Why it matters
The Parada del Sol is the oldest thing Scottsdale does on purpose, and for 56 of its 75 years it was done by a club that no longer exists. The Scottsdale Jaycees, the town’s chapter of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, organized in 1953, took over a two-year-old merchants’ parade called the Sunshine Festival, gave it a Spanish name, added a rodeo, a barbecue and a street dance, invited a sheriff’s posse to ride the mail down from Holbrook, and produced the whole thing every winter until 2009.
The town incorporated in 1951 with a cafe owner, Malcolm White, for mayor, and its brand, “The West’s Most Western Town,” was a slogan looking for proof. The Jaycees provided it: a parade of horses down Scottsdale Road that made the slogan true one Saturday a year. The 1950s chapter calls it the town’s liturgy. You meet the Jaycees today in what they left behind: the parade, the rodeo, the Hashknife riders, and a shopping mall on the corner where they built their first arena by hand.
Where to find it today
Nowhere, as an organization. The parade rides down Scottsdale Road on the first Saturday of February, run since 2021 by the Scottsdale Charros with the volunteer Parada del Sol Committee. The rodeo runs each March in the Equidome at WestWorld, produced by Parada del Sol, Inc., the nonprofit former Jaycees formed in 2009. The first rodeo grounds are under Scottsdale Fashion Square; the second were east of Scottsdale Stadium. The Arizona Memory Project holds the chapter’s photographs.
How it started
The festival came before the club. On November 17, 1951, five months after incorporation, the Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce and the Scottsdale Riding Club staged the Sunshine Festival parade to open the tourist season. It was a merchants’ project, and merchants have stores to run.
The Junior Chamber of Commerce was the national answer to that problem. The Jaycees were chapters of young men (18 to 36 at the organization’s 1976 peak, 40 today) who took on civic projects as leadership training and then aged out, making room for the next class. In 1953 a group of young Scottsdale men organized a chapter, and the Chamber handed them its festival. They renamed it the Parada del Sol, moved it from November to the cooler, busier weeks of January and February, and built it into a week: parade, barbecue, street dance and a best-beard contest. Among the founders was Bill Schrader, a farm kid from Indian School and Hayden roads who became the first chairman of the rodeo and the Parada, president of the chapter, a councilman at 29 in 1958 and eventually mayor. The first Parada rode in November 1953.
The chapter had no money and no land. When the Jaycees decided in 1956 to add a rodeo, landowner Harry Lenart leased them the vacant northwest corner of Scottsdale and Camelback roads for a dollar a year, and the members built the arena themselves.
The decisions that locked it in
Taking the festival, 1953. The Jaycees could have started a project of their own and left the Sunshine Festival to the Chamber and the riding club. Instead they took the one event the town already had and made it theirs, which tied a club of transient young members to a permanent civic obligation.
Adding the rodeo, 1956. A parade is a morning. A rodeo is a venue, livestock, sanctioning, insurance and a second weekend. The Jaycees chose the harder thing, which gave Scottsdale a PRCA rodeo still running seventy years later and gave the chapter a real-estate problem for life. The dollar-a-year corner was wanted for a shopping center within three years, and in 1960 and 1961 it became Scottsdale Fashion Square. In 1959 the Jaycees moved east of the new Scottsdale Stadium and north of the Boys Club and built a second arena by hand; it lasted 25 years before the civic core around the stadium pushed the rodeo north to Rawhide in 1985, and later to WestWorld.
Inviting the posse, 1958 to 1959. In 1958 the Navajo County Sheriff’s Posse in Holbrook carried a letter 200 miles by horseback to the governor in Phoenix. The next winter the riders came to Scottsdale for the Parada, and the Hashknife Pony Express has opened the celebration every year since, the oldest Pony Express ride sanctioned by the U.S. Postal Service. It is the one part of the Parada that cannot be dismissed as marketing.
The Fourth of July, 1970. Under president Dave Hawkins and chairman Ray Gardea, the Jaycees took on the city’s Independence Day celebration and fireworks at the rodeo grounds, later at Rawhide and, in 2001, at WestWorld.
Dissolving, 2009. When the chapter disbanded, the parade and rodeo could have gone to the city, which by then had WestWorld and a tourism department, or to the Chamber, which had started the festival. Instead some former members formed Parada del Sol, Inc., an Arizona nonprofit corporation, and carried on as volunteers.
The years it nearly ended
The Jaycees’ near-death events were about ground, and the last one was about people. In 1959 the first arena had to go so that Scottsdale Fashion Square could be built; the chapter hand-built a second one beside the stadium. In 1985 that one went too, and the rodeo moved to Rawhide. It settled at WestWorld in 2006, the year after Rawhide itself was dismantled and moved to the Gila River Indian Community.
The chapter ended in 2009. The record gives no single cause, but the structure supplies one. A Jaycees chapter is a young men’s club by rule; members age out at 40, and the national organization had been shrinking since its 1976 peak of 356,000. A 56-year-old parade and a PRCA rodeo are a heavy load for a membership that turns over every few years, and when recruiting slowed, the load did not.
What the successors inherited was thinner than it looked. Up to 2009 the Jaycees had used WestWorld for the rodeo without paying rent. From 2010 the city introduced rent and raised it in steps to a $25,525 base fee by 2015. The parade was produced by a core committee of ten or fifteen people and about fifty volunteers on the day, under president Wendy Springborn. On January 26, 2021, the board cancelled the 68th parade over COVID-19, and that spring the Scottsdale Charros, who had ridden in the parade for most of its life, took over its management. The rodeo stayed with Parada del Sol, Inc., which added a second September rodeo, the West’s Most Western Rodeo, in 2024.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The Jaycees set out to produce the Parada del Sol as the town’s winter celebration of its Western identity, “hundreds of horses and entertainment to highlight the spirit of the Old West,” and did that, without a change of purpose, until the day they dissolved. What changed was not what the club did but who was left to do it.
In other hands the mission has moved a little. Parada del Sol, Inc. frames the rodeo as a charitable enterprise supporting “charities, healthcare initiatives, and community programs,” which the Jaycees never claimed; the parade under the Charros belongs to the city’s branded Western Week, launched in 2017. The Jaycees never had the chance to drift. They ran out of members first.
Who the record leaves out
Women. The Jaycees were a men’s organization by national rule until the Supreme Court decided Roberts v. United States Jaycees in 1984. Scottsdale’s Parada had a Queen and her court from early on, and the chapter’s photographs show women in the parade; the record does not show them as members or chairmen before the mid-1980s, and we found no account of when, or whether, the Scottsdale chapter admitted them after. The volunteer committee that inherited the parade in 2009 was led by women: Springborn as president, Kimberly Chiappetti as a longtime member and Chris ‘Chrissy’ Lyman as president by 2024. That is documented; the years between are not.
The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and the Mexican-American riders. The Parada’s cast has always included Native color guards and dancers and Mexican charro riders and folklórico troupes. The Jaycees’ own record is a record of Anglo young men producing a Western show in a town whose eastern border is the Community and whose name for the event is Spanish. What those participants were paid, asked or told is in no source we found.
The landowners and the hands. The men who hand-built two arenas, the stock contractors and the posse riders who slept out on the Mogollon Rim in February appear in Arizona Memory Project photographs and almost nowhere else. Who was in the chapter in 2009, how many there were and how the vote to dissolve went is not public; the city’s account says only that “some members” formed the successor.
What it didn’t have to become
The Jaycees did not have to make the Parada del Sol the whole of their identity. The Scottsdale chapter took one permanent event, added a second, then a third, and became the event. That gave the town a tradition sturdy enough to outlive its sponsor by 17 years and counting; it also meant that when the chapter ended there was no organization left under the tradition, only a committee.
And the Parada did not have to pass to the Charros. Former Jaycees chose to keep it themselves rather than give it to the city or the Chamber. Twelve years later the parade went to the one booster club in town built on the opposite model, and the rodeo stayed with the volunteers. Had the chapter handed the whole thing to the city in 2009, the Parada would be a municipal event today, and the old argument about whether Scottsdale’s Western identity belongs to its boosters or its government would have been settled quietly, in favor of the government.