Why he matters
Bill Clayton’s term was short and ended in grief, but it sat at a turning point. He became mayor in the fall of 1964, when the boomtown was adding people faster than it could build roads, parks or offices, and within a month the city had asked a hundred of its residents what to build. The answer, the Scottsdale Town Enrichment Program, became the plan for much of the city the 1960s left behind.
He did not live to see it built. Clayton died in office in December 1965, months before voters approved the bonds for the Civic Center his council had set in motion.
Where to find his era today
The Scottsdale Civic Center. STEP’s Civic Center task force asked for a real home for government and the library. City Hall and the library opened in 1968.
Eldorado Park. The city had no official parks in 1964. STEP’s parks task force changed that, and Eldorado opened in 1967 as the first community park.
A city asking itself what to build
STEP’s kickoff meeting took place on November 4, 1964, in the municipal building next to the Little Red Schoolhouse, a month after Clayton took office. The 100 participants split into seven task forces: public safety, utilities, the Civic Center, libraries and museums, parks and beautification, public works, and a municipal airport. They met through the holidays and presented their recommendations to the council on January 20, 1965.
The 1965 page records what followed that year: the special census, the hiring of Bennie Gonzales, and the start of the STEP forums the city would keep holding into the 1970s.
The full story
C.W. “Bill” Clayton was elected to the council on April 4, 1961, and won one one-year and two two-year council terms, the second of which he did not finish. He was on the council that October when voters approved the home-rule charter, and on the charter council that banned billboards in 1962. Little else about his life before office survives in the sources this page could check, and it will not guess at his dates or his trade.
His path to the mayor’s chair was unplanned. Bill Schrader’s successor, John Woudenberg, was elected mayor on April 7, 1964, and resigned on September 29, citing the pressures of his business. On October 6 the council appointed Clayton to finish the term. The city he inherited had roughly quadrupled since 1960, and sewers were only then reaching the southern neighborhoods.
The city had hired its first planning director, George Fretz, in 1963. Fretz, City Manager Richard Malcolm, Woudenberg and then Clayton pushed for a citizen-written, three-year list of capital projects, and a month into Clayton’s term STEP convened. The report that came out of it in 1965 was an unusually accurate forecast. It called for a Civic Center to replace the old schoolhouse and rented offices the government was using, a first library built from scratch, parks and 50,000 new trees, fire hydrants and stations, better water and sewer service, flood control on Indian Bend Wash, and a municipal airport on the old Thunderbird field that Schrader’s council had annexed.
Clayton’s council began putting it in motion. In 1965 the city hired Bennie Gonzales to design the Civic Center, and a special census counted 54,504 people, five times the 1960 figure. The first Civic Center bond issue failed at the polls that year. Clayton died in office on December 21, 1965. On January 6, 1966, the council chose councilman Bud Tims to succeed him, and later in 1966 voters passed the bond. Tims presided over most of what STEP had asked for, but the list was written while Clayton was mayor. The period is covered in the boomtown era.