First year of marriage

AS TOLD BY HIS WIFE, PEARL OLSEN CLEMENT, IN 1985

 When we were living in Taylorsville, UT [1923], we were just married, so we were really in love, and Raphael would come up and love me, and Grandma Clement would see us, and she'd say, "Oh you silly gawks." She always called us gawks. She thought that was the silliest thing to be showing your affection. 

Pearl Clement

We'd think we were alone, that's why I couldn't stand it there any longer, there was Nancy and Rube in there, or somebody, you never knew. We couldn't be private, we had to get in the car and ride out if we wanted to even love a little bit, and you know, it got kinda bad that way. So I said, "Well I've had it, we're going to move to one place or the other", and Grandpa had this all hatched up then, that we should go down and run the Fairview farm, and that's when we got the Fairview farm. We were married in 1923, and we moved down there in about six months, making it in the spring of 1924 when we went down there.

Can you imagine - can you just see your mother sitting in a covered wagon, driving a herd of stock out ahead of us, with these little calves in the back, and you know, it gets kinda smelly after awhile. I'd get out lots of times and help drive, you see, and let Grandpa Clement get in the wagon.

He was with us all over, everywhere. I had thought, here now, we were finally going to be by ourselves and start our own lives. I thought, well he's just helping to take the stock out and get us started, and then he'll go back. But then he stayed out there with us, and Grandma stayed down there in Taylorsville with Rube and Nancy a while longer.

Raph and I were living in Fairview on the farm, when Grandpa brought Grandma out there, and so we lived on the farm together. It was just a transfer of the situation that we had in Taylorsville, only I was a little more private because Rube and Nancy weren't there now. I was three months pregnant with Don. We moved directly onto the Fairview farm, so the little house on Main Street was not yet in the picture - 2 bedroom wood house, no basement.

Then it wasn't too many years until Nancy and Rube moved out to Fairview. They lived up the Fairview Canyon Road, right across the street from the older Grandpa Clement's home. Aunt Nancy (Orton) said that the buildings on the right hand side of the road as you go up the canyon, were built by grandpa Darius Albert Clement, and his father Darius Salem Clement, on DSC's property.

Back to the trip. Well, you can imagine what the team looked like by the time we got to Fairview with that stock. The house hadn't been lived in for some time then, and "Oh, I thought, Is this going to be my kind of a life? Carrying water from the spring, and coal-oil lamp lights?" That was going to be my life for a long time. We lived under those conditions what seemed like a hundred years, I guess. We got a crank telephone before we got electricity. The electricity came onto our farm right around 1940. They had electricity in town a few years before we got it on the farm. We moved away from Fairview for good in 1943.

My mother didn't like Raphael, she couldn't reconcile taking her daughter backwards in time. I think you want to look at it this way - Mother went through a similar circumstance with her marriage, she moved out on a farm and she wanted better things, and I think that she realized the hard job that I would have. But they didn't have water on that farm in Pigeon Hollow, near Ephraim. My parents nearly worked their heads off out there and hardly any water to irrigate with. Our farm in Fairview really was a better situation, it had springs all over it. It was really a nice farm, actually. There were only six acres that we had to buy water for out of the 82 acres.

I can see my mother thinking, "Here goes my daughter backwards in time", after they had gotten out of the back woods and up into the city, and this was just an old log house to her, see. Well, Mother didn't like Raph because he was quiet, and we were Olsen's, and we just liked to know what was in the other guy's mind a little bit too, when we're talking. 

She became very fond of him later on in her last years. But she wanted me to marry Glen Carlson from Mt. Pleasant, and I don't even know who his folks were, but anyway, he fell in love with me, and we wrote back and forth when he went in the Navy. He had such a cute smile, and you know with his Navy uniform on -about what happened, was that my mother fell in love with him because he'd always ask about her, and Raph never did. Raphael just held the resentment, and so he drew within himself.

He may also have recognized that he wasn't giving me all the things that my folks may have wanted him to. But his mind was thinking, and he was planning what he was going to do as fast as he could - get a job and stuff, but in the meantime, there we were. And I'd go out to kiss him good-bye when he'd go to work. He was hauling gravel on the state road, that was his first job, the one before he bought the milk truck. And I'd go out and meet him when he'd come home.

I tried to be neat and clean in that one bedroom log house. Routinely, every week, I'd take everything out of the cupboards, scrub the whole thing. The corners of the floors had to be clean, and if they were passed over by anyone when scrubbing, they had to go back and do them. When I saw some of the kids down on their knees scrubbing the floor, I thought they might be praying that they could get out of it.

While we were working, I had bread going. It was great for me when my sisters and brothers and my parents came out there, it was just heaven to me, because it was so few times that they would come. My kids may think that I worked them to a frazzle when I knew my folks were coming, but I liked my house clean - I liked it clean under the beds, I couldn't stand things laying around.

You can go and look under some beds and you can see a lot of dust and lint and things like that. This is a thing that came from my mother. She was taught how to be neat and clean. She worked and lived with this Lowery family in Manti from about age twelve. The Lowery family was a wealthy family."

Back to Pearl and Raph's initial living situation in Taylorsville. Pearl relates that during 1924, their first baby, Don, was on the way so they moved to Salt Lake City for a few months and rented an apartment on 300 South and 400 East. They moved from one place to another for a short period which meant they were changing places to go to church. 

Don Raph was born 8 November 1924 in Salt Lake City, UT. When the baby was only a month or two old, they moved from the Salt Lake apartment back to the farm in Taylorsville. Raphael's folks wanted them to take the apartment in the big house, which used to be a boarding house, and he could help some with the dairy. He was laid off Utah Power and Light Co., so he bought a truck and hauled milk from farms around the Taylorsville area in five and ten gallon cans to the dairy in Salt lake. When spring [of 1925] came, they moved to the Fairview farm. (Pearl's autobiography).