Bergstrom helped Keep Hermosa Hermosa for over 50 years
by Kevin Cody Katherine Bergstrom, one of the last of the “Swedish Mafia,” which waged a 50-year battle to “Keep Hermosa Hermosa,” decades before the slogan was coined during the 2015 oil drilling debate, has died. Bergstrom was 87. She passed away January 5, surrounded by loved ones. Katherine Chappelear married into Hermosa’s “Swedish Mafia,” as the activist women were known, when she married Bob “The Beach Captain” Bergstrom in 1959. She was 22 when she saw him playing a ukulele on the beach under a palm frond shack at 21st Street, and introduced herself to him. Bob Bergstrom and his friends kept the balsa surfboards they shaped in the beach shack, along with the catamaran they built. He was inducted into the Hermosa Beach Surfer Walk of Fame in 2014, one year before his passing. Though a noted waterman who managed King Harbor Marine from 1972 to 1975, his most enduring contribution to beach culture resulted from the day he quit surfing and gave his balsa board to a grom on the beach, because surfing had gotten too crowded. John Milius memorialized the scene in his cult classic “Big Wednesday.” Katherine Bergstrom and fellow members of the Swedish Mafia were committed to…
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