25 years agoPresident Hugh B. Brown, then second counselor in the First Presidency, arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Jan. 12, 1963, to begin his first tour of missions in South America.
According to a Church News report, President Brown planned to hold conferences with missionaries and members throughout the six South American missions during the six-week tour, and to inspect new chapels under construction and prospective building sites.
He was accompanied on the tour by Elder A. Theodore Tuttle of the First Council of the Seventy, who was serving as president of South American missions, and by his daughter, Zina Lou Brown.
"Mission records indicate proselyting work among the missions is making good progress," President Brown was quoted as saying. "We will be looking for local leadership with the possibility of organizing stakes."
The tour included visits to 15 cities throught South America.
Quotes from the past
"Unless we develop love, self-forgetting love for our fellow men, living or dead, we cannot become like our Father in Heaven. Work in the temple halls develops within us unselfishness, love, forgetfulness of the reward, joy in doing the Father's work, and we grow toward His stature.
"When the Lord said that unless this work be done the earth will be utterly destroyed at His coming, He meant, no doubt that since the spirit of love lies at the foundation of this work, unless we can temper our wills into a condition of love for our fellow men, He shall have failed in the ultimate purpose that He had in creating the earth, and placing us upon it." - Elder John A. Widtsoe of the Council of the Twelve, delivered in the Tabernacle, Salt Lake City, Utah, Sept. 30, 1934.