We had them one year. They looked crazy. It was ridiculous,” Pat Modell, wife of the former Browns owner, said recently. “It was so cold in Cleveland that it almost looked like they were wearing wooly pajamas.”

Art Modell said in a recent phone interview he didn’t even remember the team having cheerleaders. Although some of the former cheerleaders recall being told at the time that it was her creation, Pat Modell said it was hatched by someone on Art’s staff.

“Whose idea was that?” she called out to Art in another room. “It was the biggest flop.”

Maybe, but a nugget of Cleveland football history nonetheless. And still meaningful — maybe more meaningful to some — with the passage of time.

“It was a blast,” said Robin Byall Paisley, a ’73 Rocky River grad and now a nurse in Portland, Ore. “To be out there in front of that crowd. At that age. Oh, wow, a Cleveland Browns cheerleader.”

The group was mostly juniors and seniors from local high school drill teams and cheerleading squads. They practiced on Saturday mornings at Edgewater Park, learning basic dance routines to the songs of director Frank Strasek’s Cleveland Browns pep band.

Perks were few. With no access to a dressing room, they had to arrive on game day in uniform.

And, oh, those uniforms. Strictly Pittsburgh Steeler-chic: white satin knickers with brown stripes down the side, brown knee socks, orange turtleneck sweaters, orange and white pom-poms and saddle shoes.

“It was really unflattering,” Paisley said. “We kind of looked like referees.”

The cheerleaders performed only at home games. They weren’t paid, but were allowed to bring a chaperone, which their dads, brothers and boyfriends lapped up. They went largely unnoticed, except by Steeler fans, who, as one former cheerleader recalled, tossed garbage and beer cans at them.

Paisley and her older sister, Lynne, Otto and a few friends were all recruited by their Rocky River pom-pom coach, who they believe had a connection to the Browns.

So the teens didn’t have to try out. But they did have a page-and-a-half of rules. Among them: No gum-chewing or consuming alcohol while in uniform. No excessive jewelry. No grooming on the field. No fraternizing with or dating the players. And, apparently, no cheering.

“One thing we could not do, we could not incite the crowd beyond, ‘Go Browns!'” said Lynne Byall Benson, now a college professor in Boston.

It’s not like they didn’t have something to cheer about that year. The Browns, under new head coach Nick Skorich, finished 9-5 before losing to the Baltimore Colts, 20-3, in the playoffs.

The cheerleaders were gone after 1971. Some actually quit before the season ended because it was so cold. They weren’t allowed to wear coats unless they all matched, but were told the Browns wouldn’t buy them.

They were to turn in their uniforms at season’s end, but Benson was so upset when the Browns reneged on a promise to invite them to the team’s year-end banquet that she kept hers. It’s still in a trunk at home.

The Browns have no record of the 1971 cheerleaders. No photographs. No mention in the media guide or game programs. They haven’t had cheerleaders since — one of the few NFL teams without them. The others: the Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, New York Giants and the Steelers.

The Browns actually fielded cheerleaders before 1971, but that fact has been misreported.

Former Plain Dealer Sports Editor Hal Lebovitz, answering a reader question in 1979, wrote that the Browns had majorettes with a team band starting in 1946, but only the one season with cheerleaders.

The Plain Dealer’s Emerson Batdorff reported in 1960 that the team debuted “a talented crop” of six cheerleaders that season, in white sweaters, brown corduroy shorts and white earmuffs.

The Browns have a 1962 photo of four women who fit that description. One was Elaine Hybil, now Elaine Arndt of Wisconsin. They were all Brush High School majorettes who got to be Browns cheerleaders because the school band director played in the Browns’ pep band.

There were six cheerleaders in 1961 and four in ’62, including Sheila Lefkowitz, now Sheila Myers of Beachwood, who said her sister was also a Browns cheerleader in the late ’50s.

“They probably were there so the women had something to watch while their husbands were intent on the game,” Batdorff wrote back then. “Coach Paul Brown thinks of everything.”

The experience in 1971 was definitely a mixed bag, said Rocky River grad Rita Salah, now Rita Allen, a retired consultant living in Belgium.

“Part of me doesn’t want to admit that I did this,” she said. “And part of me is pleased to say that I did.”