Virginia McCaskey, 102, Owner and Stalwart of the Chicago Bears, Dies

Virginia Halas McCaskey, the longtime owner of the Chicago Bears and the daughter of George Halas Sr., who created the team and was one of the founding fathers of the N.F.L., died on Thursday. She was 102 and had spent her entire life around the team going back to the 1920s.

The Bears, who announced her death on their website, did not list a cause or specify where she died.

Mrs. McCaskey attended nearly every Bears game for decades. She witnessed eight of the Bears’ nine league titles (their first championship was in 1921, before she was born and when the team was named the Staleys), as well as its only Super Bowl championship, in January 1986.

She met many of the dozens of Bears players who were inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, a list that includes Red Grange, Bronko Nagurski, Dick Butkus and Walter Payton, as well as her father, who died in 1983.

Mrs. McCaskey never took her front row seat to N.F.L. history for granted.

“All the opportunities I’ve had, all the privileges I’ve had, all the miracles I’ve watched — I’m just very grateful,” she said in “A Lifetime of Sundays,” a 2019 documentary celebrating the N.F.L.’s 100th anniversary. “I can’t think of a better life.”

While she occupied the owner’s suite during games, she rooted like an everyday fan. In 2003, at the first game in the newly remodeled Soldier Field in Chicago, Mrs. McCaskey sat with the former N.F.L. commissioner Paul Tagliabue as the Bears lost to their archrivals, the Green Bay Packers.

“I waited a long time for Don Hutson to retire from the Packers,” she told the commissioner, referring to the great Green Bay wide receiver from the 1930s and ’40s. “Now I can’t wait for Brett Favre to retire.”

In some ways, Mrs. McCaskey was an accidental owner. Her younger brother and only sibling, George (Mugs) Halas Jr., was the team’s heir apparent, working at the club starting in 1950 and rising to team president in 1963. But he died of a heart attack in 1979 at 54.

When George Halas Sr. died in 1983, Mrs. McCaskey received the sole vote in a one-generation trust. He also gave each of his grandchildren equal shares in the team. George Halas Jr.’s first wife, Therese, later claimed that their two children did not receive the same protections as the other grandchildren when the Bears were reorganized in 1981. In 1987, a probate judge upheld the reorganization.

Also in 1987, Therese Halas had the body of her husband exhumed to determine whether he had been poisoned, having died relatively young, at 54. Coroners found that his internal organs had been removed and replaced with sawdust, according to court documents. Without his organs, the coroner could not determine whether drugs or poison were in his body when he died.

Mrs. McCaskey, her husband and her 11 children, however, turned the Bears into a considerable dynasty. When she took over as principal owner of the team in 1983, her husband, Ed McCaskey, became chairman, after serving as vice president and treasurer for 17 years during George Jr.’s tenure. Mrs. McCaskey appointed her eldest son, Michael, then a professor at Harvard Business School, as the club’s president and chief executive. He became chairman in 1999, and his brother George succeeded him in 2011. (Michael McCaskey died of cancer in 2020.) Two other sons, Brian and Patrick McCaskey, work for the team as vice presidents.

“Pride is the word I try to avoid because I’m in this position due to my inheritance,” Mrs. McCaskey said in an interview. “I haven’t done anything to earn it. I still consider it a man’s world, and I’ve been very grateful to be involved as much as I am. It’s a great privilege, and I have to make sure I don’t disappoint.”

Virginia Marion Halas McCaskey was born on Jan. 5, 1923, in Chicago, the eldest child of Mr. Halas and Minnie Bushing Halas, who died in 1966. By then, Mr. Halas had already made his name as a football player and coach and had even played briefly for the New York Yankees, in 1919. The following year, he was hired by the A.E. Staley food starch manufacturer in Decatur, Ill., to run the Staleys, the company’s football team.

The Staleys joined the newly formed American Professional Football Association that year, and Mr. Halas attended the league’s inaugural meeting at a car dealership in Canton, Ohio. The Staleys went 10-1-2 in their only season in Decatur, finishing second in the 14-team league. The following year, the Staleys moved to Chicago, where they won the league championship.

In 1922, Mr. Halas and Edward (Dutch) Sternaman bought the team and renamed it the Bears. The league also had a new name: The National Football League. Nine years later, in 1931, Mr. Halas bought out Mr. Sternaman for $38,000.

In the years before media rights deals and seven-figure sponsorships, the Bears struggled financially, particularly during the Depression, when numerous pro teams folded.

“I didn’t realize it when I was growing up, but there were difficult years in the late ’20s and early ’30s,” Mrs. McCaskey said. “My dad had the Chicago Bears, but was also part-owner of a commercial laundry company, he worked in real estate, he even tried selling cars. I often use the word ‘survival,’ because that’s what was involved.”

Virginia was at her father’s side on the football field from a young age. As a toddler, she joined the Bears on a barnstorming tour organized by Red Grange, the premier player of the time. In 1939, at age 16, she enrolled at Drexel University in Philadelphia to study business management so that she could help her father run the Bears. She lived there with her uncle, Walter Halas, the football, baseball and basketball coach at Drexel.

In Philadelphia she met Ed McCaskey, then a student at the University of Pennsylvania. The couple married in 1943 before Mr. McCaskey left for Europe to serve in the U.S. Army during World War II. They were married for 60 years until his death in 2003, at 83.

In addition to her sons Patrick, George and Brian, Mrs. McCaskey is survived by six other children, Ellen Tonquest, Anne Catron, Edward McCaskey Jr. and Mary, Richard and Joseph McCaskey; 21 grandchildren; 40 great-grandchildren; and four great-great-grandchildren. Her second-oldest son, Timothy, died in 2011.

Though Mrs. McCaskey spent her life carrying her father’s legacy, it is unclear whether her children will continue to own the Bears.

“I always hope that our present-day players and coaches once in a while give a little thought to the early teams and the beginnings of the National Football League,” she once said. “It was so important to my dad. That was his life, and anything that was important to him automatically became important to me.”