'Obsessively frugal' lawyer leaves $3.3M to Skid Row charities
A former lawyer for the Veterans Administration who invested in stocks and lived a frugal lifestyle has left $3.3 million to Skid Row charities in his will.
Delmer Clarence Kallberg was 98 when he died about a year and a half ago, the Los Angeles Times reports. In a will typed on a manual typewriter, he generously provided for his son, Jeffrey Kallberg; gave $500,000 to the VA; and directed that the rest of his money go to “the various charitable organizations on the so-called skidrow.”
The $3.3 million that was left is being distributed to about 30 charitable groups doing work on Skid Row.
Delmer Kallberg had lived through the Depression and served in World War II, where he suffered hearing loss. His marriage did not survive, and he was reclusive and “obsessively frugal,” the story says.
Jeffrey Kallberg, a music professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Los Angeles Times that his father “was a complicated man and stubborn as all get out. … He had fights with most everybody he knew, including family and me, and for a long time we were out of touch. I made various efforts to repair things, and they were rebuffed.”
Jeffrey Kallberg reconnected with his father, however, after the older man was hospitalized for a fall. Afterward, when Jeffrey Kallberg visited his father at home, the place “was a decaying time capsule from the 1970s,” Jeffrey told the newspaper. Delmer Kallberg was more positive during the visits, and he expressed interest in Jeffrey’s family.
In fact, Delmer Kallberg had been so proud of his son that he saved newspaper clippings and showed them off to others, his banker told the Los Angeles Times.
Jeffrey Kallberg wrote a bio for the charities that received money from his father. “My father was not a man who made friends easily,” Jeffrey Kallberg wrote. “But he felt strongly that one of the purposes of his life was to fight for the ‘little guy’ (as he termed the most indigent of his clients), and it was in this realm that he most easily allowed his humanity to show through.”
