Business: Death of Wrigley

Whenever Gum-Man William Wrigley Jr. was away from Chicago, as regularly to be expected as the morning mail were his daily long distance telephone calls to his office in the Wrigley Building. Often they lasted for an hour or two. Sometimes they came from California. Sometimes they came from Arizona. Fortnight ago, the calls stopped abruptly. It was announced that Bill Wrigley was ill in Phoenix. Not seriously, just a slight heart attack following acute indigestion. A week later, another telephone call came from Phoenix, but it was not from Mr. Wrigley. Death had come to him early that morning, peacefully, while he slept.

Capitalist, sportsman, showman, philanthropist, Bill Wrigley was to the man in the street the perfect example of the Poor Boy Who Made Good. His life to the newsie was the great American legend; and every newsie could outline its cogent paragraphs: ran away from home in Philadelphia at the age of eleven to sell newspapers in Manhattan; back to Philadelphia to sell soap for his father; into the towns of eastern Pennsylvania where he came to be known as the Wonder Boy Salesman; finally to Chicago, where he peddled more soap, then baking powder and then, because he found it more profitable, chewing-gum. .. .

In a day when other manufacturers were still dubious about the power of advertising, Wrigley believed in it (“Tell ’em quick and tell ’em often”), spent millions to publicize his gum in practically every country of the globe. He lost several small fortunes in the process. But the fortune he finally attained was reputed to be close to $100,000,000. In 1917 he bought an interest (along with Jonathan Ogden Armour and Albert David Lasker) in the Chicago Cubs, the money-losing, badly run National League baseball club whose members lived so riotously that Wrigley virtually took on the role of reformer as well as part owner. In 1924 he bought out the Lasker interest, became owner of about 71% of the Cubs’ stock. For the last five years the club made money, in 1929 won the pennant but failed to win the world’s championship.

Bill Wrigley was no slave to his desk. Once when he was asked to be in his office to sign an important contract, he cried, “The hell with it, the Giants are in town,” hurried off to the ball park. He seldom missed a game. For several months of every year he went to Catalina Island, 12 mi. off the coast of California, which he had bought in 1919 for $2,000,000, and of which he had made a profitable business enterprise as well as a playground for himself and family. He owned the Biltmore Hotel at Phoenix in which he died, was a director of some 40 corporations (although he seldom attended meetings), was associated in many a business with his great & good friends Adman Lasker, Charles Alexander McCulloch, John Daniel Hertz. He believed religiously in all the old maxims, went to bed early, got up early, rode horseback almost to the day of his death, at 70 looked 20 years younger. Red faced, clear eyed, with not a grey hair in his head, recently he remarked that by taking care of himself he expected to live to be 100.