Three students walked in Scottsdale High School’s first graduating class. The building itself, opened in 1923 on Indian School Road, was a far larger statement than the diploma count suggested: a farm town two years past a ruinous cotton crash had decided its children would finish school at home rather than board elsewhere or quit for the fields. The district was already substantial — by 1920 it ran six teachers for 410 pupils — and the high school capped the system.
The bet aged well. Scottsdale High served the town for sixty years, until 1983, and its site became part of the civic heart of south Scottsdale. Enrollment pressure never let up; within five years the district would be building again, raising Loloma School in 1928 and renaming the old 1909 brick schoolhouse Coronado.
Downtown got its own addition that year, of a less improving kind: Johnny Rose’s pool hall opened on the merchant row — evidence that even a famously dry Baptist town needed somewhere to waste an afternoon. The hall became a downtown fixture, and its later sale to J. Chew Song in 1929 would mark the decade’s bookend. School and pool hall, opened the same year, made a fair portrait of the town the 1920s were building: earnest, small, and increasingly complete.