Nowhere to take the kids
By 1958 “The West’s Most Western Town” had a rodeo parade, a movie-star hotel, a Motorola plant and a saloon in the old bank — and, as Jack Huntress overheard one night at the Lulu Belle on Main Street, nowhere a family could take a child for something sweet. He took the complaint literally. He leased a 1950 building on Scottsdale Road that had been Western Motor Service, kept its big picture windows, painted the whole thing cotton-candy pink, and on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1958 opened the Sugar Bowl Ice Cream Parlor. (The parlor’s own history says New Year’s Eve; the city’s historic-register report says Christmas Eve. Either way the soda fountain was pouring before 1959.)
The pink constant
Downtown Scottsdale has reinvented itself every decade since — western stage set, arts district, nightlife strip, condo canyon — and the Sugar Bowl has sat through all of it serving the same banana splits under the same pink awning. Bil Keane, the cartoonist who lived in Paradise Valley and set The Family Circus in Scottsdale from its 1960 debut, drew the family there so often that the parlor became a landmark to readers who had never seen Arizona. Working the counter became, in the city’s own words, “a high school rite of passage.” Huntress’s nephew Carroll joined the business in 1981 and bought it in 1985; the family still runs it.
What it says about 1958
The year was a good one for institutions that lasted. Chez Louis opened on Brown Avenue, Reata Pass began serving steaks on an old stage stop north of town, and the Sugar Bowl completed the set: fine dining, cowboy dining and a soda fountain, three answers to the question of what a tourist town does after the parade goes by. The Sugar Bowl guide covers the menu; the 1950s chapter covers the boomtown it opened in.