LDS Scene

It takes more than three feet of snow to stop the Saints in Chicago, Illinois. Buried in January under three feet of snow on level ground and many more feet in drifts, members carried on Church activities, although not as usual. The Hyde Park Branch of the Chicago Heights Illinois Stake cancelled meetings for Sundays, but members received permission to hold sacrament meetings in their homes.

In the Illinois Chicago Mission, work went on in full force, although many missionaries spent hours shoveling roofs, driveways, and walks for neighbors. A landlady, not a member of the Church, who had housed missionaries for five years, called Mission President Keith Barber to express her delight at coming home to find her walks and driveway shoveled by missionaries.

“We’ll have a good month this month regardless of the weather,” President Barber said. In one week during the height of the storms, one pair of elders put in twenty-five hours of tracting, twenty-three hours of teaching, and thirty hours of “miscellaneous” helping.

The Church now has fifty-seven missions, with the creation in January of the Alabama Birmingham Mission. It was formed from parts of the existing Georgia Atlanta Mission and Florida Tallahassee Mission. Mission president is William J. Attwool, transferred from the Iran Tehran Mission. Church membership in the new mission is 7,870, with a nonmember population of 2.7 million.

The Logan Temple is being rededicated March 13 through 15 in nine separate dedicatory services. The building has been closed for remodeling for two years, and is open to the public through March 6.

Two Utah men have been called as associate directors for the Temple Square Visitors’ Center in Salt Lake City. They are Dr. Burtis R. Evans, a Salt Lake physician who has been a volunteer guide on Temple Square for more than twenty-three years; and Don L. Christensen, a Bountiful businessman and regional representative, former president of the Denmark Copenhagen Mission. They will serve with Dale R. Curtis, who was appointed director of the visitors’ center in December.

It’s a long drive from Duckwater to Ely, Nevada, but that didn’t stop four determined Lamanite teenagers. The four girls—two of them members of the Church—were given an opportunity to sing at stake conference in Ely in December. The drawbacks? No piano, no pianist, long school days (traveling sixty miles one way to school), and seventy-two miles between them and the stake center. Using a cassette tape recording as accompaniment, they practiced for weeks in the home of a missionary couple in Duckwater, Elder Norval and Sister Fay Kitchen. As the Kitchens drove the girls sixty miles to attend sacrament meetings in Lund, Nevada, the girls practiced singing, both coming and going. They practiced after sacrament meeting with a director and accompanist. The eventual performance by Debbie and Harriet Walker, who are members of the Church, and their friends Lisa Groves and Sheila George “touched the hearts of everyone within the sound of their voices,” say Elder and Sister Kitchen.

Elders Jon A. Lloyd and Frank Croese shovel their landlady’s roof after January snowstorms in Illinois. (Photography by Elder Darwin Russen).