No single headline survives from 1963, but the ground was moving all the same. This was the middle of the fastest growth stretch in Scottsdale’s history — between the 10,026 counted in 1960 and the 54,504 a special census would find in 1965 — and the work of the year was absorption: subdivisions replacing farmland block by block, schools and services chasing the population curve, sewer lines at last being pushed toward the southern neighborhoods in the 1962–64 infrastructure sprint.
The new charter government, seated after the 1961 election, was settling into the job, with the billboard ban of 1962 freshly on the books and the design-review instinct it announced starting to harden into habit. The town was, in short, doing the unglamorous part of booming. The milestones on either side of this quiet year — and the shape of the whole decade — are in the 1960s chapter.