The year’s civic turning point came on June 12, when the council the county had seated in 1951 finally turned over. Malcolm White, mayor since the town’s first week, left office along with John Shoeman, Lute Wasbotten and E. O. Brown; Bill Schrader, Mildred Bratzel, George Stroup and Raymond Guy took their places, and the council named Mort Kimsey mayor, according to the city’s council history. A Scottsdale Progress reporter, reading the paper’s own archive in 2020, described the background: the “All Western Party, made up of the original Council members,” had “dominated council races in the 1950s” and was challenged in 1958 by “new” All Western candidates and a Non-Partisan party. The 1950s politics chapter has the rest.
The year also opened three institutions that outlasted almost everything around them: Jack Huntress’s pink Sugar Bowl on Scottsdale Road, Louis Germain’s Chez Louis on Brown Avenue, and the Cavalliere family’s Reata Pass steakhouse on the old stage stop in the far north. 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 on half a 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 fight that flared in 1957, when the state supreme court ruled for Phoenix over an overlapping Scottsdale petition, kept simmering (see the annexation war): 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.