“I Needed to Open Up the Doors”

For more than two decades of the Church’s history in Guam, Church members had come from somewhere else, either as members of the US military or as expatriates from a variety of countries. At the end of World War II, Gwendolyn and Victor Olsen moved to Guam and began operating a business called South Seas Store. Church members often came to their home just to visit, read, play the piano, rest, or talk. When a branch of the Church was created in Guam in October 1951, Victor became the first branch president.

In 1976, Maria Salas Calvo and her husband, Donald, both CHamoru (formerly spelled “Chamorro”), Guam’s indigenous people, had recently married and were looking for a church. Maria recalled, “We were searching and so we were a little different because we had gone to these different denominations and we wanted to find something better to make us a happier family.” One day, when missionaries from the Church arrived on the doorstep, Donald remembers, “I had that good feeling. I needed to open up the doors for these people to give me their message.” The Calvos were baptized on May 21, 1977.

Around the same time, in the summer of 1977, a CHamoru high school student named Herbert J. Leddy read the Book of Mormon given to him by his friend. Leddy asked his parents if he could be baptized, but at the time, they understood this request as a denial of his heritage and culture. They refused. A local priesthood leader promised Leddy that if he would obey his parents’ wishes, he would eventually have their support.

Shortly thereafter, Leddy attended a junior achievement convention in Indiana. On a layover in Hawaiʻi, he met a Guamanian Latter-day Saint who had just completed a master’s degree at Brigham Young University (BYU). This BYU graduate invited Leddy to come to his home to learn more about the gospel. Every Friday for eight weeks, Leddy met with the missionaries in the Jesus family home.

“Everything I was taught seemed familiar to me,” Leddy recalled. “As I read the Book of Mormon, I found it hard to put down. I knew it was true.” With his parents’ approval, he applied to and attended Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. There, two days after his 18th birthday, he was baptized. When he shared the news with his parents, they responded, “Just as we offered you to God when you were born, we are now giving you the total freedom to be an instrument of God.”

Leddy became the first CHamoru to serve as a missionary when he was called to the Tennessee Nashville Mission in 1979.