At a glance: On June 25, 1951 Scottsdale became a town of about half a square mile, and its first decade was an experiment in governing with almost nothing. The county appointed the first council, a cafe owner, a service-station man, two blacksmiths and a tavern keeper, and the council picked its own mayor. The town bought fire protection from a private company, raised street money at charity balls and, by one historian’s account, levied no sales or property tax until 1960. It created a zoning commission within months and a board to keep downtown Western within two years. Meanwhile Phoenix, bigger and better staffed, won the race for the land around it, the resorts beside it turned away Jewish and Black guests, and the town’s first charter was thrown out on a technicality. The 1930–1951 chapter tells how the town came to exist; this one tells what it did next.
The appointed council
The county supervisors appointed five men, who were seated on July 2, 1951: Malcolm White, owner of the Tee-Bar-Tee theater; Mort Kimsey; E. G. Scott, owner of Scotty’s Blacksmith Shop; Jack Sweeney, owner of the Saguaro Inn; and Bill Miller. The next day, by the city’s council history, they chose White as mayor and Sweeney as clerk of the council. Miller moved out of town within weeks, and the blacksmith’s son George “Doc” Cavalliere took his seat. In March 1952 the supervisors added John Shoeman and V. D. “Jim” Frederick to make seven, and from 1952 the council was elected to two-year terms. It went on choosing the mayor from among its members, White in 1951, 1954 and 1956, until 1960.
Serving was hard to sustain. By the city’s count, twenty-four people sat on the council by the end of 1960; eleven resigned before their terms were out, most because they moved away, and one was killed. Frederick, who ran a Western-themed service station at Scottsdale Road and Main, was killed at his home in July 1954; a 2020 retelling of the town’s unsolved crimes says he was shot. The first member the roster identifies as a woman, Mildred Bratzel, was elected in 1958; a Virgie Brown had already served on the Zoning Commission in 1953 and 1954.
The council worked where it could. It met in businesses, homes and the high school until January 1952, then in the new fire hall of Lou Witzeman’s Rural Fire company at Brown Avenue and Second Street, and from 1955 in the 1909 schoolhouse, where a councilman elected in 1960 remembered “the Police Department was in the basement. As I remember, we had 4 officers and two automobiles.”
A town without taxes
The new town hired a marshal (the Historical Society names Hurley Pruitt) and bought fire protection from Witzeman’s company rather than hire firefighters; the first contract, the Historical Society says, was $4,260 a year. On November 13, 1951, by Ordinance No. 4, the council created a five-member Zoning Commission and in December appointed its first members, Al Lindsey, Cruz Medina, H. C. Saunders and Vernon Walker, with John Shoeman; it drew the first zoning maps in 1952. “Believe it or not,” the historian Joan Fudala has said, “we didn’t have our own taxes until July 1960, when we passed our first sales tax and our first property tax.” Residents held “Street Pavers Balls” at Camelback Inn to pay for oiling the dusty streets.
Keeping it Western
The slogan came first and the rules after. Merchants had dressed downtown in board-and-batten and hitching posts voluntarily, Fudala writes, and in 1953, the city’s historic context says, “the Town Council appointed an Architectural Board to ensure adherence to a Western theme.” The council’s first recorded fight was over looks and parking. When nine businessmen planned Pima Plaza as a “dignified Western” shopping square in 1952 with parking in the middle, it won approval “only after several months of heated battles between the property owners and the Town Council.” The promotion stayed with the volunteers: the Jaycees turned the Chamber’s 1951 Sunshine Festival into the Parada del Sol in 1953 and added a rodeo in 1956, on the corner where Fashion Square would rise.
Losing the land race
Phoenix wanted to grow, and so did the town. In 1956, by the city’s historic context, White told Phoenix’s mayor, Jack Williams, that Scottsdale meant to annex as far west as 40th Street; Williams answered that Phoenix wanted to go east to 56th Street, and they could not agree. That April the town passed Ordinance No. 29, annexing four square miles west to 40th Street; Phoenix challenged it and the courts voided it. In 1957 the Arizona Supreme Court ruled for Phoenix in another overlapping claim: a Scottsdale petition filed first did not count, because the town council had never acted on it. “With a larger more experienced staff,” the city’s context concludes, “Phoenix outpaced Scottsdale on annexations in the 1950s.” Scottsdale covered 2.8 square miles by the January 1957 special census and 3.8 by the end of 1959; Phoenix covered 185 by March 1960. A councilman elected in 1960 remembered that Phoenix “wanted to limit the size of Scottsdale and they were strongly backed by the Arizona Republic.” The annexation war page follows the fight to its 1964 truce.
A charter, twice
In 1960 the county planned for the town, and the town declined. The county’s comprehensive plan noted that Scottsdale “did not have one acre of parks,” and the council rejected it; “town officials and residents soon decided to become a Charter City to control their own planning.” On February 23, 1960, voters approved a charter, and that spring they elected their mayor directly for the first time, returning Mort Kimsey, and sent the 27-year-old Motorola engineer John Knudsen to the council. The charter did not last. The election had been held 33 days after the charter’s last publication, three days past the limit in Arizona’s constitution, and when the state attorney general challenged two Scottsdale annexations, the Superior Court declared the charter void; the Court of Appeals affirmed in 1965. By then the town had written another, ratified on October 31, 1961. The day page for February 23, 1960 has the story.
The sewer vote
Growth brought plumbing. The town’s sewage plant on Miller Road south of Van Buren went into operation in January 1959, at a cost of about $700,000, and was dedicated on October 25. When the council voted in September 1960 to expand the system, Austin Smith, the single vote against, “resigned during the Sept. 20, 1960 Council meeting,” the city’s council history records.
The color line
The decade’s sharpest social argument was about who could stay. Camelback Inn, on county land north of the town (today’s Paradise Valley), admitted Jewish guests only when “carefully selected,” its owner, Jack Stewart, acknowledged in 1954. That November the National Association of Attorneys General moved its convention from the Inn to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, after New York’s attorney general called the policy “apparently hypocritical.” In February 1959 the Boston Red Sox, in their first spring in Scottsdale, signed Pumpsie Green, and the team’s hotel, the Safari, inside the town, turned him away; “Negroes are not permitted to live in Scottsdale,” a Boston writer explained. In 1960, the Arizona Sun reported, the club put Green and pitcher Earl Wilson at Scottsdale’s Hitching Post Hotel while the white players stayed at the Safari. The 1960 census counted 10,026 people in Scottsdale: forty-six nonwhite, none Black. Our note on Scottsdale and the color line tells the story in full.
The neighbors
The water users’ association, by the city’s historic context, voted in 1956 to close its last company camp for its Yaqui canal workers; the families moved to Penjamo, along the Indian Bend Wash south of McDowell Road, “an area that was subject to flooding.” The school district built twelve grade schools and a second high school by the end of 1960, naming them, by the board’s policy, for Native American traditions, and closed the 1909 schoolhouse, the Coronado School that had served the barrio’s youngest children, in 1956. Our notes on the Coronado School and on the schools’ names follow both.
The turnover
On June 12, 1958, a new majority took office, Schrader, Bratzel, Stroup and Guy, and the council named Kimsey mayor in White’s place. The Scottsdale Progress later found that the decade’s council races had been dominated by an “All Western Party” of the original appointees, until “new” All Western candidates and a Non-Partisan slate challenged it in 1958. Bill Schrader, elected that year at 29, would be the first mayor chosen under the 1961 charter. The 1950s chapter tells the decade’s wider story of hotels, spring training and Motorola.