In 1922 Scottsdale, still a farm town with no government of its own, acquired the pieces of one. On January 4 the county supervisors appointed the town’s first local officers, a justice of the peace and a constable for the new Scottsdale precinct: W. E. Kimsey, the bank’s president and the former Vice President’s father-in-law, and A. F. Fredericks, who had won the burro roping at the town’s rodeo the year before. The day has its own page.
Then the voters went to the schoolhouse three times in seven weeks. On February 11 they approved a four-year high school, 90 to 13; on February 25 they chose the site Charles Miller offered, a block north of the grammar school; and on April 1, 132 of them, “the largest number that ever voted at an election in Scottsdale,” carried $73,000 in bonds to buy the land and build. That day has its own page too. The district hoped to open the building that fall, and the first class graduated in 1923. L. O. DuRoss, the high school’s principal, became the district’s first superintendent.
The town also got a paper. In May the Arizona Republican reported that Roy George, a playwright with a country home at Scottsdale, had issued a second number of the Scottsdale Bulletin, “a great improvement over the first edition,” and that “his paper was devoted to the interest of fruit production and a cannery for Scottsdale.” The chamber of commerce was meeting in the bank building that spring, debating a pound for stray stock and water from a well in Paradise Valley. The 1920s politics chapter has the year’s politics, and the rest of the decade is in the 1920s chapter.