Struct problems

This is supposed to return the sum of inches and feet within strucst. Why won't this work? *Attempting to return a reference to local variable "tempDist"* error

Code:

englishDist &operator +(englishDist distances1, englishDist distances2){
	englishDist tempDist;

	double feet = distances1.feet + distances2.feet,
		   inches = distances1.inches + distances2.inches;
	double temp = fmod(inches, 12.0);
	
	tempDist.feet = int(feet + ((inches - temp) / 12.0));
	tempDist.inches = temp;
	return tempDist;
} //end englishDist &operator +

Exactly what the message says. You can't return a reference to a local object, since it goes out of scope when the function ends.

Either return the object itself instead of a referense to it, or declare the local object as static (but this can have weird side effects if you call this function multiple times).

I try both those methods and I get garbled data