His Kind of Calling

If Albert Hamal knew you, he’d probably call you on your birthday. Brother Hamal, a retired furniture-store owner, likes to telephone others on their birthdays and anniversaries. “It all started with the furniture business, when I would call customers to greet them on their birthdays,” he says. Now, at eighty-six, he uses the ward list in the Salt Lake Garden Park Second Ward, where he is an active high priest, to call the members he knows and greet them on their special days. “I found it a friendly thing to do,” he says, adding, “I don’t take much of their time because I know everyone’s quite busy.” Albert calls it keeping in touch.

Albert and his wife, Lucille, have seven grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren, all of whom love romping down the long, gently rolling hill of the Hamal back yard. The bowered gardens there would keep a botanist busy naming the varieties of flowers and plants. Each spring as the garden matures and overruns, the thinnings of impatiens, alyssum, violets, buttercups, and other flowers find their way into the gardens of friends. It’s another way Albert likes to keep in touch.

This month marks the sixty-fifth spring of the Hamals’s marriage. Quite likely the phone will ring, calling them from the garden more than once, as others wish them happy anniversary—keeping in touch.

Albert Hamal keeping in touch. (Photo by Phil Shurtleff.)