Furniture Executive Bill Sandberg Dies

Bill Sandberg, an Orange County man whose family founded one of the oldest furniture factories in the Southland, has died. He was 46.

Sandberg, who had battled a rare neuromuscular disease for nearly two decades, died Tuesday at USC’s University Hospital, his wife, Penny, said Friday from the couple’s Huntington Beach home.

Sandberg assumed the presidency of Sandberg Furniture Manufacturing four years ago. The factory, located in Los Angeles, was founded by Sandberg’s great-grandfather Martin a century ago, and it is one of the larger furniture manufacturers in the region.

A well-respected businessman, Sandberg will also be remembered for his resilience and gentleness, family and friends said.

“People wonder why the good ones are taken,” Penny Sandberg said. “But there is a master plan, and we have been made stronger by his example. We will miss him dearly.”

Despite having limited muscle movement, Sandberg still led an active life coaching his three teenage sons’ roller-hockey team, and up until few years ago he rode his bicycle regularly, his wife said.

He was stricken by an acute onset of his disease before the summer and had to be hospitalized, she said. He recovered briefly in August, and was able to attend a dinner with friends, a tradition of 17 years, and to go duck hunting. But by September he was bedridden again.

“He was a fighter,” Penny Sandberg said, adding that her husband once refused to use handicap parking plates because, in his words, that would mean “giving in to the disease.”

Sandberg, a native of Pasadena, met his wife while they were students at USC. They married in 1977 and had three sons: Scott, now 17, Stephen, 14, and Jeffrey, 12.

“There is so much more to Bill Sandberg’s story,” said Eran C. Borges, an Irvine attorney and longtime friend. “He was and remains one of the most decent human beings I have ever met.”

Funeral services will be held today at First Christian Church in Huntington Beach. The family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the William H. Sandberg Memorial Foundation, 17931 Shamley Circle, Huntington Beach CA 92649.