Background
Reinsdorf was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, and he was the son of a sewing machine salesman. A lifelong baseball fan who grew up in the shadows of Ebbets Field, Reinsdorf was in the stands the day Jackie Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the color barrier which prevented black players from serving on Major League teams.
Reinsdorf earned a bachelor's degree from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He subsequently moved to Chicago in 1957. Reinsdorf became a C.P.A. and lawyer as well as a registered mortgage underwriter and a certified review appraiser. He leveraged a full scholarship offer from the University of Chicago Law School into a scholarship from the Northwestern University School of Law. His first job after graduating from Northwestern in 1960 was a tax delinquency case of Bill Veeck who at the time owned the White Sox. In 1964, Reinsdorf went into private practice. He developed a specialty in real estate partnership tax shelters. He sold his business interests in the real estate partnership in 1973 and formed Balcor, which raised US$650 million to invest in buildings under construction. He sold Balcor in 1982 for $102 million to Shearson Lehman Brothers, the investment banking and brokerage arm of American Express. However, he continued to be President of the company for several years thereafter.
Read more about this topic: Jerry Reinsdorf
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