THE year is 1923. The concert hall at the Drama and Music Conservatory of São Paulo is packed! Can you hear George Young’s steady voice? Sentence by sentence, his talk is being interpreted into Portuguese. All 585 present are listening attentively. Bible texts in Portuguese are being projected onto a screen. As a grand finale, a hundred copies of the booklet Millions Now Living Will Never Die! are distributed, along with some in English, German, and Italian. The lecture is a success! Word spreads. Two evenings later, the hall is packed for another lecture.

Not long thereafter, in March 1923, George Young, who was a pilgrim, or traveling overseer, arrived in Rio de Janeiro, where he found interested ones. He arranged to have several publications translated into Portuguese. Brother Young soon traveled to São Paulo, then a city of some 600,000 inhabitants. There he gave the lecture and distributed the Millions booklets, as mentioned in the introduction of this article. “Being alone,” he reported, “I had to depend entirely upon newspaper advertising.” These were “the first advertised public lectures given under the auspices of the I.B.S.A. in Brazil,” he added.a

In a report on Brazil, the December 15, 1923, Watch Tower commented: “When we consider that the work there began June 1 and that no literature was on hand at the time, it is remarkable how the Lord has blessed the work.” The report went on to say that Brother Young’s public lectures in São Paulo were 2 of the 21 delivered from June 1 to September 30, with a total of 3,600 in attendance. In Rio de Janeiro, the Kingdom message was gradually spreading. And in only a few months’ time, over 7,000 of our publications in Portuguese had been handed out! Moreover, publication of The Watch Tower in Portuguese had begun with the issue of November-December 1923.

George Young called on Sarah Ferguson, and The Watch Tower reported: “The sister came to the parlor, and for a time was speechless. Taking hold of the hand of Brother Young, and looking earnestly into his face, finally she remarked: ‘Are you a really live Pilgrim?’” She and some of her children were soon baptized. In fact, she had been waiting for 25 years to be baptized! The August 1, 1924, Watch Tower mentioned that 50 were baptized in Brazil, mostly in Rio de Janeiro.