President David O. McKay's Handshake That Carried a Witness

In 1951, nineteen-year-old Beverly Bekker of California and her two closest friends made an improbable plan: instead of waiting to become airline hostesses, they would follow Marian's Air Force family to occupied Germany. Against family objections, the three girls saved their weekly paychecks, and in March 1952 Beverly and her friend Carlene traveled by plane, ship, and train across a still-recovering postwar Europe — aided at every turn by providential strangers: Carlene's aunt and uncle who took them in when their ship was delayed in New York, and a kind Dutch taxi driver in Rotterdam, Mr. Kramer, who returned Beverly's forgotten camera, drove the girls through the tulip fields, and sent them off to Munich with sandwiches and a wave.

Settled in Starnberg and then Wiesbaden, Beverly, a Latter-day Saint far from home, hungered for the company of the Saints. She found a notice of LDS services in Munich, then joined the Wiesbaden LDS Servicemen's Group. On July 2, 1952, she traveled to Frankfurt for a special conference where President David O. McKay, then a counselor in the First Presidency visiting the West German Mission, presided with President Cannon. After the meeting, Beverly went forward to greet him. He took her hand — and held it. Looking her straight in the eyes while he asked what she was doing in Germany, he spoke to her until tears came. "He kept a hold of my hand and looked me straight in the eyes, and I could feel the strength within him," she wrote home that night. "Tears came to my eyes, the Spirit was so strong. Mother, if I never knew it before, I know it now, that the Latter-day Saints is the true Church of Jesus Christ and I have a testimony to that; I feel it way down deep in my heart."

Beverly later called that handshake her conversion experience: a witness by the Holy Ghost, felt in the presence of the Lord's prophet, that the Church was true and that David O. McKay was a prophet of God. "I am so thankful the Lord looked over me and guided me," she reflected. "Having the opportunity to hear and meet President McKay became my conversion experience. I had a witness by the Holy Ghost that the Church was true and that David O. McKay was a prophet!"