Featured on my Facebook page, and posted here for archiving.

How many times have you heard a woman say, “I could never have been a pioneer!” Often that means we’re thinking of the moving and the hardship and the physical difficulties … but I think most of us would have done all right, had our lot been cast in the mid- or late-19th century.

I wonder if Luana Packer Halversen thought about that when she was called to accompany her husband Reed to preside over the New Zealand Mission in 1945? She was almost due to deliver another baby when the call came, after all.

Because the call came during the final months of World War II, it was not easy to arrange for ship passage to their new assignment. The Halversens lived in the San Francisco area as they waited for travel arrangements to be made, checking in frequently with the steamship companies. It took so long for berths to be made available that Luana had her baby at home, after all – “a wonderful new baby,” as described by German E. Ellsworth, president of the California Mission.

I wish I had Luana’s own words, but I have this paragraph, filtered through her husband and her mission president: “I [President Ellsworth] told President Halversen yesterday that I think the Lord had a hand in holding him here to save his wife having a delivery on shipboard, but he rather felt it would have been all right even at that, and perhaps it might have been – but as for me, I should prefer to have them born in the good old United States.”

Maybe so – Luana accepted the call knowing of the very real possibility that she would give birth aboard ship somewhere in the Pacific under threat of enemy action.

[Updated:] Luana Packer Halversen lived until February 2019, passing away at age 105; she is buried at Spanish Fork, Utah. She’d have made a fine pioneer.