A burning house founded one of this year’s institutions, and a printing press the other. Lou Witzeman 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 the Rural Fire Protection Company, a private subscription fire department that became Rural/Metro after 1959. 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.
The water went the other way. That year, by the city water department’s timeline, the City of Phoenix bought the Brown Water Company that served the unincorporated town, putting Scottsdale’s taps in a rival city’s hands three years before Scottsdale had a government.
That arrangement had about three years left in it. The 1950 census takers would count 2,032 people in the area, incorporation talk was turning serious, and in June 1951 Scottsdale would finally become a legal town of about half a square mile. The 1930–1951 politics chapter tells how. 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.
That June the town also got its first movie house: Malcolm White’s Tee-Bar-Tee on Main Street, a false-fronted theater named after a cattle brand.