What it means
The Howdy Dudettes were Scottsdale’s welcome wagon in its booster years: high school girls the Chamber of Commerce sent out as goodwill ambassadors. When a convention group checked into the Hotel Valley Ho, Dudettes were there to greet it. When a Hollywood star came to ride in Parada del Sol, Dudettes walked beside the car. The job was to make a town of a few thousand people look like the friendliest stop in the West, and in the photographs it works.
Today the word is mostly heard from two groups: longtime residents, some of whom were Dudettes or grew up with one, and the organizers of Western Week, who revived the name in 2017. If someone at a February parade mentions the Dudettes, they mean the official ambassadors welcoming the crowd along Scottsdale Road. If a grandmother mentions them, she means 1965.
Where you’ll meet it
In the Parada del Sol parade lineup and Western Week program, in the photo archives of the Scottsdale Public Library and the Historical Society, and in the Chamber’s own histories.
Where the word came from
The name is a stack of tourist-trade Western. “Howdy” was the greeting every visitor expected. “Dude” was what Arizona called the paying guests at dude ranches, and in the 1950s those ranches, along with the resorts, were what brought outsiders to Scottsdale. A dudette was a female dude. The Chamber had already given the town its slogan, the West’s Most Western Town, and its greeters needed a name to match. Nobody is on record as the person who coined it.
The date is slightly fuzzy, and the record shows why. Local accounts, repeated in coverage of the parade’s anniversaries, say the Chamber added the Howdy Dudettes as ambassadors in 1959, during the expansion of Parada del Sol. But the Arizona Memory Project, the state’s digital archive, holds a photograph titled “Howdy Dudettes Escort Actress Amanda Blake in 1958 Parada del Sol.” Blake was Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke, then one of the most watched shows on television, and the photo puts the name at least a year earlier than the usual telling. The honest answer is the late 1950s, with 1958 the earliest dated sighting.
Through the 1960s and 1970s the Dudettes were the Chamber’s standing welcome committee, greeting meetings and convention groups at hotels such as the Valley Ho; the state archive has a 1960s photograph of them there. One local history column puts the end of the program in the early 1980s.
What it is not
The Howdy Dudettes were not a dance team, a rodeo queen court or a school club. They belonged to the Chamber, and their work was hospitality. They are also not the Charros, the men’s civic group that hosts spring training, though the two often shared a parade.
The fine print
The revival is a different institution with the old name. After the program lapsed, the Dudettes were, in the words of a 2019 anniversary story, “taken off the roster at one point and were brought back by popular demand in 2017.” Promotional listings for the 2018 and 2019 parades describe “the famous 1959 ‘Howdy Dudettes’” serving as official Western ambassadors, drawn from the staff of a Scottsdale resort. The name and the hospitality survived; the high school recruiting did not.
The original record has holes. No public source we found says how many girls served each year, how they were chosen, what the Chamber asked of them beyond greeting and parading, or exactly when the last class served. The Chamber’s own history is thin on women generally: the Dudettes are the best-documented female presence in its first decades, and the date the first woman joined its board does not appear in any public source. The photographs are the richest evidence, which is fitting for a job that was mostly about being seen.