The census takers made it official: 10,026 people on 3.8 square miles, five times the population of the village that had voted itself into existence in 1951. A decade of Motorola paychecks, air conditioning, spring training, and relentless 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.
What the number concealed was how small the machinery underneath still was. Scottsdale in 1960 was governed as a general-law town, its downtown held to the stage-set western storefront look the Chamber had spent the fifties perfecting, its southern neighborhoods still waiting on sewer lines that would not arrive until mid-decade. Citrus groves and farmland ringed the subdivisions, flipping to model homes block by block — the kind of growth you could watch happen from a porch.
The pressure of all those new neighbors pointed at one solution: home rule. Within two years the town would adopt a charter, ban billboards, and start designing the boom instead of merely absorbing it. The quintupled village of 1960 was, in other words, a town about to take control of itself — the story picks up in 1961, and the whole arc runs through the 1960s chapter.