Virginia McCaskey, principal owner of the Chicago Bears and the only daughter of team founder George Halas, died Thursday, the team announced. She was 102.
“While we are sad, we are comforted knowing Virginia Halas McCaskey lived a long, full, faith-filled life and is now with the love of her life on earth,” the family said in a statement. “She guided the Bears for four decades and based every business decision on what was best for Bears players, coaches, staff and fans.”
McCaskey was reluctantly forced by circumstance to take over her father’s enterprise. She guarded it with passion, patience and more than a touch of Papa Bear’s legendary toughness and stubbornness. When she removed eldest son Michael as team president in February 1999 and went outside the family to replace him with financial director Ted Phillips, she made the difficult decision with a style and grace that defined her personality.
The death of her only brother, George “Mugs” Halas Jr., of a heart attack in 1979 at age 54 left McCaskey as the sole heir to the franchise started in 1920.
“All the time I was growing up and for a large part of my married life, my brother Mugs was there,” she once said. “I used to think, ‘Thank God for Mugs.’ I depended on him. He was the one in charge. I just assumed he would be the one to take over for my dad, and that put me in a great position. I would be able to enjoy all the perks and not have any of the problems. But God had other plans for all of us.”
Though she was two years older than her brother, she had no intention to follow her father’s footsteps. On the board of directors, she kept the title of secretary rather than assuming the title of president or chairman, even though she controlled the voting stock. Her late husband, Ed, who died in 2003, once said she quietly “called the shots.”
“I don’t look to be in the spotlight,” she said. “I think it’s a man’s world as far as the Chicago Bears are concerned.”
When the team reached the Super Bowl in the 2006 season after a 21-year absence, McCaskey allowed herself a rare reflection: “It was a bumpy road a lot of times, how I should sell the team and give Chicago competent ownership. OK, maybe I’m not competent, but Ed and I found the people to do the job. Actually, we found Ted Phillips and he found (former general manager) Jerry Angelo and Jerry Angelo found (former coach) Lovie Smith and here we are.”
Although she held the power to affect day-to-day decisions, she preferred the role of cheerleader and caretaker to power broker. But nobody made a major decision without first consulting her.
When the team fired GM Phil Emery and coach Marc Trestman in December 2014, son and Bears Chairman George McCaskey described his mother as “pissed off — she’s fed up with mediocrity.”
Always reserved in public, McCaskey did not display her father’s irascibility. But she demonstrated the same grit and determination to keep the Bears a viable small family business in an age of implausible financial growth.
Although the team has grown from Halas’ $100 investment into a multibillion-dollar asset, largely because of Halas’ support of league revenue sharing and television contracts, a sale by the McCaskeys would be like the Ford family leaving the auto business.
McCaskey liked to recall a family quote: “Either we own the Bears or we are the rich McCaskeys. We are not the rich McCaskeys who own the Bears.” That was repeated more often before the 2003 opening of renovated Soldier Field, enabling the family to substantially increase revenue.
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She and her husband raised a family of 11 — the logical number for a huddle in the home — in a modest house in Des Plaines. Tim, a Bears vice president, died in 2011 and Michael died in 2020, both of cancer. In 1994, the McCaskeys moved to a ranch home one block away. Daughter Anne moved into the old house.
“I probably live in the smallest house of any NFL executive, but that’s what Ed and I were comfortable doing,” McCaskey said. “That was our lifestyle and now I’m able to stay in that house by myself with wonderful neighbors and Anne is a block away.”
Son Patrick, a Bears vice president, once wrote: “My mother always found it amusing when someone asked her how much hired help she had. That was probably the reason my father nicknamed her ‘Laughing Girl.’ She did all the cooking and laundry and housework. The only real time she got a break was when she went into the hospital to have another baby.”
Although there was more concession to household help in later years, daughter Ellen Tonquest once recalled it wasn’t until her mother was 75 that “she had a cleaning lady once every two weeks.”
Son George once recalled: “When we were kids, I remember her up on an extension ladder on the second floor. She was pushing 50 and there she was painting the gutters. She got that self-reliance from her dad.”
Her father wrote in his autobiography, “Halas by Halas,” that he was “stunned” when his first child was a girl, born Jan. 5, 1923.
“I had assumed — and so had (wife) Min — that the new arrival would be George Stanley Halas Jr.,” Halas wrote. “I already had visions of drawing my son into the thick of the Bears. We didn’t even have a name for a girl.”
Virginia Marion said after her brother came along, she “didn’t mind a bit” assuming traditional female roles of sister, wife, mother and spectator to the family business.
“I was sure Mugs would be quite capable of taking care of everything,” she said. “Even after he died, it really didn’t sink in that I might someday be in charge because Dad reassumed Mugs’ position as president and stepped back into the picture. I guess neither one of us faced reality.”
Halas was 84 when his son died, and he appropriated authority from GM Jim Finks and eventually fired coach Neill Armstrong and hired Mike Ditka in 1982, the year before Halas died.
“More than most people, he considered himself immortal,” McCaskey said of her father. “He kept saying to me, ‘I am leaving you in control and I want things to be in good order for you.’
“And yet there was what I felt was a gap. I had asked Dad, ‘What would you think of Michael’s coming into the Bears and working under Jim Finks and let him learn?’ And he said, ‘Not now, not at this time.’”
Ed McCaskey used to say the only time the future was mentioned was when Halas “talked about what might happen if God makes a mistake. But you don’t ask him about it. That’s the surest way to be shut off. He told (former Bears trainer) Fred Caito that he was going to live to be 120.”
A graduate of St. Scholastica High School, Virginia attended college at Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, where her uncle Walter was football coach and could keep an eye on her.
When she met Ed, a student at Penn, Halas sent two emissaries from the NFL — future Commissioner Bert Bell and Pittsburgh Steelers owner Arthur Rooney — to campus to check him out. After a short conversation, they gave their approval. Rooney told Virginia: “And whoever said Halas was an angel?”
Ed and Virginia attended the 1942 NFL championship game between the Bears and Washington with the intention of asking Papa Bear for permission to marry. The Bears were two-time defending NFL champions, undefeated and big favorites.
“It was there I learned how much football meant to the Halas family,” Ed once recalled.
With the Bears on the verge of losing 14-6, Ed noticed Virginia crying.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “It’s only a football game.”
“No,” Virginia answered. “Don’t you realize my father will never let us get married if the Bears lose?”
Sure enough, the two had to elope and chose Halas’ birthday, Feb. 2, for their marriage date.
“He wasn’t very happy about that,” Virginia said.
By 1949, the McCaskeys had moved into their Des Plaines home, where they raised eight boys and three girls. For a long time three bunk beds accommodated six of the boys in one room.
McCaskey shunned the spotlight and always considered matters concerning Bears ownership to be private, even though the team is dependent on public support.
“With my mom, there’s stoicism, loyalty, faith in God, an ultimate faith in man and humility,” son George said.
When she moved Michael out of the president’s job and made him chairman of the board, she admitted it was difficult.
“Any mother, any wife, likes to see her loved one appreciated and supported,” she said. “I think Michael has handled it better than I have … we’ll be fine.”
Her announcement was one of the few times she spoke in public, and she stayed around after the news conference to answer questions.
Less than a year later, she had to appear again upon the death of Walter Payton on Nov. 1, 1999.
She said: “After Brian Piccolo died (in 1969), my husband Ed and I promised ourselves we wouldn’t be so personally involved with any of the players. We were able to follow that resolve until Walter Payton came into our lives. And you all know what a difference he made to all of us and to the NFL.”
In April 2000, she asked Payton’s widow, Connie, for permission to name the Bears’ indoor practice facility in Lake Forest after him.
As McCaskey stayed behind the scenes in recent years, her son George often was asked for updates on her state of mind about the team.
In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic in September 2020, he said she had returned to her daily routine of attending church and working out three times a week and revealed her plans to attend that season’s opener against the Detroit Lions.
“She’s always eager to start the season, but to say that she’s especially eager this season is an understatement,” George said. “I talked to her a couple of weeks ago and said, ‘So I take it you will do whatever is required of you to attend the games?’ And she paused and said, ‘Yes’. In that tone I think you have heard yourself, leaving no doubt about where she stands.”
At the end of the 2021 season, George said she had been consulted about the firings of GM Ryan Pace and coach Matt Nagy as a member of the Bears board and said her assessment of the season was that she was “very, very disappointed.”
“Everybody wants to win one for her,” he said. “And we’re doing everything we can to make that happen.”
McCaskey stepped into the spotlight for the last time during the Bears’ celebration of their 100th season in June 2019.
She appeared onstage at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont as part of a panel on Bears history and shared her memories of her father and the players and coaches who passed through the organization over the years.
“I’m still trying to find words for what they’ve meant to me,” McCaskey said. “It has made me even more grateful for what my life has been and the position I’m in. There are so many privileges and perks and blessings. I just can’t believe that I’m here and I’m enjoying life at my age the way I am.”
Don Pierson is a former Chicago Tribune reporter and columnist. Tribune reporter Colleen Kane contributed.