The Nybro Action Team consists of Hjalmar Sveinbjőrnsson and Alex Bejerstrand, two under-employed roommates living in Nybro, a small industrial town in southern Sweden. Hjalmar is a chef; Alex takes woodworking courses. They offered to visit the James Bond Museum in their city and send us a dispatch, which we gladly accepted. We have lightly edited their post for grammar and punctuation.
You have accomplished the first hours of a new day, you made it to work and your already slacking off on Gawker, getting your fill of someone else life.
Your life is spent on the security of housing, bills and taxes being paid and hopefully one day you will have off-springs that follows into your footsteps, your fathers foot steps and his father's father foot step, etc. You are a normal stable person, living your life like everyone else, yearning, earning and slowly dying.
If your about to gather momentum to propel your body through the nearest window, plummeting to your meaningless death, STOP NOW, my writing is not that powerful.
Like always I am just building a frame that I will stretch the canvas over, then paint you a picture of a man that wanted something more than a career safety-tested by previous generations; lawyers, doctors, clerks, accounted, librarian, policemen, teacher, construction, mechanic and other third grade textbook examples of what being a grown-up is all about.
Bond, Gunnar James Bond Schäfer tore that textbook in half, threw one part out the window and kept the other, because you need money to make your dreams a reality.
Bond, Gunnar Bond was born in a small beautiful seaside town of Västervik in Sweden in 1957 to Inga Charlotta and Johannes Schäfer. His father was a German soldier that moved to Sweden shortly after the end of World War 2, Gunnar is youngest of three, Bertil (1951) and Heinz (1955).
When Bond, Gunnar Bond (BGB) was two years old and just moved with his family to Nybro, his father suddenly disappeared without a trace. The only explanation offered to the childrens was that he went back to Germany to look for his mother, never to return. In the following years the family of four falls into hardship, he remembers getting a visit from the Lions club donating food over holiday festivals while they plummet down the social classes to the lowest.
Single mother with three kids of a German soldier in the sixties was not called a "independent powered heroine of a mother" but the total opposite, In Iceland we had the hate word for women that dated American soldiers during WW2, Kanamella is playing on the word for Caramel in Icelandic, Kana being a slang for American and mella (said; metla) the most derogatory word you can find for a prostitute, so I can only imagined what was said about a son of an ex-Nazi soldier
In 1965 three new people entered the family, as his mother had met a new man, Sven Walliande, and with him his daughter that we legally can not name, we think, at least because she is not named is his biography.
Yes he wrote and published his own biography, what have you done with your life?
The third one was James Bond. In 1965 his older brother took him to see Goldfinger in theater and the image of a high-class super spy was edged into his mind. In the following years his passion for Mr. Bond and his creator Ian Fleming grew, he held James Bond as his role model, and looked at Ian Fleming as his father, someone to look up to and take after. He had sometimes imagened or wished that his father also was a spy, called back from duty and disappearing back into the shadows of secret intelligence.
BGB joined the army in hopes of becoming a pilot in the air force like his hero Fleming, who had hunted down Nazi scientists, but BGB career was not as glamorize. He failed his pilot test and only made it into infantry. But just like his hero he had backup plans. He had been playing tennis professionally since his teens, with that he had security himself as a judge on a national level but in the same year finished his school study as a car mechanic, why? Because James Bond is a practical man and later in the same year he had started his own car mechanic shop in Nybro instead of persuading a carrier in tennis, and that are those "sane" elements that shine through BGBs insanity
Ever since he saw his first film he had been collecting James Bond memorabilia, his first one being a CORGI toy car of the Aston Martin DB5, and in later years he would even travel to set location of the Bond films, collecting and documenting anything he could find related to the franchise, but one thing he never found was a James Bond museum.
So why not open up the first James Bond museum in the world, right here in little Nybro. It's the 1990 and his business has been going well, his James Bond lives style has been allowing him a lot of free time, not getting married can do that to a person. It was all there, just ready to fall into place, his work shop was a large industrial complex that over the years was dived up into car repairs and museum, with the repair area in the back of the house, and shop in the front and everything in-between was James Bond, and with each film more got added to the collection.
He estimated he has spend over 500,000 dollars to get his collection to where it is today with the most expensive being his first edition of Ian Fleming books and his collection of cars featured in the movies and he keeps the whole thing running, despite all odds like location location location …
When the Nybro Action Team arrived at the museum we really had no idea what to expect from this man, we only know that he most be more then a little eccentric but we were not prepared for how open and honest he was. When we entered the car shop we were led by Mr. Bond into the museum and first part of the exhibition is a documentary about him and the museum comprised of footage he shot with help of some friends, showing him drive around acting out his hero with such joy and then followed by couple of interviews and clips from TV shows that have visit him over the years.
Most of those journalists came there expecting a easy picking, someone they could easily satire, but were soon won over. So were we, such a charming man more then happy to share his passion for James Bond and Ian Fleming. Even his documentary showed both the negative and positives interviews when he could as well just left it out, personally I hope he does because we sat there for an hour until he came to our rescue and informed us that there was still a hour more of content. Normally people just see a shorter version but we were there as journos not tourists.
Afterwards we are let lose in the museum while he takes care of the car shop. Its not easy curating a museum in one side of the building and selling spark plugs in the other, but he somehow makes this work and considering all the obstacles like just the fact NO ONE we talked to in Nybro had gone to the museum and I think the towns people should be ashamed not supporting the only real tourist attraction in town. I hope that one day the town of Nybro hosts a James Bond day with Mr Bond leading in every step because there is not so often you get to go to a museum, shot BB guns, play video games, and drink Bollinger champagne with someone that is as honest as sunshine.
I highly recommend for anyone to go see his museum and meet the man, Bond, Gunnar Bond before his time is up on this earth.