A burning house founded one of this year’s institutions, and a printing press the other. Lou Witzman watched a neighbor’s home burn with no fire department to call — the unincorporated town had none, because legally there was no town — and organized Rural Metro, a private subscription fire department. It was a thoroughly Scottsdale solution: no government available, so a businessman sold fire protection the way other people sold magazines. The peculiarity outlasted the century. Rural Metro protected Scottsdale for over five decades, and the city did not stand up a municipal fire department until 2005.
The same year, James H. Boyd began publishing the Scottsdale Progress, giving the gathering boom a hometown paper of record. Between the Chamber of Commerce (1947), the fire brigade, and the newspaper, the crossroads was assembling the organs of a real town while remaining, on paper, nobody’s responsibility.
That arrangement had about three years left in it. The 1950 census takers would count 2,032 people, incorporation talk was turning serious, and in July 1951 Scottsdale would finally become a legal town — about one square mile of one. The improvised institutions of 1948 are half the reason it could: the place had been acting like a town for years before the paperwork caught up. The formalities are in the 1950s chapter.