Robert Myers Westberg, 85

Robert Myers Westberg died July 25, 2017, at his home in Kalispell, surrounded by his loving family. He was 85. A retired lawyer, he and his wife Nancy moved to Montana in 2000 from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Westberg was born in Seattle on July 12, 1932. His father, Alfred J. Westberg, was a lawyer and served as a senator in the Washington State Legislature. His mother, Jean Myers Westberg, was the daughter of prominent Seattle architect David Myers, who laid out the University of Washington campus and designed many of its significant buildings. As a boy, Westberg delivered newspapers by bicycle in the family’s hilly Madrona neighborhood. He was an acolyte in the Episcopal Church. He initially attended Garfield High School in Seattle, where he played clarinet in the band alongside classmate Quincy Jones. He worked as a page in the state legislature. He went on to attend the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire; during the summers, he worked at Sanders Fountain Lunches in Seattle as a fry cook and assistant manager.

After Exeter, Westberg won a scholarship to Princeton University. He waited tables in the student dining hall, was on the Crew, and joined Charter Club. Just short of his senior year, his scholarship was withdrawn when a concerned alumnus notified the school that his father had just bought a new Cadillac.

As a result, Westberg returned to Seattle. The University of Washington School of Law was willing to admit him despite his lack of a college degree. By the end of his first year, he was first in his class and became editor of the Law Review. To pay for school, he worked at the Leckenby Structural Steel Company, spray painting steel girders with lead paint.

While at law school, he met Miss Nancy Lyon, an activist and social worker who had been an aide to Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver in Washington, D.C. The two were married in 1955. He would always characterize his marriage to Nancy as “the best thing I ever did.”

When Judge F.G. Hamley was named to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, he invited Westberg to accompany him as clerk to San Francisco. Westberg and his young wife, then expecting their first child, moved to the Bay Area. The Westbergs lived for 44 years in Marin County — in Sausalito, Mill Valley, Belvedere and Kent Woodlands. They raised three daughters, Britt, Jennifer and Catherine.

Westberg was a partner in the San Francisco law firm Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro, where he worked for 50 years. He specialized in anti-trust law, appellate work, and legal ethics. Among his clients were Bethlehem Steel, AT&T, BART, and Chevron. Politically liberal, he was warned as a young associate at the firm that he would be passed over for partnership if he did not resign his membership in the American Civil Liberties Union, which the senior partner at the firm considered to be a Communist organization. Nonetheless, he and Nancy were active in the politics of the day; they canvassed for Democratic candidates, and participated in the anti-war, environmental and civil rights movements.

In one of Westberg’s most significant cases, he represented, pro bono, a group of African American, Hispanic, Asian American and Pacific Islander firefighters in a successful racial discrimination suit against the San Francisco Fire Department, which at that time had only one African American firefighter. He successfully argued a landmark point on the issue of custody under the Miranda Rule before the Supreme Court of the United States, representing a San Quentin death row inmate.

Robert Myers Westberg was a member of the Bar in Washington state, California, New York state and the District of Columbia. He was chairman of the California State Bar Association Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct, president of the San Francisco Legal Aid Society and — for several years — the Mill Valley Library board.

Westberg had a strongly developed sense of personal integrity and honor. He had a distrust of hiring a tax accountant to prepare his taxes because he thought it was a way to try to get out of paying one’s fair share. (Instead he did his own taxes until well into his 70s, using an abacus.) After he retired from practicing law, he volunteered for seven years at the Kalispell Regional Medical Center, delivering mail and newspapers.

Robert Myers Westberg is survived by Nancy, his wife of 62 years, of Kalispell; daughter, Britt La Gatta, and son-in-law Louis La Gatta, of Corte Madera, California; daughter, Jennifer Li, of Kalispell; daughter, Catherine Westberg, of Citrus Heights, California; honorary daughter, Diane Kefauver, and honorary son, Jon Rubin, of San Francisco; grandsons, Robert La Gatta and Steven La Gatta, of Vallejo, California; grandsons, Christopher Oberling and Harold Oberling, of Kalispell; granddaughter, Alexandra Issacharoff, of Los Angeles; grandson, Jacob Issacharoff, of Placerville, California; grandson, Elijah Issacharoff, of Sacramento; and brother, David Westberg, of Hollywood, California. He also leaves behind Maizie, a miniature schnauzer.

The family plans a private remembrance.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that you consider a donation to the American Civil Liberties Union in his name.