Palatine-Inverness community stalwart Westerberg dies at 99

Torgny Westerberg, a pillar of the Palatine-Inverness area since the end of World War II, was a man whose nimble mind was interested in almost everything but the passage of time.

Before he died at the age of 99 last Thursday, he had already celebrated his 70th wedding anniversary and eagerly attended his 75-year class reunion at Chicago's Armour Institute (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) only to find there were no surviving classmates to reunite with.

But there was no such thing as retirement for Westerberg.

Even after taking up new hobbies like woodcarving and completing a self-published autobiography well into his 90s, he was still mowing the lawn of his six-acre Inverness home three weeks ago and signed off on what would be his last civil engineering project two days before his death.

Apart from his devoted children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Westerberg's lasting legacy in the area is the Valley Lake subdivision in Inverness, which was carved out of the 80-acre farm he bought in 1944. He purchased the farm before the property was part of Inverness and still stood within Palatine.

Individual lots were sold off gradually, financing the trips he and his wife Lillian took all over the world. But he continued to own and live in the original farmhouse and barn.

"He turned a farm into this beautiful place," his daughter Ginny LaVelle said, gazing out over the attractive lake and fountain that form the view from the back patio.

His civil engineering skills brought him work from areas including water and soil testing, rehabbing many area churches, and the construction of four of the five Ahlgrim Family Funeral Home locations.

But his interests were never purely professional. Having bought a farm property, he learned farming skills like raising different species of birds and how to expand and maintain his farm buildings.

Blessed with an artistic eye, he took on new media, such as paintings and shadow boxes, long after others his age had sought comfort in old routines.

"He just had to be doing something new all the time," Westerberg's daughter Lois Gaskin said. "He wanted to live each day to its fullest - and he did. I thought of my father as a peer until my mother died (in 2006) and only then did he become an older man."

"He was intellectually engaged in everything," LaVelle said. "He lived a vital life up to the end of his life."

LaVelle's husband, Larry, believes there was a deeper meaning in the example his father-in-law set.

"This was his covenant with God," Larry LaVelle said. "He wouldn't say that, but his life showed it."

A memorial service will be held at 3:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 3 at First United Methodist Church of Palatine at 123 N. Plum Grove Road in Palatine. Family members also will welcome visitors to Westerberg's home during the evenings of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

For more information, call Ahlgrim Family Funeral Services at (847) 358-7411.