Through four decades Reed Durfee has been working at Welfare Square and has witnessed how the divine principles of welfare transform people's lives.

For example, one day Brother Durfee discovered at Welfare Square a man covered in paint from head to toe. The man, a transient who had come in that morning asking for food, had been put to work with a brush and a bucket of paint.

It was a mystery to everyone how the man could have gotten himself so completely covered. "He looked as though someone had taken him by the heels and dipped him in a vat of white paint," Brother Durfee said. The man was on his hands and knees mumbling over and over, "I can't find my glasses. I can't do anything without my glasses. . . ."

When the glasses were finally found, the lens had been stepped on and the glasses were unusable. "They were as thick as the bottom of a soda bottle," Brother Durfee recalls.

Welfare Square employees provided their visitor with new clothes from Deseret Industries, saw to it that he had a large bag of groceries and arranged with an optical company to make a pair of new glasses.

Several years passed. One day, after returning from vacation, Brother Durfee learned that a man — clean, wearing a suit and tie — had come to Welfare Square. He had a missionary haircut and was accompanied by a lovely woman. His glasses were as thick as the bottom of a bottle of soda. He had come to Salt Lake City to be sealed in the temple.

From the time he had left Welfare Square several years before, the man couldn't stop thinking about how he had been cared for. And as he wandered around the country, being driven from one place to another, he kept asking himself why the people in Salt Lake City had treated him so kindly.

Eventually, he located the missionaries. It didn't take long before he entered the waters of baptism, met a lovely woman and came to Salt Lake City to be sealed in the temple and to thank the people whose concern for him left an eternal impression.

"I've got to be the luckiest guy in the whole world," Brother Durfee says today, "to have worked at Welfare Square my whole life and to have seen the gospel of Christ in action through the activities here."

— Neil K. Newell, Welfare Services