Likely few, if any, current General Authorities could be considered more cosmopolitan than Elder David R. Stone, sustained to the Second Quorum of the Seventy at general conference April 3.

"I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, of an English father and a mother of Scottish ancestry," the soft-spoken Elder Stone said in a recent interview, his voice tinged with the vaguest hint of a combination British and Spanish accent.

He and his wife, Rosalie, who has a degree from BYU in French with a Russian minor, have lived in seven countries over his 30-year career as a corporate executive and LDS mission president. Their six children, in order of birth, were born in New York, Argentina, Peru, Boston, Argentina and England.

"So we have a mini-United Nations amongst our children," Elder Stone chuckled. Of the six, the three sons have served missions and only one, a daughter is married.

Growing up in Argentina, Elder Stone spoke English at home and Spanish elsewhere, although he attended schools run by the British community.

By the late 1940s, Church missionaries contacted the household (his parents had divorced by then). His younger sister soon embraced the gospel, while his mother took longer.

As for young David, he did not have as much contact with the Church because he was attending boarding school and spending summers working on a cattle ranch managed by his uncle.

He was influenced, however, by Pres. Harold Brown of the Argentine Mission, whom he describes as a second father. And the self-described "freckle-faced kid" was a delightful novelty for the North American missionaries because of his bilingual ability.

After he graduated from high school, he and his family moved to Utah, where David enrolled at Brigham Young University. There, he soon received his own spiritual witness of the gospel's truth and was baptized in early November 1954. He interrupted his schooling to serve in the Spanish American Mission headquartered in San Antonio and located in Texas and New Mexico.

A voracious appetite for reading in his youth manifested results during his college years. He was one of four students selected to represent BYU on the nationally televised quiz program, "College Bowl." They appeared for five consecutive weeks. (Elder Stone admits to watching the current quiz show "Jeopardy" occasionally. "But I don't think, at my age, I'm fast enough for those kinds of things," he said. "I can usually think of the answers, but I'm not sure I can think of them in time.")

While at BYU, he served as student body president during the 1962-63 school year. Graduating that year, he went to work for Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Two years later, he met his wife-to-be while on a trip to Provo, Utah.

As she describes it, she received a telephone call from a stranger who said he had heard of her through a mutual friend. He agreed to tell her who it was only if she would go to dinner with him.

They found that they saw eye-to-eye on about everything. "We had the same basic values, and we sensed that it was something very unique; nine days later we got engaged," she recalled.

She was doing graduate work at BYU at the time in French and comparative literature and was working on her thesis. But meeting David gave her the immediate opportunity to fulfill a dream: to be a full-time wife and mother. It was toward that career that she chose to apply her keen intellect.

The Stones were a close family as the children were growing up, made necessary in part by frequent moves to various places.

"It was difficult for the children, and we're very proud of the way they adapted," Elder Stone said.

"Each time we moved, we were kind of thrown in upon ourselves," Sister Stone agreed. "That built, I think, a strong relationship among brothers and sisters, because they were their own best friends until they were able to make friends among the people their own age."

It also had its advantages, Elder Stone said, in that the family could associate with and learn to love people from all walks of life and many cultural backgrounds, particularly among Latter-day Saints. He served in six bishoprics in four countries, occasionally with bishops who were less educated than he, but to whom he was careful to give the utmost deference for their callings.

In one country, Sister Stone remembered, her husband was a home teacher to a family with eight children. Living far from the meetinghouse, they were obliged to walk 45 minutes each way to Church every Sunday, once for Sunday School and again for sacrament meeting.

"So through the years, we have reminded our children of that to show the importance of dedication and to recognize the blessings the Lord gives us," she said.

Living in so many areas also gave Elder Stone the opportunity to indulge his great love for history and to expose the family to some of the important events that occurred in the various locales. He compares some of the major historical figures of history, such as military generals, with some of the great leaders of the Church. "They have some of that same conviction; they have a cause to believe in," he said. "And one thing that makes the gospel so wonderful is that we do have the cause of all causes which drives us onward because we know the Lord is on our side."

He occasionally has spoken of that to the missionaries over whom he is currently presiding in the Dominican Republic Santo Domingo West Mission. (The Stones conclude their service July 1.)

"Being a mission president has been an absolutely marvelous experience, and the most marvelous part is to be associated with the young men and women who go out to serve missions," he said. "They are dedicated. They suffer a lot more hardship than we do."

Retired from his occupation before being called as mission president, Elder Stone had expected to finish his mission and then assume a quiet life, perhaps having the opportunity again to serve in his favorite Church calling, Sunday School gospel doctrine teacher. But it was not to be.

"And so we will go and do whatever the Lord asks us to do," he said, alluding to 1 Ne. 3:7. "Building the Kingdom is a wonderful opportunity, and in going to our assignment, I'm sure we will once again have the brotherhood and sisterhood of the members of the Church, see the Kingdom built and see lives changed as people come to a knowledge of the purpose of life and learn eternal truths."