Lawrence Herkimer often described himself as the “oldest, fattest cheerleader in the business”. A slightly paunchy, middle-aged Texan, he patented the design of the pompom and built a business empire around cheerleading — running training camps that churned out 150,000 cheerleaders a year and manufacturing everything a high school girl might desire from manuals to pleated skirts. He sold his company for $20 million in 1986. “I couldn’t think like a 15-year-old girl anymore,” he said.
Herkimer was in fact a former cheerleader from an age when the majority were men. He was working as a PE teacher in Dallas, Texas, when, with a $600 loan from a family friend, he set up his first cheerleading workshop in his garage in 1948. His class had 52 girls and one boy; a year later — as greater numbers of women began attending college after the Second World War — there were 350 pupils. He was soon making more money from running cheerleading courses than teaching.
He set up the National Cheerleaders Association, which ran 430 camps with 1,500 instructors — his head office was staffed by a glamorous mix of ex-cheerleaders. Herkimer toured a school a week teaching backflips and visited Europe and Japan. He even devised a leap known as the “Herkie” — “It was just a poor split jump,” he said. “I don’t like to tell people that.”
When a doctor later fitted him with a hearing aid he asked Herkimer whether he had worked in a profession with noisy motors. To the doctor’s surprise Herkimer replied it was the shouts of teenage girls that had affected his hearing.
Herkimer’s wife Dorothy once said: “There are times at the country club when someone says, ‘What does your husband do for a living?’ and the first woman will say, ‘Oh, he’s a doctor,’ and the next will say, ‘Oh, he’s a lawyer,’ and it comes to me and I’ll say, ‘Well, he’s a cheerleader.’”
It was Dorothy who reminded him that he could not jump forever. He began designing uniform sweaters and skirts for squads and set up a knitting mill and a factory producing ribbons and buttons. He returned from one work trip to find his wife “sitting at the dining room table taking so many orders that she couldn’t talk to me,” he said.
He estimated that his Cheerleader Supply Company accounted for 60 per cent of cheerleading uniforms and equipment sold in the US in the 1980s. “I feel we have a recession-proof business,” he once said. “If times get bad, a father would sell the boat before he would tell his daughter she can’t have pompoms and her cheerleader sweater.”
When colour television arrived in the 1960s Herkimer hit upon on his biggest success. “I figured there had to be something more colourful on the field than a chrome stick that the cheerleaders twirled,” he said, “so I got the idea to put some coloured paper on a stick.”
In 1971 he was granted a patent for the pompom. He said he chose the word after he heard that it had vulgar connotations in other cultures.
Lawrence Russell Herkimer was born in Michigan in 1925. His father was a salesman. He grew up in Dallas and was a cheerleader at high school and college — with a break to serve in the US navy during the Second World War. He married Dorothy Brown, who designed one of his bestselling pleated cheerleading skirts. She died in 1993 but he is survived by their three daughters, Marilyn, Sharon and Carolyn, who are all married and grew up helping their father and learning his routines.
He lived with his second wife, Vera, in Florida and stayed fit by playing golf. When asked if he still did “Herkies”, he said: “I was about 60 when I did my last one. I joke that it takes a crane and piano wire to perform one now.”
Lawrence Herkimer, cheerleading innovator, was born on October 14, 1925. He died on July 1, 2015, aged 89
