Robert W. Bergstrom was a one-time paperboy working a South Side route who became a respected attorney in Chicago representing clients in the entertainment industry and a counsel to a legislative committee investigating corruption in Cook County.
The Motion Picture Association of America honored him with an achievement award when he was 75, after he won more than 300 cases in entertainment law.
“He was a terrific lawyer,” said Paul Springer, senior vice president of Paramount Motion Pictures. “I don’t recall any instance where he was not successful. He was the genuine article.”
Mr. Bergstrom, 87, a former Glenview resident who lived on the Gold Coast, died Sunday, June 4, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital of heart failure brought on by esophageal cancer. Born in Chicago to Swedish immigrants in 1918, Mr. Bergstrom attended Chicago Christian College before earning a law degree from Chicago-Kent College of Law, said his wife, Betty. He practiced law for several years before joining the Navy in 1940.
During World War II, Mr. Bergstrom was a naval intelligence officer in the Pacific Theater when he and two other men were assigned to sneak onto the Japanese-controlled island of Guam, his wife said.
Their mission was to record Japanese troop and armament positions and radio them back to command to aid in a future U.S. attack on the island, his wife said.
After surviving the mission, Mr. Bergstrom worked under Adm. Chester Nimitz coding and decoding messages.
After his discharge from the Navy in 1945, Mr. Bergstrom started his own law firm and enrolled in the University of Chicago’s business school.
He married his first wife, Ruth, in 1946, a year before earning his MBA. In the ensuing decades the couple had two children and lived in Evanston and Glenview. She died in 1975. He married his second wife in 1979.
Mr. Bergstrom spent much of his time as a lawyer representing clients from the entertainment industry. He successfully represented the Bee Gees when they were sued for plagiarism in connection with their song “Stayin’ Alive,” featured in the 1977 movie “Saturday Night Fever. “Mr. Bergstrom also “had a great sense of justice and civic responsibility,” his wife said.
In 1969 and 1970, during the Illinois Constitutional Convention in Springfield, Mr. Bergstrom volunteered as an adviser to delegates assigned to modernize the Illinois Constitution, his wife said.
Mr. Bergstrom also worked with the Chicago and Illinois Bar Associations to try to have judges in Illinois appointed by merit instead of being elected, and he chaired the Committee for Legislative Reform, which fought successfully to reduce the size of the Illinois House.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mr. Bergstrom worked as a counsel for a special state legislative committee investigating corruption at the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago.
“Bob was concerned about ethics in the public arena and good government,” said Rev. John Buchanan, a friend and pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago.
Mr. Bergstrom also was a member of the Union League Club of Chicago and was elected president of the club in 1971. He was active in the club, promoting education at several boys and girls clubs around the city. He received the club’s Distinguished Public Service Award in 1981.
“He was a role model,” said his son Philip. “To have him as a dad has been a great fortune.” After buying a winter home in Carefree, Ariz., Mr. Bergstrom decided he did not want to be “half a lawyer” while there, so he took and passed the Arizona bar exam when he was 72, and began practicing general law.
In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Bergstrom is survived by three other sons, Mark, Bryan and Jeffrey; a daughter, Cheryl Lothian; and three grandchildren.
Services have been held.
