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Show Orem Mayor No. 18 Joseph A. Nelson In the State of Utah, municipal politics, as opposed to county, state and national politics, is an entirely different creature, largely devoid of involvement with the national political parties, under whose banners most other candidates for public office, except for judges, campaign and become elected. Thus, for the first half-century of Orem's incarnation as an established municipality, candidates for the Town. Board of Trustees and City Council were nominated for those positions at public meetings of local political parties which were, totally, unaffiliated with the national political parties. In the very first Orem Town election, held in 1921, the Orem People's Party and the Orem Citizen's Party were organized by local citizens, who held conventions and selected two slates of candidates to run for the four positions as Trustees of the Town Board, and for the post of Town Board President In that election Lawrence J. Snow was elected President of the Town Board, and J. W. Gillman, Orson Prestwich, John E. Christensen and Alexander H. Lowe were elected Trustees. For more than 50 years, Orem citizens, who in other elections supported either Democratic, Republican or Independent candidates, affiliated with either the People's Party or the Citizen's Party to field candidates to run their city government. In 1949 there was even another local party: the Orem Voter's Party, which fielded a slate of municipal candidates. They were all, soundly defeated in that election. Meanwhile, back in 1960, I was attending a meeting of the Orem City Council in the old Orem City Hall, in which Mayor Melbourne D. Wallace was presiding. One of the City Council members asked the group if anyone knew the whereabouts of Orem City's printed history. After a short discussion among Council members, they concluded that, since none of them had ever seen or heard anything of Orem's printed history, it was likely that such a document did not exist. City Manager O. V. Farnsworth then reported, that the Orem City Library regularly received requests from patrons, desiring to read and check out a book on the history of Orem, which, apparently, did not exist. 1998-1999 Pointing out that publication of a book of revised Orem City ordinances had recently been completed by the city on April 21, 1960, a member of the City Council noticed me, sitting in the small audience, and said, "Clyde, you are a journalist and an experienced writer. Do you think you could write a book about Orem's history? Knowing that no such book then existed, and that there really was a need for one, I, hesitantly, agreed that I might be able to write such a book. On the spot, I was commissioned by the Orem City Council to research Orem City's history and publish it in book form within one year. I was somewhat apprehensive about the assignment I had taken on that night, but after a very interesting year of study and research through boxes of records, minutes of meetings, family histories and other documents, I was able to produce Orem's first Page 75 |