What was Scottsdale High School?
For most of the twentieth century, if you grew up in Scottsdale you went to one high school, and it stood on Indian School Road at about 74th Street. Scottsdale High School opened for the 1922–23 school year on ten acres donated by the family of Charles L. Miller, a state legislator. Its first graduating class, in 1923, had three students, and two of them were Miller children, Bill and Murle. The district had hired its first superintendent, L.O. Duross, the year before. For a farm town, a high school of its own meant its teenagers could finish school without leaving home.
The school did far more than teach. Before the town had a city hall, a big church or a college, it had Scottsdale High’s buildings, and the town used them for all of those things. After the 1951 incorporation the first Town Council met there, among other places. Congregations without churches held services there. Each December from 1953 to 1966 the Mexican-American parish carried its banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe from the Old Adobe Mission to the campus for the Miracle of the Roses pageant. In August 1969 Scottsdale Community College held its first classes there in the evenings, before it had a campus of its own.
In January 1983, with district enrollment falling, the school board voted 3–2 to close it. Arcadia High would have been the other candidate, but Scottsdale High’s land was worth more. The last class graduated that May. The buildings came down in stages from 1987, and Old Main fell last, in 1992. Today a hotel stands on part of the site, and the most visible marker is a pair of white pillars that most people don’t realize are copies.
How to find what’s left
The plaque. In June 2011, during Scottsdale’s 60th-anniversary year, the alumni dedicated a bronze plaque on the curved wall of the Hilton Garden Inn Scottsdale Old Town, 7324 E. Indian School Rd., declaring the site the permanent home of the Beavers. A small committee led by William Teske (‘64) raised the money and negotiated its placement. Paul Messinger, Mary White Keltner (‘60, daughter of the town’s first mayor, Malcolm White), JoAnn Handley (‘49) and Tom Silverman designed it, including a caricature of the mascot. It sits on hotel property, so be polite and quick. It’s the only thing on the site that says what was here.
The pillars. The tall white columns at Drinkwater Boulevard and Indian School Road copy the columns on the front of Old Main. A 2011 Arizona Republic piece placed them at “Scottsdale High Way (also Drinkwater Boulevard),” the name a new section of road was given as a tribute in 1992, and quoted an alumna: “most people don’t know that’s why they are there.” Now you do. They’re best seen on foot from the corner, not from the turn lane.
The museum. Walk south past City Hall to the Little Red Schoolhouse, the 1909 grammar school, the town’s first brick school. As of 2011 the Scottsdale Historical Museum held the high school’s yearbooks, trophies and band uniforms. What’s on display rotates, so ask the volunteer at the desk. The museum closes June through August.
The yearbooks. The library’s Scottsdale Heritage Connection, next to the teen center in the Civic Center Library, keeps local yearbooks, newspapers and photographs where you can sit and read them. If you’re tracing a parent or grandparent, start here. The Scottsdale Progress on file there covers the 1983 closing vote and the demolition years.
The rest of the walk. The whole loop, from plaque to pillars to museum, takes about twenty minutes. It runs through the Civic Center, built in the 1960s and ’70s on land south of the school. That redevelopment has a history of its own, told in The Barrio Under the Civic Center.
Sixty years as the town’s building
Scottsdale High was built for a farm town. When World War II ended the district still ran only two schools, the 1928 grammar school that became Loloma, and Scottsdale High. Both had been enlarged in the 1930s with WPA money. A 1933 newspaper boasted that the town’s schools were among the best in the state.
Because the town had few other large rooms, the campus kept getting borrowed. The Mormons gathered at Scottsdale High in the 1940s. The Episcopalians began holding services there in 1953. After incorporation in 1951 the new Town Council met in businesses, in homes and at the high school, until the town’s offices moved into the Rural Fire Company’s new fire hall in January 1952. In the 1950s residents came to the high school for Civil Defense instruction.
The event that best showed what kind of town Scottsdale was in the 1950s was a pageant. From 1953 to 1966, each December, the parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help carried a banner of Our Lady from the Old Adobe Mission to Scottsdale High for the Miracle of the Roses pageant. In the pageant, a young woman chosen each year played the Virgin and young men and women played Spanish soldiers, monks, Aztec leaders, townspeople and Juan Diego. The pageant drew Scottsdale’s Catholic community, city officials and local businesses. It began in the public high school while the district was still running the Coronado School, a few blocks away, as the school for the town’s Hispanic and other non-white children; the district’s own chronology dates Coronado’s closing to 1956. The Scottsdale and the color line note follows that thread.
The 1960s turned the school into a civic training ground. Its girls were chosen as the Howdy Dudettes, the town’s official welcoming committee, in the 1960s and ’70s. In 1968 its Key Club helped the newly formed Scottsdale Historical Society circulate the petitions that saved the Little Red Schoolhouse. A civics teacher, Bill Jenkins, went on to be mayor from 1974 to 1980. Evelyn Caskey was principal at both Scottsdale and Chaparral high schools. Among the alumni the Republic listed in 2001 were the Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer, the actor Stuart Margolin, the astronaut John L. Phillips, the state schools superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan, and Fee Waybill of the Tubes. Dan Quayle attended for two years.
The vote and the wrecking ball
By the early 1980s, the baby-boom wave that had filled the district’s schools was passing through. Scottsdale grew from 10,000 people in 1960 to more than 88,000 in 1980, and the district had built schools wherever the subdivisions went: Arcadia High in 1959, Coronado High in 1961, Saguaro in 1966, Chaparral in 1972. The older neighborhoods aged, and enrollment fell. Elementary schools that opened in the late 1950s were closing by the late 1970s, and by 1983 the board was looking at its high schools.
Superintendent Philip Gates wanted to close Arcadia. The board chose Scottsdale High, by 3–2 in January 1983. As the Republic reported the vote, the reason was money: Scottsdale’s land was worth an estimated $10 million to $15 million, more than Arcadia’s, and the district needed cash. The school had 1,226 students. Its 61st class graduated in May 1983, and the doors shut.
The city’s own historic context, written in 2012, records what happened next with unusual candor. Some alumni and preservationists told the board they did not want the school demolished. “In spite of some vocal opposition,” the board decided to demolish the buildings, “with the Old Main building being the last to fall to the wrecking ball.” Residents asked the City Council to intervene, but the council had no jurisdiction over an independent, self-governing school district. The district won approval to lease the site in 1985. It was rezoned for development in 1986, demolition began in 1987, and Old Main was razed in 1992. The Historical Society dates the razing to 1991–92, which is when the last of it came down. One alumnus, Dave Hamory (‘65), photographed the empty campus in 1987, and his pictures are among the last of it standing.
Why it matters
Scottsdale saved its 1909 grammar school after 1968 because residents petitioned for it, more than 1,500 signatures in the first push, and because a tenant was found. It did not save its 1922 high school, and the reasons are just as instructive. The school was not the city’s to save, the land was worth more than the building, and the district was short of money. Its replacement was not a park or a museum but commercial redevelopment on Indian School Road at the edge of Old Town.
The alumni have kept trying to put the name back. In 1994, when the district was naming its new high school in the north, they lobbied for “Scottsdale High School.” The district chose Desert Mountain instead, on the recommendation of the future students and parents. In 2011 the alumni settled for bronze. “The youngest graduates are now 45 years old,” Teske told the Republic, “and by the time they are 90, there will be no remembrance of Scottsdale High.” More than 17,000 people graduated from it. The plaque is there so that those people aren’t the only ones who remember.
The rest of the school’s record is unfinished. Board minutes for 1982–83 at the district office would show how each member voted and why. The Scottsdale Progress run in the library has the demolition fight week by week. And the alumni website, kept up by volunteers for more than twenty years, is still collecting stories.