Rosie Hammond: Temple Trips to Go

Eighty-seven-year-old Rosalind Hammond proves just how vital an influence elderly members can have on others. Long before the October general conference when President Ezra Taft Benson invited elderly members to make their final years their best, Rosie Hammond was doing just that.

In 1983, Rosie began to wonder how she could get to the Los Angeles Temple regularly from her home in Victorville, some one hundred miles away. She didn’t drive and had no immediate family who could take her.

She prayed for inspiration and for a ride—both for herself and for others of the Victorville stake. At one point, the stake arranged for a bus one Friday a month to encourage priesthood attendance at the temple. But the bus trips continued for only a few months.

Rosie went to her bishop with the problem. She felt prompted to ask if their ward could sponsor their own bus if she could get enough people to commit to go. The bishop agreed. So she found the cost per seat for the round-trip, then went to work.

With the bishop’s approval, Rosie announced the first trip, signed up all the interested people she could find, and chartered a bus. At first, it was difficult to fill it. She was so committed to the idea, however, that she paid the cost of any unfilled seats herself. “I just couldn’t let the project fail,” she recalls. “I want the Lord to know that there are people in Victorville who are trying hard to accomplish his work.”

It took time, but finally there was a bus running to the temple consistently once a month. With phone calls and reminders and frequent expression of testimony, Sister Hammond would patiently and vigilantly fill her bus month after month.

After she had kept the bus filled for five years running, something interesting happened. Rosie’s stake president called for an increase of temple attendance. He urged a 100-percent increase. Rosie wondered how she could do that. “We only got there once a month, and could do only so much while we’re there,” she says.

Again she felt a prompting: put together another bus trip each month. So she did. Every other Tuesday, the second and fourth of each month, seats fill up on Rosie Hammond’s buses to the temple.

How did she do it? She first went to the regular attenders and asked for a commitment for a second trip each month. Twenty-seven people accepted the challenge. Most performed endowment ordinances; some did initiatory work. This gave Rosie another idea. She realized that people could go to the family history library and do research during the same hours. So she invited members and even persons who were members of other churches to join them on the trips, each for his or her own purpose.

Rosie Hammond’s personal sense of urgency about the importance of work for the dead has influenced many other lives. From her own carefully kept records of the temple bus trips, Rosie saw her companions during the first six months of 1987 accomplish 506 endowments, 215 sealings, 1,082 other ordinances, and 56 days of genealogical library research, this last by both members and others.

Besides her efforts to get herself and others to the temple, Rosie serves as ward librarian, Deseret Industries representative, visiting teacher, and Relief Society gardening instructor. For Rosie, life has never been fuller.

Photography by Jerry Garns