October 14 - Lawrence Herkimer

Image courtesy app.emaze.com

On this day, in 1925, Lawrence Russell Herkimer, the Father of Modern Cheerleading, was born in Muskegon, Michigan. Cheering for your favorite team has been around for as long as sports themselves. Organized cheers being led by someone (or a group of someones) didn’t start occurring until the 1860s. Around that time, sports fans in Great Britain began chanting in unison to rally their teams. It didn’t take long for the fad to cross the pond to America and cheering was already pretty well established by the time the first intercollegiate football game happened in 1869. An exclusively male activity in the beginning, cheering continued to grow after that, with each school developing their own signature cheer as the rest of the Nineteenth Century played out. The moniker Cheer Leader (notice it’s two separate words at this point) started being used in 1897 when Princeton University designated three male students, one from each class, to fill the position. A year later, the University of Minnesota had a six man squad doing the same thing. The first fraternity for cheerleaders, Gamma Sigma, was founded in 1903 and UM permitted the first female cheerers in 1923. It wasn’t until World War II, when most collegiate boys were being drafted into the war effort, that cheering became a predominantly female activity.

Image courtesy smu.edu

Lawrence was a student at Southern Methodist University when his lifelong commitment to cheerleading began. Up to that point, cheering had been more about the cheers themselves than the physical stunts that we’re used to today.  Besides raising one’s arms, an occasional jump or high kick to help punctuate the amount of enthusiasm a squad member was feeling is as visual as things got. The epitome of a cheer move was something along the lines of a split jump. Lawrence changed all that when he screwed up his execution of a split jump. Luckily his fellow cheerleaders thought his new move looked really good and the signature jump forever known as the herkie was born. Moves grew from there as everyone tried to outdo each other with higher jumps, flips, pyramids, throws and anything else they could come up with. Cheering really exploded when Lawrence decided it was worth being formally taught to the next generation.

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After graduating from SMU in 1948, Lawrence got a job teaching physical education and statistics at his alma mater. He organized his first cheerleading camp on the grounds of the school that same year, calling his new organization the National Cheerleaders Association. He borrowed $600 from a friend of a relative to get the camp going and enticed 52 girls and one boy to be his first test subjects. It was a resounding success. The very next year, enrollment jumped to 350 kids. Within a couple of more years, Lawrence was making more from his camps than his teaching job. He retired from university teaching and never looked back. Eventually, the NCA employed more than 1,500 instructors teaching cheer moves to tens of thousands of kids at 430 different sites pulling in nearly $50 million a year. They still sponsor the premier cheer championship event every year, with more than 23,000 athletes from nine countries competing for the top spot.

Image courtesy nytimes.com

You might think that creating a classic, still used cheer jump and starting a successful system to teach it to youngsters would be about all that one man could contribute to the world of cheerleading. In many cases you would be right, but Lawrence had something else to give. As cheerleading gained popularity right alongside color television, he felt that new props would be needed to really make routines pop during televised games. Pompoms were already in existence, but with their big handles and sometimes awkward manner of holding them, they weren’t up to the job of executing clean maneuvers in professional arenas. Lawrence tinkered with them, developing a tighter, more controllable version with hidden handles. In 1971, he was granted US Patent no. 3560313 for his innovation. He preferred to use the French spelling, pompons, for his invention after learning that the word with a double m was Polynesian slang for prostitute. Lawrence’s second venture (which he started at the insistence of his wife), Cheerleading Supply Company, was already successfully selling skirts, sweaters and other uniform pieces and made a killing with the new design.

Lawrence sold the National Cheerleaders Association in 1986 for $20 million, staying on for several more years to run the business. He later admitted that 1986 was also about the last time he could successfully do a herkie jump, but it’s hard to say if that was what prompted him to start getting out of the business. An impressive move for a 60 year old any way you look at it. Lawrence remained physically fit for the remainder of his life, golfing and exercising at a local health club several times a week. He passed away on July 1, 2015 in his beloved Dallas, Texas from heart failure. He was 89.

Also on this day, in Disney history: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Submarine Voyage