Way back in another era, McDonald’s used to give away epic promotional items when you visited their stores.

Case in point – this Dallas Cowboys full-size roster poster from 1981.

The front…

Tom Landry was still the coach, Danny White #11, Gary Hogeboom #14 and Glenn Carano #18 were the quarterbacks / alternates, and Tony Dorsett #33 was still on the team. Wikipedia has a summary of the season, and I do remember watching the final game against the 49ers with my dad in our living room on the old TV set they had. Funny how a simple thing like this can bring back memories so easily.

The back of the poster had “autographs” of the whole team around their iconic helmet.

I don’t remember the exact details of how I originally got the poster, but I do remember that as soon as I got home, it went up on my wall right above my bed and stayed there even after I went off to college.

The poster did surprisingly well rolled up in a cardboard tube sitting sideways in one of my Seward Trunks all these years, but it took awhile for it to flatten out so I could scan it. I got lucky the tape I used to hang it up back then came right off and left very little residue.

After guiding it very slowly through a poster scanner at max resolution, and a little straightening in Photoshop, here we are.

Flickr only allows 300mb uploads, so this is a highly down-scaled version of the original 900mb TIFF scan.

If you like this one, just wait until you see the Dallas Cowboys roster poster I have from 1979.