The tourist economy was about to get a payroll to match. Motorola had opened a research lab in Phoenix in 1949, and its research chief, Daniel Noble, had bought a house near Scottsdale the next year. By the Scottsdale Historical Society’s timeline, 1954 brought a Motorola plant at 52nd Street and McDowell, in Phoenix about a mile west of the town line. The bigger Scottsdale plant on McDowell Road came in 1957. Engineer families began filling subdivisions on both sides of the line and needing schools, sewers and streets in quantities a half-square-mile town had never planned for.
The town government was still small and fragile. The council chose Malcolm White as mayor again in 1954, and on July 27 council member V. D. “Jim” Frederick was killed at his home. By the city’s council history, 11 council members resigned and one was killed in the town’s first nine years.
The year’s loudest public argument happened just outside the town limits. Camelback Inn, on county land north of town, turned away Jewish guests, and in November the Anti-Defamation League told the National Association of Attorneys General, which had booked the inn for its December convention. New York’s attorney general refused to register, the U.S. attorney general said he would not stay there, and the association moved the whole meeting to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The inn’s spokesman said it hoped the attorneys general would “respect our rights to run our own business.” The story of that color line, and how long it lasted, is in Scottsdale and the color line. Both halves of the decade, the boom and the politics, run through the 1950s chapter and the 1950s politics chapter.