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| President and Sister Topham take the incoming missionaries to get a good view of Pittsburgh |
Tell us a bit about yourselves.
We are from Utah. We
both grew up in southern Utah but have lived in the Salt Lake City area for
most of our adult lives. We have 4
children and 16 grandchildren ranging from 18 to 9 months old. I am a civil engineer by education and worked
30 years for the Utah Department of Transportation in highway planning
construction and maintenance. I also
spent 11 years as a Senior Vice President and Western Regional Manager of an
international engineering firm. My most
significant professional achievement was participating in the planning,
financing, contracting and reconstruction of I-15 in the Salt Lake Valley. Sister Topham was a cosmetologist but was
always first and foremost a wife and mother and practiced most of her
profession in our home while raising our family. As for recreation, Sister Topham is a bowler
and has participated in several bowling leagues, but her real interest is in
her grandchildren. She loves music and
likes to play the piano. I like to golf
and to spend time at our desert home in St. George, UT. While there I like to ride back-roads and
trails in off-road vehicles.
What brought you here to the Pittsburgh area?
In 2011 I retired from work and Sister Topham and I had a
desire to serve a mission. We were
surprised to be called on a three-year assignment to preside over a mission and
were assigned to Pittsburgh and surrounding areas. We have loved our time here and the people
we have served and have served with.
What did your responsibilities consist of while you were here?
The main focus of a mission president is to work with the
individual missionaries. We have the
responsibility to receive the missionaries, to orient them, provide housing and
transportation for them, to assign them to their various service areas, and to
train and direct them in their missionary work.
The Elders serve for 2 years and the Sisters for 18 months, and there is
a constant flow of incoming and outgoing missionaries. During our tenure here, the age at which
missionaries can serve was lowered, resulting in a significant increase in the
number of missionaries assigned to us.
When we arrived we had approximately 140 missionaries and we now have
about 260. The most significant increase
was in our young sister missionaries, which increased from 8 to 80.
What were some of your first impressions of Pittsburgh?
We had visited Pittsburgh several years earlier on a
business trip and were favorably impressed, so we came with a positive
attitude. We love the green of summer
and the colors of fall. I had hoped to
serve where the winters weren’t quite as harsh, but the good outweighs the bad
by a long way. In the three years we
have been here, we have driven approximately 100,000 miles. Our area covers from Lancaster to
Williamsport on the east side and from Wheeling, WV, to Erie, PA, and Jamestown,
NY, on the west, so it is quite possible that we have seen more of Pennsylvania
than many of the natives. Our first
impressions of the beauty of the landscapes and the warmth of the people will
be our lasting ones as well.
Please tell one or two of your most memorable experiences during your time here.
Because our mission boundaries are so broad and our
missionaries so spread out, we didn’t think it would ever be possible to have
all of them together in a single meeting.
As it turned out, we were able to get everyone together twice, once in
June of 2013 and once in May 2014. We
were privileged to be visited by apostles David A. Bednar and Jeffrey R.Holland, along with other General Authorities of the church. Each meeting lasted 3 hours and each
missionary had the opportunity to individually meet these special men and be
taught by them. For us, being able to
sit where we could look at all our missionaries in one group and watch each of
them as they shook the hand of one of the Lord’s apostles was a real blessing—one
that we will never forget.
When you go home and describe Pittsburgh to people, what will you say?
First let me say that we have grown to love the people
here. They are friendly and courteous
and accepting of people from other cultures and places. A couple of things that really struck us
were, first, the courteousness of drivers.
We were amazed at how people stop to let others into lines of traffic
and allow them to make left turns in front of them, etc. Also, coming from a very rural part of the
country, we assumed that Pennsylvania would be more urban. I suppose that if we
had served in Philadelphia we would have found that to be true. Instead, we found that central and western Pennsylvania
can be as rural, if not more rural, than southern Utah, where we were reared.
Do you have anything else you'd like to say to people of Pittsburgh?
We hope that when we leave it won’t be the end of our
relationship with Pittsburgh and that we will have the opportunity to come back
or at least keep in contact with those we have grown close to. Sister Topham has been a Pittsburgh Pirates
fan since they won the World Series against the Yankees when she was in elementary
school and listened to the games on the radio, so we will continue to root for
the Pirates. We hope that the prayers of
the members will be answered, that more people will hear and accept the message of the restored gospel, and that you will be able to have a temple here in the
not too distant future. We hope that our
positive memories of Pennsylvania will never leave us.
We in the Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Stake are so grateful for the dedicated service of Elder and Sister Topham. We wish them the very best as they return to their family in Utah!
