It's true. I was in a tracting mission, (it was all we really did), and over a 7 to 8-month period in 1969 I tracted out THE ENTIRE CITY OF Lugano, Switzerland, then started all over again. Thankfully, I received a transfer to Torino, Italy, as I began an overlap. People were like, "You know, you were already here not that many months ago." I was a little ashamed as I'd bow my head and say, "Yes." To be fair, Lugano has a lot of rich and famous, and their villas are off-limits and unreachable, narrowing down the city considerably. It was still a lot of work, but if you go out 6+ days per week for 8 months or so in a small city full of restrictions, you can do it.

Postscript: Once my companion Bruce B. (now well-known gay activist) and I gave a discussion to the famous Italian singer Mina Mazzini. She was quite charmed by Bruce because of his musical abilities and because he had no idea who she was. Bruce and I baptized a family of four and became famous mission-wide because no one had baptized there for years, Lugano not being exactly fertile soil for Mormons. The family remained active for at least 20 years, when I quit following them. Among others tracted out in Lugano was British race car driver, Sterling Moss. Police arrested my comp Marshall and me once for disturbing people, but they let us go; the police pronounced us "bravi ragazzi"--"good lads."

Postscript 2: Tracted out a very old man named Thorp in Lugano, who was lapsed LDS and had gone on a mission to Armenia and Greece I think from 1906 to 1910. He had translated the BoM into Greek, and in 1921 even met in NYC with David O. McKay, who had him arrange the manuscript into the new chapter-verse format. He proudly showed us his typed out manuscript in two Zerlock-bound volumes. Sadly, the church did not the manuscript when they printed up the BoM in Greek back in the 1980s, possibly because Thorp left the church in the late 1920s, married a goy, and remained an ex-pat. We'll never know.

That's a good effort, a whole city!
I tracted out my whole area on my mission. I knocked on every single damn door in my entire assigned area. It took 6 months.
There were no baptisms.

The only ones to tract in my neighborhood these days are Jehovah Witnesses. I've told them I'm not interested in their discussions, and for the most part they don't "retract" a house that isn't going to be a prospect.

Wow. You were a busy little beaver. What DO missionaries do these days? So sad they can be in a place like Lugano and totally miss it.

In retrospect, I'm glad it was a tracting mission. It's all we did. It's all we had to do. We were responsible for nothing else. We didn't have to think or come up with new stuff. We put ourselves into alpha-state, and just knocked on doors. It was walk-walk-walk, but also see-see-see. I fancied myself a strange kind of sight-seer.

In a big city like Rome, Milan, or Torino, you got to know your part of the city intimately, if you were there long enough. Some of us were. (We had one missionary who started in Modena, transferred to Torino, and then back to Modena, where he finished his mission. He was pissed, but he sure knew Modena when he was done. It's not a big place, either, so he very likely tracted the whole city.) European cities are mostly vertical, so you can knock on 30 doors in a small amount of time, so long as you can get in.

I spent a long time in Lugano, but loved it because it was Switzerland, even more because we couldn't afford Lugano, and lived in a flat outside town in a village called Lamone. We took the train to work like commuters. Train into town, funicular into downtown, and city bus out to the area we were working.

I have no idea what missionaries do these days. People no longer tolerate strangers knocking, and no one is home, anyway. Here in my city I see them walking for miles where there is no sidewalk, only a grassy shoulder of the road. There's not enough time in your day after walking great distances to actually get anything done. Last Sunday I saw two sister missionaries walking through people's yards along a busy highway, probably to avoid debris and the dead 'possums and armadillos spread evenly along the road.

Same here, I was stuck in a town in Sardinia. It was a nice place but being there for six months was a bit overboard.

I was in Sardinia, too. But at the time, only Cagliari was open, and very unsuccessfully. Now that's the only happening place, missionary-wise.

I was in Oristano. It opened up just about a year before I was transferred there and it had been covered about two times before I got there. I think there is still a small branch there, imagine 25 years of tracting in a city of 30,000.

Lovely place, just wonderful.

Mormon missions are so pointless. Either changing missions to service missions such as digging wells and working in food pantries are just eliminating them altogether are the best options in my opinion. As is often said, the point is to convert the missionary but what a colossal waste of time and money. Well past time for TSCC to start covering all of the costs from tithing funds and pay the missionaries to boot.

Wow sounds like you had a fun mission despite the tracting. I once tracted out the city of Ayelsbury, with my comp who was Mormon royalty. We baptized an old man, who was blind and very poor by English standards. The locals ward members hated us for it. It made my comp look good though as a greenie since the area baptized very few.

In my mission there was a law prohibiting tracting "door-to-door" (ovelta ovelle). So we skipped a few doors in between, but kept careful records (tracting books) to make it easier to fill in the gaps. This meant that pretty much all of the doors in a tracting area were knocked on at least once a year.

me too. A whole city (town really). La Rochelle France. A beautiful place for sure.

Tracting missions do prove one thing: the MP has no idea what works and what is a complete waste of time. He has zero inspiration. Zero.

We kept a log, and knocked on every door three times: morning, afternoon and evening, until we talked to someone. If you were in that town as long as I was, you would fill the book and start over.

I guess the goal was to keep us busy, and keep us from thinking...

Funny. We did the very same thing, keeping a log. We'd purchase a small ledger and a map, then cut out the area outline from the map and paste it into the front. Some of us kept meticulous notes, and we had little icons we used for things to signify a Jew, who had vocally chased us away, etc.

danboyle Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> me too. A whole city (town really). La Rochelle
> France. A beautiful place for sure.

I never got to La Rochelle, but I did the same in Caen and Poitiers :)

> If you were in that town as
> long as I was, you would fill the book and start
> over.

And then the next mishies after you would do the same again. And again. And again. As I mentioned in another post, it got really, really hard to find anybody at all who hadn't already shooed away les jeunes mormons!

Little 3x5 cards with "history" of each and every house in the following places:

Larkspur, CA
Tibron, CA (lotsa maids etc)
Dublin, CA
Pleasanton, CA (lived down by the horse racetrack)
Sinole, CA -- baptized a WHOLE hippie family
San Raphael, CA (devil statue in front of Catholic Church creepy at night)

Yes, I could tell not only the precise date of last two or three visits but also one liner comments (funny as heck)

I spent eight months, 1/3 of my mission, in Mackay, North Queensland, Australia. The town's population was about 25k. We had two sets of missionaries there. I spent 3.5 months on one side of the town with one companion, and then was transferred to the other side of town with another companion for another 4.5 months. I wasn't happy with it at first, but by the time I left, I had grown to love the town and the branch. It became like a second hometown to me. The most negative part was knocking on somebody's door on one side of town, and a few months later, knock on another door somewhere else, and meeting the same people who had moved there from the first area. I got burned out on meeting the same people over and over, and I'm quite sure that the people grew even more tired of us.

At least sometimes, on Fridays, we four elders would pile into the Toyota and drive up the coast to Bucasia Beach and knock on doors in that community. We'd knock on doors for a few hours, then go to a store and buy hot dogs and buns and have a cookout on the beach. After sunset, we'd play on the beach or in the waves awhile just to have a little recreation.

I regularly see missionaries popping wheelies and riding in circles doing stupid bicycle tricks. They do this nearly every day.

Yep, everybody knows of mormonism through Google.

This is great...pointless two years...followed by a lifetime of the same...i was busy following plyg profits at the time...even they were smarter than the church...actual work missions...digging wells...building houses...working farms...but most were suckered there too...my buddys spent most of their two years building that behemoth mess of a house rulon jeffs lived in in sandy utah...ol prick had about 80 in his family...but like the church so much of the labor ended up as dollars or benefit for the chosen few...but the plebes just loved it so..praise to the man...who wouldnt know jeebus if he Splilled coffee on his crotch...young men were also told to work for dad building houses...dad kept all the proceeds..no wages were paid...kid might get a pair of pants when the knees were gone....there were prosperous jokers whod turn over huge checks to the big guy about graduation time every spring...in hopes one of that new crop of teen age beauties might end up in his sack...any uppitty girls never graduated ...they were married off into pregnant servitude as young as twelve or fourteen...lest they become worldly...even had my sweet heart spirited away during summer break to marry an older guy... she was fifteen...i still wonder these many years later...guess we didnt hide our affection well enough...plygs had suckhole stoolies too

But a fair-sized town on the southern end of Zuerichsee (Lake Zuerich). Of course, it had been tracted out many times before. The kids were wise to us and started yelling out "Bibelforscher," (their name for J.W.'s) which soon meant no open doors. Ah, the monotony.

Yeah-good-times-ly yrs,

S

I have the distinction of having "served" in Switzerland when we got 4 francs to the dollar. Imagine that. Four francs to the dollar, and we were rolling in money. Back in the day when the 100 franc note was about 8 X 11, and had to be folded multiple times just to get it in your wallet.

In-fact-it-was-four-francs-and-change-ly yrs,

S

(quote)

Back in the day when the 100 franc note was about 8 X 11, and had to be folded multiple times just to get it in your wallet.

(end quote)


Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!!!! That's a very big piece of paper money!

Wonder if you had to buy an oversized wallet with multiple folds just to fold that again and then yet again a few times more just to fit into your wallet!

Back then, only the 10 franc note fit in the wallet with no problems. Had you lived in Switzerland then, y ou would have noticed that all the paper money had neat, multiple creases in them, because they had a system of folding the notes into little rectangles that looked like Dentine gum. (I was never able to do it correctly.) People, especially women, carried around their neatly folded money in coin purses, mostly just so that you could put the huge notes somewhere. In the 1980s they went to smaller, normal-sized money, but for years afterwards all the money still had creases because old habits die hard.

Bonus question: As long as we're on Swiss money... Swiss money is in four languages, German, French, Italian, and... What is the fourth national language, a language indigenous to Switzerland (except that a dialect of it is spoken in Italy)?

Easy question... the answer is Romansh.