A Case That Refuses to Die Even After Death

My relationship with Johan Bertil Sagermark was a case of journalistic trickle-down.

One day in early 1982, Sagermark managed, against all odds, to get the editor-in-chief on the telephone, briefly. The editor-in-chief told him to call the editor. The editor told him to call the city editor.

The city editor told him to call me.

Thus began our involuntary relationship. Every week or so for more than two years Sagermark would call me and explain the latest twist in his battle with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to remain in this country as a refugee fleeing persecution in Sweden.

He was in his 60s, married to a Guatemalan woman half his age, and living in Escondido. He had some esoteric dispute with the Swedish government about the safety of construction cranes.

After that I was lost. I was not helped by hours and hours of listening to Sagermark’s heavily accented English nor by his hundreds of pages of documents.

When my interest flagged, Sagermark would remind me that, by corporate declension, I had been ordered by the editor-in-chief to listen to him. That was usually good for an additional 30 minutes.

I was not alone. Sagermark was carrying on correspondence with reporters throughout the United States.

He crisscrossed the country by Greyhound, possibly the nation’s best-traveled and most media-minded illegal alien.

One newspaper clipping showed him wearing a sandwich board telling people not to buy a Volvo. Another story said many newspaper and government offices issued orders not to let him past the front desk.

Sagermark and I became estranged in mid-1984. More precisely, I got a promotion that provided just enough authority to order someone else to talk to him.

In 1986, a cool decade after his visa had expired, he lost his fight with the INS and was put on a jet to Stockholm. He threatened to sneak back via Tijuana but never did. Instead he died of cancer at age 67 a year later.

His spirit survives, however.

Pacific Bell is dunning Sagermark’s widow, Francesca, for $2,142.62, plus court costs and interest. The company says Francesca ran up a big bill making calls to Sweden to talk to her husband.

Francesca is represented by the Legal Aid Society. She filed a countersuit charging that Pac Bell reneged on a payment plan and inflicted great emotional distress by making her use a pay phone.

Trial is set for Monday in Vista Superior Court. The case has been going on for two years.

Reporters are getting calls about it.

When in San Diego . . .

Who says San Diego isn’t cosmopolitan?

The elevator down from the 34th floor of Symphony Towers was packed with San Diego businessmen who had just attended Tuesday’s United Jewish Federation breakfast with U.S. Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.).

The animated conversation was in Hebrew. Then one of the businessmen said enough was enough.

“This is America,” he protested. “Speak Spanish.”

Whereupon the conversation shifted flawlessly into espanol. We monolinguals were impressed.

Fun and Games Dept.

Political notes:

* The sexual harassment claims against Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego) earned him a spot Monday in Jay Leno’s monologue on “The Tonight Show.”

“I can’t imagine any woman,” said Leno, “who would check into a motel with a man named Bates.”

* John Hartley complains he’s had trouble getting crime statistics from the San Diego Police Department since challenging Councilwoman Gloria McColl.

Not so, say the police. Hartley has had two ride-alongs and gets the same stats as everybody else.

* If you think the San Diego County delegation in Sacramento is unenlightened, you should look northward.

The capital press corps has a pet name for the Orange County delegation: The Cavemen.