It has been hiding in plain sight for as long as its (now-former) owner can remember, hanging in her booth in a Lakewood antique store — a stained, faded, threadbare pennant passed over and over and over by customers who didn't even think it worth a lousy 15 bucks.

"There's no telling where or when I picked it up," Lu Smith said Wednesday when I called to ask a few more questions about my weekend purchase.

Smith, a collector of Dallas antiques for decades, has a spot at Curiosities in Lakewood from which she sells her homegrown antiques: ashtrays and staplers branded with the monikers of long-gone businesses, decades-old maps, Dallas Railway & Terminal Co. trolley tokens (well, until I bought them all), and other museum-quality Dallas-related ephemera. You might also know her as the former owner of and genial host at the Inwood Lounge.

I was browsing her booth Saturday in search of Christmas gifts when my 13-year-old son pointed out the blue pennant decorated with a white state of Texas and red "DALLAS" lettering. It was partially obscured by a silky white Texas Sesquicentennial scarf.

The pennant looked mighty familiar.

"I bought it someplace in Dallas County — a flea market, probably," Smith said. "I'd love to make up a big fat lie." She laughed. "But that's your job."

Well, maybe that'll have to do. Because best guess is, the pennant's 80 years old, and it's based on a century-old design. Anyone associated with it is long gone.

Dallas' long-lost official flag, designed in 1916 by Jane Malone and forgotten about for a century. ((Irwin Thompson / Staff Photographer))

And as far as Dallas' official archivist is concerned, this is the only one in existence.

"I don't know of any other one," John Slate said Wednesday. "I've never even talked to anybody about it."

Last year, you may recall, engineer Dallas May tried to persuade the City Council to swap out the city's tired-looking official flag, adopted in 1967, for his new design — a Pegasus floating above three wavy blue lines meant to represent the Trinity River. May told the council in December 2015 that our current offering "does not inspire the kind of love and admiration because the seal on it is really a symbol of authority and not inclusiveness. ... It's a symbol for Dallas City Hall and not the people."

Fair enough. The current flag's a bit staid and stale. But I never thought May's design was the answer, either — mostly since May's flag would probably come with a cease-and-desist from Exxon Mobil, whose lawyers went after tiny Oak Cliff comic shop Red Pegasus back in July for using the company icon trademarked back in 1911. The flying red horse might be Dallas' symbol, of sorts, but only because a company planted it on top of downtown's first skyscraper in 1934.

In the midst of last year's smallish brouhaha over the city's flag, I'd read a couple of decades-old accounts mentioning a century-old original, which was designed by a young woman named Jane Malone, a commercial designer who'd attended the Aunspaugh Art School here and Columbia University in New York.

Sometime between 1914 and '16, Malone entered a design contest held by the Evening Journal, this newspaper's afternoon publication, and received $25 when her design was chosen by the Dallas Society for Municipal Research on March 10, 1916. Ten days later, it was adopted as the official city flag by the city commissioners.

From The Dallas Evening Journal on March 11, 1916.

Last year, John Slate sent me a Dallas Times Herald clipping from 1966 featuring what was believed to be the Malone-designed flag, which was discovered lying around City Hall only after a citizen had complained that Dallas didn't even have an official flag. But in that photo, and another from a 50-year-old city brochure titled "Dallas Banner," the font was different — plain, sans serif. And the pennant was silk and decorated with fringe.

Turns out, that flag was from 1954 and came from the SMU student body. It was presented as a gift, then, apparently, tossed aside.

The pennant hanging in Lu Smith's jampacked antiques booth looked closer to what could have been the real thing, like something that might have been designed a century ago. When I got home Saturday, I sent it to Slate with a note: "Look familiar?" He responded the next day.

"Wow, that's it!" he wrote. "I think the news clipping is plenty of proof."

He attached a short piece from The Dallas Journal dated May 22, 1935, which said that the city was considering flying its official city flag during Texas Centennial celebrations set to take place the following year. It also noted that most folks had no idea Dallas even had an official city flag.

"Although the design was adopted in 1916, the records do not show that a single ensign was ever made," read the item. "The design has hung on the wall of City Secretary Earl Goforth's office since the Commission under Mayor Henry D. Lindsley officially accepted it as the municipal banner."

A rendering of the flag ran with the story — in black and white, of course. It looks precisely like the one I bought Saturday. Jane Malone's flag.

"I don't have any doubt about that," Slate said when I asked him about it Wednesday.

"It's the only one I've ever seen. For all I know, you may have the only one."

This was NOT the flag. Instead it came from SMU students in 1954. ((Dallas Municipal Archives))

That's because, according to an Aug. 16, 1966, Dallas Morning News story, "not a single flag was ever made" for the Texas Centennial, despite that old story from the Journal. Wrote Joe Dealey Jr., the official design was yet again forgotten, discarded.

By 1967, we had a new one. The one we have today. The boring one.

Now, finally, we have the real thing. In living color.

I sent a photo of The Real Malone to Ted Kaye, who wrote the flag-design guide Good Flag, Bad Flag, serves as editor of American City Flags and is easily the most famous member of the North American Vexillological Association — The Expert, in other words. Kaye has a soft spot for May's offering, which appears in the brand-new issue of The Vexilloid Tabloid.

Dallas' official flag flies in front of Dallas City Hall. Because it has no choice. ((Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer))

"That's a nice little banner that Dallas adopted in 1916," he wrote back.

He then evaluated it according to the five basic principles of flag design, as spelled out in Good Flag, Bad Flag:

"It scores high in Simplicity (bold, clear design), Symbolism (Texas, star, location of star, colors of state flag), Colors (just three) and Distinctiveness (the swallow-tail pennant is unusual, no other flag looks like it)," he wrote. "It only scores low on No Lettering or Seals (with 'Dallas' prominently written).

"But I like to say that in every bad design, there's a good design trying to get out," he wrote. "Removing the 'Dallas' inscription, and perhaps enlarging the star, would improve the design. In fact, it would surpass the current flag, which suffers from the use of the city seal."

So we have a winner. The same winner we chose — and discarded — a century ago.

So let's make this happen, Dallas. I've got a flag just waiting to be flown. Has your name all over it.