LDS Scene

A Relief Society chorister from Farmington, Utah, has won first place in the 1977–78 Relief Society song contest. Ruth B. Gatrell took the honors with her composition “Love Grows as We Serve One Another.”

Sister Gatrell, a former Utah Symphony concertmistress, is the mother of eight and the grandmother of thirteen.

The second place song was “A Time and A Season,” with music by Janice Kapp Perry and lyrics by Val Camenish Wilcox, both of Provo, Utah. Honorable mention went to Ruth Benson Lehenbauer of Dearborn, Michigan, for “How Lovely Is the Woman.”

Marina Galvez de Oliva of Guatemala City, Guatemala, was awarded a special merit for “In Thee I Trust.”

The Mormon Panorama of historical paintings by C. C. A. Christensen (1831–1912) is on display until September at the Church Visitors’ Center at Independence, Missouri. After September, the ten-by-seven-feet paintings will be on display in San Jose, California.

Brother Christensen painted the series in the late 1870s and took them to settlements in Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming. He used them as illustrations as he lectured on the story of the Latter-day Saints to members and nonmembers. Nineteen of the twenty-three paintings depict scenes that happened within 250 miles of Independence.

It was a stunning way to meet the Mormons. An LDS all-stars team from three Texas stakes surprised Texas’s second-place high school basketball team in a 117–103 game, part of a “Meet the Mormons” evening in March. The San Antonio East Stake sponsored the game against the Fox Tech Buffaloes. Playing on the Church team, Bill Bailey of San Antonio College hit 44 points.

Julio Cesar Saba goes in slugging and comes out smiling. The twenty-three-year-old member of the Cordoba Second Ward, Cordoba Argentina Stake, won the South American professional bantamweight boxing championship recently. Brother Saba, known as the “fighting Mormon,” joined the Church six years ago.

A course called “Getting the Most Out of Your Lifetime” has helped the Fremont Centerville Ward at Fremont, California, get the most into its ward building fund.

Two ward members, Pat Green and Ann Sipes, taught the course in organization, goal realization, and home time-management recently in Fremont, Hayward, and Livermore, California. Course fees went to the ward building fund.

The Young Women’s president in the Fairview Heights Illinois Second Ward represented the state of Illinois in the Mrs. America Contest. The national contest was held in April in Las Vegas, Nevada. Karen Marie Walker, 26, won the state competition in March. A 1972 graduate of Brigham Young University with a degree in home economics education, she received a Ph.D. degree from Walden University in 1977. Her husband, Mike, is a dentist at Scott Air Base, Illinois. They have one son.

Albert Pickup of the Burnley Ward, Preston England Stake, doesn’t give up. Brother Pickup, a 1948 convert to the Church, twice ran unsuccessfully as a general election candidate in the borough where he lives. Now, however, he has been elected mayor of Burnley—the first Tory mayor since 1974, and the first Mormon Mayor.

The Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum was dedicated March 28 at BYU. The facility houses life science collections and displays and is used by students and faculty of the College of Biological and Agricultural Sciences for research. The museum is named in honor of a Seattle businessman whose gift to the university made the building possible.

A sophomore anthropology major from Roseglen, North Dakota, is the new Miss Indian BYU. Doreen Meyers, 19, a member of the Catholic Church, was awarded the 1978–79 title. She is an Arikara-Hidatsa-Mandan-Assiniboin Sioux whose Indian name, Stay-shun no-gou, means “making chief woman.”

It started with a couple of sticks of gum that U.S. Airman Gail Halvorsen handed through a barbed-wire fence to German children one day during World War II. Soon afterward, the American flyer began dropping packets of gum and candy during the Berlin airlift, and he became known as the Candy Bomber.

June 26 marks thirty years since the Berlin blockade, and with that anniversary is coming recognition of the Candy Bomber, now associate director of personal and career assistance at Brigham Young University. Brother Halvorsen is involved in speaking tours and celebrations this year. A former commander of the Templehof Central Airport in Germany, where he also served as a first lieutenant during World War II, he hopes to have reunions with many of those who helped gather and package the candy for the German children.

BYU continues to move closer toward computer-assisted translation, which may be possible by August 1979. In March, the late Ernest L. Wilkinson, former president of the university, and his family donated a new computer to the university for exclusive use in language translation and research. Also, the BYU Translation Sciences Institute has received a $60,000 grant from Clifford C. Graham of La Jolla, California, for development of the Chinese segment of the computer-assisted translation program.

Two wheelchair athletes competed in the National Wheelchair Marathon at Boston in April, and one took second place.

Curt Brinkman placed second for the second consecutive year. He and Mike Johnson, BYU’s two Para-Olympics gold medal winners, participated in the prestigious Boston wheelchair marathon. Brinkman, of Provo, Utah, finished second in the event last year. Both wheeled a world-record endurance trek around Utah Lake near Provo in August.

From seventy-one stakes they came—from as far north as San Luis Obispo, California, and as far east as Yuma, Arizona. Some 14,000 young persons gathered on a sunny Sunday afternoon in April in Long Beach, California, to hear President Spencer W. Kimball and his wife, Camilla Eyring Kimball.

President Kimball warned them of immorality and encouraged them to work hard to achieve success. “Many voices we hear are those of seducing spirits, advocating carnal pleasures and unrestrained physical satisfactions,” he said. “Our world is now much the same as it was in the days of the Nephites. ‘If it were not for the prayers of the righteous, … ye would even now be visited with utter destruction.’” (Alma 10:22.)

He also counseled the young people to become involved in planting gardens and keeping journals.

Seven members have been appointed to the recently formed Women’s Research Institute at BYU. Barbara B. Smith, general president of the Relief Society, is chairman. A professional director of the institute will be named later. Other members are Jeffrey R. Holland, Church commissioner of education; Ruth H. Funk, general president of the Young Women; Janath R. Cannon, first counselor in the general presidency of the Relief Society; Richard Chidester, faculty member at the Institute of Religion at the University of Utah; BYU President Dallin H. Oaks; and Marilyn Arnold, assistant to the president for special projects at BYU.

The commission will study women’s issues of concern to members of the Church. Programs will be carried out by volunteers.

“Candy bomber” Gail Halvorsen with children of those he “candy-bombed” during World War II.