The sale of the Cubs to Tribune Company first made headlines in June 1981, just after baseball that year was halted by a players’ strike.
But it took a while for all the details to be sorted out, and the last such detail was the approval of the sale by Cubs shareholders.
Yes, “shareholders,” because owner William Wrigley II owned 81 percent of the team. That was more than enough to vote to approve the sale, but it still required a shareholders’ meeting attended by many of the minority shareholders. Many of those shares had been acquired from Wrigley employees who got them as gifts.