No single first made the record in 1958 — a measure of how quickly the extraordinary had become routine. The Valley Ho and the Safari were taking winter reservations, spring training was an annual fixture at the wooden stadium, the Parada del Sol rode every winter, and Motorola’s plants — the second barely a year old on McDowell Road — kept hiring. The town that incorporated seven years earlier at one square mile and 2,000 people was now mostly in the business of absorbing its own success.
That meant subdivisions spreading across former farmland, and it meant the annexation debates that flared in 1957 kept simmering: every acre of county land was a question of who would claim it first, Scottsdale or Phoenix. The 1960 census would tally what the decade added up to — 10,026 people, five times the 1950 count — and the 1960s would make even that look slow.