The census takers made it official: 10,026 people on 3.8 square miles, five times the population of the half-square-mile town that had petitioned its way into existence in 1951. A decade of Motorola paychecks, air conditioning, spring training and western marketing had turned Winfield Scott’s old crossroads into a real town, and the count, impressive as it looked in the newspaper, was about to become a footnote. Five years later a special census would find 54,504 people living here. 1960 was not the boom’s peak; it was its starting line.
The machinery underneath was changing fast. On February 23 voters approved the town’s first home-rule charter, and that spring they elected a mayor directly for the first time, returning Mort Kimsey. In July, by local historian Joan Fudala’s account, the town passed its first sales tax and its first property tax. It started a recreation program and took an option on the land that would become the civic center. The council kept meeting in the old schoolhouse. And in September councilman Austin Smith resigned at the table after casting the only vote against expanding the sewer system.
The charter turned out to be flawed. The election had been held 33 days after the charter’s last publication, past the 30-day limit in the state constitution, and when the attorney general challenged two Scottsdale annexations a court declared it void. The town started over with the charter it still uses, ratified in October 1961. The story picks up in 1961; the first decade is in the 1950s politics chapter, and the whole arc runs through the 1960s chapter.