Back in 1942, Gale Hammond had no question how he would spend the three months between his high school graduation and his eighteenth birthday—the day he would be drafted into World War II: “My dad said, ‘Go get some education. Get a trade that will help you when you’re in the service.’”
In a precollege career-aptitude interview, Hammond mentioned an interest in business—his family trade back to Great-Grandfather Hammond—and was told, “Your hands are too big to be in business. You should take the mechanic course.” Undeterred, Hammond instead enrolled at LDS Business College. There he studied from morning to night, passing off one accounting class after another until he finished an associate’s degree—all before his birthday. “I graduated on a Friday and then was inducted into the army on a Monday,” he remembers.
Hammond has carried that determination and work ethic with him throughout his life. After sixty-four years of running his own Salt Lake City-based toy store, Hammond Toy and Hobby, he still works full time at age ninety-one with no retirement in sight. “Maybe in ten years, I don’t know,” he says. “I plan on dying with my boots on.”
After returning from WWII, where his life was spared seventeen times while in combat, Hammond was called to the Western States Mission—joining the first cohort of postwar missionaries for the LDS Church. With no help from seasoned proselytizers, Hammond and his companion “didn’t really know what we were doing,” he remembers. “We would bang on doors, introduce ourselves, and when we finally got into a house, we didn’t know what to say. And you can imagine, we never baptized anybody.”
Now known by the nickname “Mr. Missionary,” Hammond has since upped his game: he’s served five stake and ward missions; volunteers as a guide at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City; and has completed three full-time missions alongside “Mrs. Missionary”—his wife, Georgia.
He met her at BYU—or, as he called it back in the day, “BY-Woo”—where he studied business and accounting thanks to the GI Bill. Finding himself a bachelor near the end of his studies—and hoping to spare BYU the rumored “tuition refund” to single graduates—he made a cold call to a girl from Las Vegas in the singles branch. “She accepted the blind date, and we’ve been going together ever since then. They didn’t give me back the tuition,” Hammond says. “My wife has been gone about ten years, and she was the joy of my life.”
After graduating from BYU in 1951, he worked at Del Monte in California for three years before starting his own business—a toy shop run out of his basement—with only fifteen dollars to invest in toys and games. “I sold the inventory for twenty-five dollars and went back and bought twenty-five dollars’ worth from the warehouse, and kept working up like that,” Hammond says. After two years he opened his first storefront, eventually building to fifteen different locations in Utah. Today, he and two of his five sons still run three of those locations and have a popular online storefront. “We are doing more business on the internet than we do in the stores,” Hammond says. They specialize in puzzles and hobbies alongside popular toys.
Hammond, who boasts fourteen grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, says working in the toy business helps keep him young at heart. His secret to long life? Work. “Moving around, doing something, working,” he says. “The doctors always say, ‘Keep active,’ so I have been active all my life.”
