Two years before it was a town, Scottsdale rehearsed being one. In February 1949 the young Chamber of Commerce — chartered in 1947 and already polishing “The West’s Most Western Town” — staged the Scottsdale Horse Rodeo on weekends at the old Loveland polo field at Camelback and Invergordon Roads, with a parade, a barbecue and trick rider Dick Griffin. It ran again in 1950, became the Sunshine Festival in 1951 and the Parada del Sol in 1953: the whole liturgy of the western brand, invented by a merchants’ committee before there was a municipality to endorse it. At a Chamber meeting that year, the city’s arts-colony history records, the town was urged to “give preference to the horseback rider over the automobile.”
The brand needed places to eat and things to buy, and 1949 supplied both. Claudia Ogden served the first meal at the Pink Pony at Scottsdale Road and Main; Charlie Briley bought it the next year for $50,000 and turned it into the Cactus League’s unofficial clubhouse for half a century. Buck Saunders opened The Trading Post on Brown Avenue — art supplies first, then paintings — one of the first galleries in a town that would soon have hundreds. And the surrealist painter Philip Curtis moved into a studio-house on George Ellis’s Cattle Track property (1949 by the city’s arts-colony history; other accounts say 1948), where he would paint for the next fifty-one years.
Smaller firsts filled in the year: the first natural-gas service reached town; the Ride-n-Rock dude ranch went up, the first of a postwar wave (the Flying T, Rancho Vista Bonita, The Bunkhouse); and on the steps of the Little Red Schoolhouse the Gonzales brothers sang a ballad to Our Lady of Guadalupe that grew into the Miracle of the Roses pageant. The census the following spring counted 2,032 people in the area, and the town that had just rehearsed itself would incorporate fifteen months after that. The full decade is in the 1940s chapter.