For 102 years, Virginia McCaskey lived — and recounted — Chicago Bears lore: ‘Like having a conversation with a history book'

Chicago Tribune

08-02-2025

Once upon a time, Virginia McCaskey inherited memorabilia from a cousin, a collection that included a box of old ticket stubs. In it, she said, was a torn admittance to the NFL's 1932 championship game between the Chicago Bears and Portsmouth Spartans.
With weather concerns and a push to attract more fans, the league's first postseason game was moved indoors to Chicago Stadium. For decades, McCaskey told people what her 9-year-old self remembered most about attending the Bears' 9-0 win in front of 11,198 spectators.
'Just the odor,' she said. 'It was almost overwhelming. Because the circus had just left town.'
With that ancient ticket stub, McCaskey also had a portal back to the infancy of pro football and the league her father, George Halas, imagined, founded, built and, in those earliest years, exerted great effort to grow. She marveled at the price stamped on that ticket.
'A dollar and a quarter,' McCaskey told the Tribune in 2019. 'For a second-balcony seat.'
At some point, McCaskey took the stub to a major NFL event to show others what once was and what the league had become. Her informal show-and-tell presentation came at a time when Super Bowl tickets had ballooned past $100 per seat.
'Just amazing,' she said.
On Sunday, with football's grandest annual game taking place at the Superdome in New Orleans between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, the cheapest face-value ticket is close to $900 with some seats listed on the secondary market for more than $8,000.
What an incredible popularity rocket ship the league has ridden across the decades. And over the past century-plus, McCaskey was around for almost every snap and every milestone, every breakthrough and every superstar.
McCaskey died Thursday at 102, leaving behind nine of her 11 children plus 21 grandchildren, 40 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren. She also leaves behind memories from a life embraced and well-lived, a life attached to the Bears since birth and one that gave her encyclopedic knowledge of the league her father created and the franchise Chicago fell deeply in love with.
Public visitation for Virginia McCaskey, the Chicago Bears principal owner, is scheduled for Tuesday
'Incredible' memory
For many within the Bears family, it was McCaskey's smile, so ebullient and sincere, that drew people in.
'Mrs. McCaskey was kind of like our grandmother,' said former long snapper Patrick Mannelly, who played more games (245) for the team than any other player. 'And she had that wonderful smile like a loving grandmother to all of us. It was always genuine.'
McCaskey's sharp memory and detailed knowledge of Bears history also was remarkable.
This was, after all, Halas' daughter, a direct connection to the league's origin. While so many Bears fans, for generations and generations, were absorbed in team lore, McCaskey lived it. All of it.
She witnessed the greatness of quarterback Sid Luckman. She grew incredibly close to running back Walter Payton. She knew Halas not only as a fiercely competitive player, coach, executive and businessman, but also as a doting father and loyal husband.
Gary Fencik, a safety for 12 seasons — including 1985, when the Bears won their only Super Bowl — was often amazed at how much knowledge McCaskey retained.
'You could ask her, 'How many players wore the number 32?' and she'd just rattle a bunch of them off,' Fencik said.
Johnny Lujack, Ralph Kurek, Charlie Ford, Lemuel Stinson …
'It was incredible,' Fencik said. 'It was like having a conversation with a Chicago Bears history book. You'd be amazed at the level of detail in her recollections. And you'd get this oral history that would leave you shaking your head like, 'Wow! What amazing storage of the Bears experience.''
If you've never heard of Dick Plasman — he wore No. 14 — Fencik hadn't either. Until years ago, when he was visiting with McCaskey before a Bears Care gathering and the team's principal owner began detailing a play in which Plasman, a Bears receiver, went spilling through the south end zone at Wrigley Field and into a brick wall.
'She's telling me how he came out of there with a bloody towel over his head because he didn't wear a helmet,' Fencik said. 'And your first instinct is: 'What do you mean? He was just wearing his leather helmet?' But no. She'd say: 'Gary, it was the 1930s. You didn't have to wear a helmet in the NFL until the '40s.''
McCaskey enjoyed telling such stories but took far greater delight in getting to know as many Bears coaches and players as she could. When the NFL's 100th season arrived in 2019, she playfully lamented the explosion of coaching staff sizes — the Bears had 24 coaches on their payroll that year.
'It's amazing to me,' she said. 'When you look at the original pictures of the Decatur Staleys and Chicago Bears, that was the whole squad. Including the coaches.'
'The family legacy'
McCaskey was well into her 90s in the late 2010s when Hall of Fame football writers Don Pierson and Dan Pompei collaborated with the team on 'The Chicago Bears Centennial Scrapbook,' published in 2019 to coincide with the league's 100th season. McCaskey served as a tour guide through history for that project.
'What an incredible treat,' Pierson said. 'She was never a raconteur, slapping her knee and telling us about the time Red Grange carried her through the train station. But her memory was like a steel trap.'
Through her own life experience, McCaskey became the most reliable Bears historian there was.
'A big part of her life was about preserving the family legacy,' Pierson said. 'That was her sacred role.'
McCaskey was a student at Drexel Institute of Technology in 1940 when she twice in a three-week span took the train from Philadelphia to the District of Columbia to see the Bears play Washington. On the second trip, the Bears won 73-0 — a record margin that might never be broken — to win the fourth of their nine NFL championships.
Twenty-three years later, McCaskey was 40 when a team coached by her father and led by defensive end Doug Atkins and tight end Mike Ditka downed the New York Giants 14-10 at Wrigley for title No. 8.
As clearly as she remembered the chill on what she described as 'a beautiful, clear day,' and as much as she appreciated the performance of the Bears defense, McCaskey never forgot the family's limited ticket supply and the generosity of her daughter Anne, who volunteered to give her ticket to her younger brother George, then 6.
'She thought it would mean more to him,' McCaskey told the Tribune in 2019. 'I thought, 'Wow! I raised that kind of a kid.''
Personal connections
In the summer of 2019, when the team held its Bears 100 celebration at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, a gallery displayed the 28 busts of all the men who, at that time, had been enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame as Bears.
McCaskey didn't just know of them all. She knew them all personally.
'And not only did she know them,' Pierson said, 'she'd remember their wives' names, their children's names.'
Those connections meant everything.
McCaskey was 3 years old, a toddler beside her mother and infant brother, George Jr., as the family rode the rails in 1926 during the early stages of Red Grange's renowned Barnstorming Tour.
She knew Bulldog Turner, Bill George and Dick Butkus.
Bill Hewitt, Mike Singletary and Mike Ditka.
Brian Urlacher? McCaskey was 95 when, after a 2018 Bears preseason game, she rolled into the linebacker's private party in a hotel ballroom in Canton, Ohio, two nights before his enshrinement ceremony.
'He deserved it,' McCaskey said.
'She appreciated the truth'
Jerry Angelo, the Bears general manager from 2001-11, called McCaskey 'a special owner' while lauding her 'enlightened mind for the game.'
On road trips, Angelo had an open invitation to watch games from McCaskey's private box. It was in those moments that their relationship grew — and that at least one informal ordinance had to be established.
'Watching a game live can be a roller coaster of emotions,' Angelo said, 'particularly when it's your team and legacy. We all agreed, whatever was said, that we would abide by the 'Vegas Rule' or there would be a good chance my tenure could end on any given Sunday.'
That dynamic often elicited a laugh. Angelo also appreciated the intelligent questions McCaskey would ask and the wisdom she'd occasionally share of things she learned from her father.
'She wanted to hear what I thought,' Angelo said, 'Regardless if she agreed with it or not, she was always respectful and grateful for the truth. I think that's what I respected most about her. I could be honest with her and never felt threatened about what I said. From that perspective, we had a strong connection because she appreciated the truth.'
Phil Emery, who succeeded Angelo as GM in 2012 after an earlier seven-season stint as a Bears area scout, expressed his gratitude for the opportunity the McCaskeys provided him.
'Virginia was a wonderful woman and always treated myself and my family with class,' Emery said. 'She was a very graceful, fun, smart woman to be around, and I only wish I could have done better for her.'
'A loss for the NFL'
The outpouring of condolences Thursday after McCaskey's death proved plentiful.
From the Super Bowl in New Orleans, former Bears cornerback Charles Tillman recounted the handwritten letter McCaskey sent him in the late 2000s as his infant daughter, Tiana, prepared for a heart transplant. McCaskey expressed gratitude for what Tillman meant to the Bears as a player while offering prayers for his family.
Tillman was moved by the kindness. 'First class,' he said.
Mannelly heard Tillman's story and immediately thought of a similar instance when McCaskey made special effort to attend the funeral for Mannelly's brother-in-law, Taylor John, who died at 28. That small gesture provided great comfort.
'That, to me, was such a moving moment,' Mannelly said. 'She truly cared about us, not as her employees but like we were her kids.'
Similar sentiments have been common from so many who knew McCaskey as a tough, hard-working woman with a big heart and generous spirit. That made Thursday a trying day.
'It's a loss for the McCaskey family,' former Bears coach Dave Wannstedt said. 'It's a loss for the city of Chicago. And it's a loss for the NFL. I mean, when you say Virginia McCaskey, (daughter of) George Halas, you're really saying the National Football League.'
A magical moment
Wannstedt easily recalled McCaskey on the planes to and from road games, clutching her rosary and allowing prayer to carry her from takeoff to touchdown.
After one victorious trip in the 1990s, Virginia's husband, Ed, per custom, spent much of the flight home jubilantly crooning Sinatra's 'Chicago.' It was loud. It was enthusiastic. And Ed, then the team chairman, carried on until Virginia applied her own personal mute button, reprimanding her husband with a loud 'Enough is enough!'
'She had her rosary in hand,' Wannstedt recalled Thursday with a chuckle. 'I mean, what a picture — her saying the rosary and Ed singing, 'Chicagooo, Chicagooo,' and her ribbing him a little bit. 'Enough is enough!''
Perhaps no picture was more storybook and more exhilarating for McCaskey than the one from Jan. 21, 2007, inside a real-life snow globe at Soldier Field. It was on that chilly, adrenaline-fueled afternoon that the Bears hammered the New Orleans Saints 39-14 for the NFC championship, punching their ticket to Super Bowl XLI.
On a stage outside the end zone, wearing her mother Min's elegant fur coat and a smile brighter than the stadium light towers, McCaskey accepted the George Halas Trophy.
Angelo, who had built that Bears team into a champion, marveled at the moment, relishing a triumph that allowed the daughter of the NFL's founder to accept the trophy that bears her father's name.
'Can't put that into words,' Angelo told the Tribune on Thursday. 'One of my proudest moments as a Bear.'
A framed snapshot from that magic moment was displayed prominently on a Halas Hall wall not far from the general manager's office.
'I can't tell you how many times I walked past it and had those same feelings and emotions as when I first saw her on that stage receiving it (with) that smile,' Angelo said.
In 2019, when recounting that milestone from her own perspective, McCaskey first recalled the sharp anxiety leading up to the game and her hesitance to answer any of the league's logistical questions about preparing for the trophy presentation ceremony.
'Then all of a sudden,' she said, 'we were up there on that platform and everyone was smiling and laughing and singing the Bears fight song. And it was the way it should be.'
What will the future bring?
Of course it hasn't been that way often enough. The Bears have won only one playoff game since that day 18 years ago — and none since 2011. They haven't enjoyed three consecutive winning seasons since 1988. Only one player on the 2024 roster, 40-year-old tight end Marcedes Lewis, was alive then.
That, too, is a part of recent Bears history and folded into McCaskey's story. In some pockets, there's a sense that the succession plan after Halas' death wasn't detailed enough and that McCaskey wasn't adequately prepared to take on such demanding oversight of a professional football franchise in an exploding industry. (Her father's vision had been to turn the team over to his son, but George 'Mugs' Halas Jr. suffered a fatal heart attack in 1979, four years before his father died.)
'You really have to put yourself in her shoes to understand what exactly she was dealt at the time she was dealt it,' Pierson said. 'And she'd agree with that herself. She never presumed to understand all the intricacies of running a pro football franchise. But she certainly did her best and was always driven to pursue what was best for the Bears.'
In 1999, McCaskey made the bold decision to dismiss her son Michael from his role as Bears president and CEO and replace him with Ted Phillips, whose subsequent 24-season run was defined largely by on-field mediocrity.
George McCaskey replaced his brother Michael as team chairman in 2011 and has presided over a 14-season run that has included more than twice as many head coach firings (five) as winning seasons (two). After a last-place collapse in 2014, George famously described his mother as 'pissed off.'
'She's fed up with mediocrity,' he added. 'She feels that she and Bears fans everywhere deserve better.'
For a decade since, that sentiment has played on repeat.
Where the Bears go from here is anyone's guess, and speculation about future ownership options won't quiet anytime soon. But for years the family has insisted it has little desire to relinquish control of the franchise.
In 2019, McCaskey expressed her sentiments to the Tribune: 'I hope we can continue as a family-owned franchise. I'm not positive. But I think this might be the only sports franchise in America that has been in one family the whole way.'
During that same conversation, as the NFL's 100th season approached, McCaskey was asked how she hoped the second 100 seasons of Bears football might unfold for her family.
'I wish them well,' she said.