William Wrigley, 66, chief executive officer of the Chicago-based company that has become synonymous with the chewing gum business worldwide, died Monday of complications due to pneumonia.
Mr. Wrigley’s death came only days after he missed the William Wrigley Jr. Co.’s annual shareholders meeting–the first time he had been absent in 36 years.
Earlier Monday, the chewing gum giant named Mr. Wrigley’s son, William Wrigley Jr., as acting president of the company because the elder Mr. Wrigley was admitted to the hospital on Friday for treatment of pneumonia.
Mr. Wrigley was the third generation of his family to head the nation’s dominant gum manufacturer.
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He proved an able successor to his father, Philip K. Wrigley, in beating back stiff competitive challenges
But he was unable to keep intact all of his father’s legacy, most notably the Chicago Cubs baseball team.
Mr. Wrigley sold his 80.5 percent interest in the National League ball club to Tribune Co. in 1981 for $20.5 million. The sale was forced by the death of his parents within two months of each other in 1977, subjecting their $81 million estate to federal and state inheritance taxes.
To pay those taxes, Mr. Wrigley was faced with a choice. He could either sell a significant portion of his 25 percent interest in the gum company, a highly profitable enterprise, or his holdings in the Cubs, a perennial money loser and an enterprise that outsiders suspected he tolerated out of respect for his father.
Mr. Wrigley quickly accepted the Tribune offer.
But Mr. Wrigley did try to preserve Cubs tradition while at the helm. As CEO, he resisted installing lights at Wrigley Field. He preferred day games because it allowed players to go home at night to be with their families, and he didn’t want to spoil the uniqueness of Wrigley Field.
Of the city’s major business figures, the lean and crew-cut Mr. Wrigley was one of the most private. He participated in few outside civic activities, explaining that he didn’t want to get involved in organizations in which he would be “just a name on a letterhead.” Although he occasionally granted interviews to sportswriters in which a certain ambivalence about the Cubs invariably seemed to emerge, business reporters found they could corner him only at his company’s annual shareholders’ meeting.
Undoubtedly a major reason behind this posture was a hotly contested annulment from his second wife, the details of which, down to the property division of two onyx Q-Tip holders, were reported almost endlessly in the daily press.
Mr. Wrigley was married three times. The first marriage was in 1957 to the former Alison Hunter. The couple had three children, Alison, Philip and William. They were divorced in 1969. Six months later he married Joan Fisher, who had been married twice before.
The marriage was a stormy one. Mr. Wrigley complained that his second wife outspent even his handsome income. The marriage ended, but only after a fierce four-year court battle.
In 1981, Mr. Wrigley married for a third time. A year later the fact of his marriage still was known only to his friends and family.
Mr. Wrigley was born Jan. 21, 1933, and was groomed early to take over the gum company, a business his flamboyant grandfather started in 1891.
He was educated at Chicago’s Latin School, Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and Yale University. At Yale, he studied liberal arts “with an emphasis on psychology.”
“This was for business purposes,” he once explained. “I didn’t study psychology as such, but rather industrial psychology. . . . The practical application of psychology helps your advertising campaigns.”
After a two-year stint in the Navy, Mr. Wrigley returned to Chicago in 1956 and joined the company at the age of 23.
In 1960 he was named a vice president. In 1961, when he was 28, his father assumed the post of chairman of the board and turned over the company’s reins to his son, who was appointed president and chief executive officer.
Mr. Wrigley proved himself an adept boss in his own right. For decades, the Wrigley Co. had been known as “the General Motors of the gum industry.” Until the 1970s it controlled as much as two-thirds of the total gum market, selling just four principal brands: Doublemint, Spearmint, Juicy Fruit and P.K. (which was marketed mainly abroad). All had been introduced before 1915.
In the 1970s, however, Wrigley’s market share was cut to about 33 percent.
Under Mr. Wrigley’s leadership, the company grew to reap in excess of $2 billion in annual sales and expanded its presence to more than 140 countries. Most recently, it opened a $70 million factory in St. Petersburg, Russia.
In 1998, Wrigley’s profits soared to $304.5 million compared with a net income of $271.6 million in the year-earlier period.
Mr. Wrigley, who owned about 30 percent of the company, benefited quite nicely from the financial success. Last year, he captured the 101 position on Forbes magazine’s rankings of the world’s richest billionaires, with an estimated worth of $3.1 billion.
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