Philip Knight Wrigley, also called P. K. or Phil, was an American chewing gum manufacturer and executive in Major League Baseball.
Background
Philip K. Wrigley was born on December 5, 1894, in the Plaza Hotel, in Chicago, Illinois, one of two children of William Wrigley, Jr. , founder of the chewing gum company that bears his name, and Ada Elizabeth Foote.
Beginning in 1907, William Wrigley had invested heavily in advertising, particularly of a new gum called Spearmint, and by 1911 sales of the William Wrigley, Jr. , Company were measured in millions. The family lived first in an apartment on North Dearborn Street near Lincoln Park, then moved to a house in the suburbs.
Education
Philip received his early education at the Chicago Latin School, a private boys school, and attended high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Because his father had taken him out of school so often for vacations and travel, he graduated from high school in 1914, about two years behind other boys his age. Admitted to Yale and Stanford, Wrigley decided to forego college in favor of entering the family business.
Career
He persuaded his father, however, to let him go instead (at the age of twenty) to Australia to establish a gum factory in Melbourne. The plant was functioning successfully when Philip returned in 1916 to Chicago, where he enrolled as a special student in chemistry at the University of Chicago. In 1917, when the United States entered World War I, Philip Wrigley applied unsuccessfully for cavalry training, then enlisted as a fireman third class in the Naval Reserve, and was assigned to a new aviation unit at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. He was commissioned an ensign on December 6, 1917, and put in charge of an aviation mechanics' school, where he remained until his discharge as a lieutenant in February 1919. In 1920 he became a vice-president of the Wrigley Company, while his father began construction of the Wrigley Building in Chicago, bought an interest in the Chicago National League Baseball Club, organized the Boulevard Bridge Bank (which in 1933 became the National Boulevard Bank), and in 1921 bought the Los Angeles Angels. On February 10, 1925, Philip Wrigley was elected president of the company, and his father assumed the chairmanship of the board, which he held until his death in January 1932. The Wrigley Company survived the Great Depression, paid regular dividends, gave a general pay increase in 1933, started an unemployment compensation plan in 1934, and a pension plan in 1935. Philip Wrigley later confessed to voting once for Franklin D. Roosevelt. The company fared less well in 1936, but Wrigley maintained and increased its advertising, which included radio sponsorship of Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians and full-page ads in Simplicity and Woman's Day. His active interest in the company's advertising continued even after his son William succeeded him as president in 1961 and he became chairman of the board.
In addition, Wrigley became the owner of the Chicago Cubs after the death of his father. He also became the owner of two major league baseball fields, one of which was located in Chicago, Illinois and the other one was located in Los Angeles, California.
Besides taking over his father's baseball team and owning a successful company, Wrigley founded the All American Girls Professional Baseball League during World War II. This helped boost his profits when there was a decline of in income when professional, male, baseball players were drafted due to the war.
During the war, the Cubs were having very bad luck getting to the world series. In spite of frequently changes of managers, coaches, and pitchers, they were a consistent source of expense and disappointment. Although these tribulations continued for thirty years, during which Wrigley received several serious offers to buy the Cubs (whose home stadium on the North Side is Wrigley Field), he refused to sell the team. Philip K. Wrigley died on April 12, 1977, in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage that occurred as he was watching the Cubs on television.
Achievements
Philip Knight Wrigley was a noted owner of both the chewing gum company, that bore his family name, and the Chicago Cubs.
Views
Quotations:
"Baseball is too much of a sport to be called a business, and too much of a business to be called a sport. "
Interests
Philip K. Wrigley was an enthusiastic horseman and yachtsman. He had several small boats during his early childhood at Harbor Point; he recalled that his father bought him a thirty-foot sloop named the Wasp, when he was eleven years old. His largest boat was a ninety-eight-foot cruiser named Speejacks, which he bought in 1925, renamed Fame, and kept on the Great Lakes until 1941, when he gave it to the United States Navy. In 1930, Wrigley established an Arabian horse ranch named El Rancho Escondido on Catalina Island.
Connections
On March 26, 1918, Philip K. Wrigley married Helen Blanche Atwater of Garden City, New York, the daughter of a Wrigley Company vice-president. They had three children.
Father:
William Wrigley, Jr.
William Wrigley, Jr. was an American chewing gum industrialist and salesman.
On September 17, 1885, William Wrigley, Jr. married Ada E. Foote, by whom he had two children — Philip Knight and Dorothy.
Mother:
Ada Elizabeth Wrigley (Foote)
Sister:
Dorothy Offield (Wrigley)
Wife:
Helen Blanche Wrigley (Atwater)
Daughter:
Dorothy Rich (Wrigley)
Daughter:
Ada Blanche "Blanny" Schreiner (Wrigley)
Son:
William A. Wrigley, III
William A. Wrigley, III was an American president of the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, founded by his grandfather William Wrigley, Jr. from 1961 until his death in March 1999.
