LDS Scene

Ricks College has announced plans to raise $10 million during the next five years to expand and improve the two-year college. Ricks administrators hope the school’s Centennial Capital Campaign will reach its goals by 1990, two years after the college celebrates its centennial. A major portion of the $10 million will go for scholarships and student grants; some funds will be used to improve facilities. Ricks, with a record enrollment of 6,857 for fall 1985 semester, is the largest privately owned two-year college in the United States. Its students come from all fifty of the United States and from thirty other countries.

Dr. Roger L. Hiatt, chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Tennessee, has been named president of Collegium Aesculapium, an organization of LDS medical doctors. Collegium Aesculapium, with some seven hundred members throughout the United States, schedules meetings twice a year to discuss medical topics, as well as the relationship of gospel principles to medical practices and problems. Dr. Hiatt is president of the Memphis Tennessee Stake. Active in professional circles, he was honored as his state’s outstanding ophthalmologist in 1984.

The Mormon Handicraft shop in Salt Lake City closed its doors on March 15. The shop had been a fixture in Salt Lake City since it opened in 1937. It originally provided an outlet for the handiwork of women who worked in their homes trying to supplement family income during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and a means of preserving handicrafts of LDS women of many national backgrounds. Barbara W. Winder, general president of the Relief Society, which sponsored the shop, said it was closed because it was primarily a local outlet and no longer served the needs of a worldwide Church.

Dr. James O. Mason has been presented the highest honor given to United States Public Health Service commissioned officers, the Distinguished Service Award, for outstanding work during nine months as an acting assistant secretary of the nation’s Department of Health and Human Services. The award was presented by U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. Dr. Mason is director of the Public Health Service’s Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. A member of the Atlanta First Ward, Atlanta Georgia Stake, he is regional representative for the Jacksonville and Tallahassee Florida Regions.

The president of the Church’s Minneapolis Minnesota Stake has been chosen to head one of the largest grocery product manufacturers in the United States. President Mark H. Willes had been serving as executive vice-president and chief financial officer of General Mills when he was named its president.