LDS Scene

Ground for the New Jordan River Temple will be broken June 9. The ground breaking ceremony at the fifteen-acre temple site in South Jordan, Utah, will be held on Saturday, 9 June 1979. The temple site will be dedicated by President Spencer W. Kimball.

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir will give nine concerts in Japan in September. The choir will perform in Japan’s five largest cities—Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Nagoya, and Kyoto—on their first tour to the Far East. The tour is sponsored by Chukyo TV Enterprises, Ltd., of Nagoya, Japan.

The tour schedule includes the following concerts:

September 5, Yokohama; September 6, Tokyo; September 7, Kyoto; September 8, Osaka; September 10, Nagoya; September 11–12, Tokyo. The choir will leave Salt Lake City September 2 and return September 13.

A former Arizona legislator has been named director of the Ezra Taft Benson Agriculture and Food Institute at BYU. D. Delos Ellsworth of Provo, Utah, associate and acting director of the institute since its organization in 1975, has been named director. He succeeds Dr. Lowell D. Wood, now director of production and distribution for Church Welfare Services.

A lifetime of devotion and service was noted at the March 12 funeral service for Ida Jensen Romney. The wife of President Marion G. Romney, second counselor in the First Presidency, died March 9 at her Salt Lake City home. The Romneys were married fifty-four years.

Rulon Christiansen of Ogden, Utah, is fourth in a series of guest organists at the Salt Lake Tabernacle. He is organist at Weber State College in Ogden and teaches organ and class piano. In 1973 he won the National Federation of Music Clubs organ competition.

Previous guest organists were Beverly Decker Adams, Gordon Johnston, and Elizabeth Forsyth.

A Church member in Metairie, Louisiana, has been named 1979 State Mother of Louisiana. Beulah Burgon, a Church organist and seminary teacher, will represent Louisiana at the national conference of the American Mothers Committee, Inc., in New York City in May. She and her husband, Clive M. Larson, are parents of three sons. She has been involved in volunteer work in her community.

The Relief Society Monument to Women in Nauvoo, Illinois, is getting a good overview, literally. The room in the Nauvoo Visitors’ Center overlooking the monument’s statuary park has, in the past, held a display regarding temples. The temple display is being moved to another part of the center, and the Relief Society room is being moved so that it overlooks the monument. Guides will use small bronze replicas of the statues in the monument to explain the park’s design.

A German member of the Church has been honored by the German government for distinguished service in public office. Kurt Koehle, sixty-five, received the Bundesverdienstkreuz Am Band, or federal merit cross and ribbon, for his twenty-five years in public office. He and his wife, Johanna Lehmann Koehle, are the only members of the Church in their community of Hilzingen, Germany. He has been a member of the city council for twenty-five years and a member of the Church for twenty-nine. He serves as a counselor in the Switzerland Zurich Mission.

Church members have again been reminded not to “keep those cards and letters coming.” The mail in question is letters that some Church members have sent to the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D.C., in defense of maintaining religious broadcasts on radio and television in the United States. Although the writers of such letters are well-intentioned, there is no need for the letters. The FCC is not considering a ban on religious broadcasting—although rumors floating throughout religious groups in the United States have said such a ban has been considered. The response to several years of such rumors has been nine million pieces of mail.

“Love at Home” took to the streets recently in Melbourne, Australia. The song became the theme for a float which Church members sponsored in a parade viewed live by 900,000 persons and on television by an estimated three million.

The parade was part of Melbourne’s ten-day Moomba festival. (Moomba is an aboriginal word meaning “to get together for fun.”) The Church float—depicting a small frame home with a happy family in the back yard—was covered with thousands of handmade crepe flowers. Relief Society members in the Fairfield, Blackburn, and Footscray wards made the flowers. Two professional builders, Igor Maksymiou and Hugh Thornton, were assisted by other brethren from various wards in construction of the float.

The float traveled a one-and-one-half-mile parade route. The songs “I Am a Child of God” and “Love at Home” were played on loudspeakers as the float proceeded. Mutual youths from the Caulfield Ward distributed four thousand reprints of a recent Church Reader’s Digest insert to persons along the parade route.

The Melbourne “Love at Home” float on parade.