The Terrible Towel is the gold rag every Steelers fan waves at every game. The team does not own it. Myron Cope invented it as a radio gimmick before a 1975 playoff game. He gave the entire trademark to a school for people with disabilities. His own son had lived there for years, and had never spoken a single word. Every official towel sold since has funded that school. Fans are still waving it, fifty years on.
The Terrible Towel Doesn't Belong to the Steelers
Every fall, millions of gold and black towels spin above NFL stadiums whenever the Pittsburgh Steelers take the field. Almost none of the people waving them know who actually owns the trademark - and it isn't the team.
A Radio Man's Last-Minute Gimmick
In 1975, Pittsburgh sportscaster Myron Cope was working the Steelers' flagship radio station, WTAE, when a producer asked him to come up with a gimmick for an upcoming playoff broadcast.
Cope's answer was simple: he asked fans to bring a plain gold dish towel to Three Rivers Stadium and wave it during the game.
The Steelers beat the Baltimore Colts on December 27, 1975, with an estimated 30,000 towels twirling in the stands. The team went on to win the AFC Championship the following week.
By the time the Steelers reached Super Bowl X, the towel had an official name. Cope's daughter, Elizabeth, had a habit of calling her father's promotional ideas "terrible" - and the label stuck.
The Trademark Cope Gave Away
The Terrible Towel became one of the most recognizable props in American sports. But in 1996, Cope did something no team owner or league executive would ever expect from a beloved local icon.
He signed over full ownership of the trademark to Allegheny Valley School, a nonprofit in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, that provides care for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
From that point on, the Steelers themselves no longer controlled the rights to their own rally towel. Allegheny Valley School - now known as Merakey Allegheny Valley School - did.
His Silent Voice
Cope had a personal reason for choosing that particular school. His son, Danny, was born with severe autism and never learned to speak. Danny lived at Allegheny Valley School for years, cared for by staff there while his father built a broadcasting career known for having one of the loudest voices in Pittsburgh.
Cope's daughter, Elizabeth, later told the New York Times just how much the towel meant to her brother.
"It's almost like the Terrible Towel is Danny's silent voice."
Cope spoke openly for years about raising a nonverbal child and about the isolation many families of children with autism face. Giving away one of the most valuable trademarks in sports was, for him, a way to make sure his son - and everyone else living at the school - would be provided for long after he was gone.
Every Towel Still Pays It Forward
Myron Cope died in 2008, but the arrangement he set up never expired. Every officially licensed Terrible Towel sold since 1996 sends proceeds straight to Merakey Allegheny Valley School.
The school says it has now realized more than $9.5 million from licensed Terrible Towel products - money that funds programs for hundreds of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, the same kind of care Danny received.
In December 2025, the Terrible Towel marked its 50th anniversary. It is still waved at every Steelers home game, sold in nearly every Pittsburgh gift shop, and packed in the luggage of Steelers fans who moved away from the city decades ago.
Half a century after Cope first asked fans to bring a dish towel to a football game, the trademark still belongs to the school where his son lived - and the towel is still speaking for him.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who invented the Terrible Towel?
Who owns the Terrible Towel trademark?
Why did Myron Cope give away the Terrible Towel trademark?
How much money has the Terrible Towel raised for charity?
Is the Terrible Towel still sold today?
Verified Fact
Verified Aug 16, 2026
Source: Merakey Allegheny Valley SchoolShow verification details
Verified 2026-08-16. Independent audit (fact-verifier), separate pass from content-creator self-check. PRIMARY SOURCES read in full: avs.merakey.org/terrible-towel.html (confirms 1996 trademark transfer to Merakey AVS + over .5M raised, but does NOT mention Danny/family - so source_url corrected below), Pittsburgh Magazine "The Terrible Towel Turns 50" (Dec 2025, fetched - confirms 1996 transfer, .5M figure matches merakey exactly, Danny nonverbal + on autism spectrum + lived at school for many years), TribLive 50th-anniversary piece (fetched - confirms Danny age 57, nonverbal, autism spectrum, currently resides in a Merakey AVS group home; gives a DIFFERENT verified Elizabeth Cope quote - flag as house note), ABC News Person of the Week 2009 (fetched via redirect - confirms 1996 transfer + AVS mission, no Danny detail), Wikipedia Terrible Towel (confirms Dec 27 1975 debut vs Baltimore Colts, 1996 transfer, Danny autistic). CLAIMS CHECKED: (1) towel not owned by Steelers - CONFIRMED, trademark held by Merakey AVS since 1996, multiple sources. (2) Dec 27 1975 debut vs Baltimore Colts, Steelers won 28-10 - CONFIRMED (WPXI, Wikipedia, Bleacher Report). (3) 1996 full trademark transfer - CONFIRMED by primary avs.merakey.org text. (4) Danny Cope nonverbal + autism, lived at AVS for years - CONFIRMED (Pittsburgh Magazine, TribLive, Wikipedia); exact enrollment year is disputed across sources (1982 vs 1992) so text/article correctly avoid stating a year, using "for years" only - no fix needed. (5) .5 million raised - CONFIRMED verbatim match between avs.merakey.org and Pittsburgh Magazine; correctly kept OUT of social_text/social_caption/social_engagement_comment/social_link_comment (article + FAQ only) - copy law verified compliant. (6) Elizabeth Cope silent-voice quote ("It is almost like the Terrible Towel is Danny is silent voice") - could NOT be fetched directly from NYT (paywalled), but is corroborated consistently across 3 independent secondary aggregations (Pittsburgh-area outlets citing the same NYT interview with identical wording) - treated as a real, correctly-attributed quote at MEDIUM confidence on this one sub-claim; copy is already properly hedged (article attributes it explicitly to NYT via blockquote+attribution, social_engagement_comment uses reported-speech "once said" rather than a bare verbatim quote) - no further hedging needed. NOTE FOR RECORD: TribLive quotes a DIFFERENT, independently-verified Elizabeth Cope line ("The Terrible Towel is like the flag of Steelers Nation...we carry the torch") which is NOT used in our copy; both quotes appear genuine and are not contradictory. CORRECTIONS MADE: (a) article para 2 (Trademark Cope Gave Away section) said AVS provides care for people with "intellectual and physical disabilities" - WRONG, Merakey AVS own site consistently uses "intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD)" as its primary descriptor (physical disabilities are a secondary/accompanying condition for some residents, not the primary descriptor) - corrected to match FAQ language and the organizations own terminology. (b) source_url was avs.merakey.org/terrible-towel.html which supports the 1996 transfer + .5M but does NOT mention Danny/the family story at all - CITATION FIDELITY FAIL on the human-interest half of the headline claim - swapped source_url to Pittsburgh Magazine Dec 2025 piece, which is the single source independently supporting every headline claim (1996 transfer, .5M, Danny nonverbal/autism, years at AVS). Cope 2008 death correctly kept OUT of all social copy (article only) per house style. NUMERIC COHERENCE: pass, no math is done in social copy, single $ figure only in article/FAQ and self-consistent. PEDANT TRAPS: none remaining - AVS enrollment year avoided, terminology fixed, no anachronisms, fifty-years-on framing accurate as of Aug 2026 (50th anniversary was Dec 2025). NAIVE-READER LEGIBILITY: pass - all referents established (he=Cope from prior sentence, that school=established), single payoff (delivered once in social_text, not repeated), timeline anchored (1975 debut -> 1996 transfer -> fifty years on), no unwritten-fact logic jumps. SHARE-CRAFT: closer lands on a human beat (fans still waving it / the towel still speaking for him in article closer), humans are the grammatical subject throughout (he signed, Cope gave, fans wave), clear turn/reveal structure (towel is famous -> reveal it is not Steelers-owned -> reveal why -> ongoing payoff) - pass. FUN-BRAND: wholesome celebrity-devotion pattern (a father secretly gave away a hugely valuable trademark to fund care for his nonverbal son and hundreds of others like him) - genuinely uplifting, no forced-institutionalization framing, no suicide-adjacent or graphic content, no religious imagery - PASS, no exclude_from_scheduling needed. TIER: MEGA reviewed and left as-is - mass recognizability (NFL/Steelers rally-towel icon) + a real, nameable, historically massive-engagement fan tribe (Steelers Nation) + a specific, non-vague, plausible detonator sentence (tribal one-upmanship: our towel funds a disability school since 1996, what does yours do) - clears the MEGA bar honestly, not inflated. ENGINE=2 confirmed correct (the towel/trademark ownership IS the story, not a celebrity name-dropped into unrelated trivia). AFFINITY_POOL=2 confirmed correct (Steelers/Terrible Towel is a mass-recognized national NFL brand, not a regional-only fame case). No scheduled_posts existed for this fact (checked, 0 rows) so no cascade cancellation needed. No image_social exists yet (pre-imaging), nothing to null.
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