Three students walked in Scottsdale High School’s first graduating class. The building on Indian School Road, voted in three elections in 1922 and planned for the 1922–23 school year (the Historical Society dates it to 1923), 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 a second grammar school, later called Loloma, in 1928 and renaming the old 1909 brick schoolhouse Coronado.
Downtown got its own addition that year, of a less improving kind: Johnny Rose razed his frame store and built a white glazed-brick building on the merchant row for, in the city’s words, “billiard, pool and silent movies.” Prohibition was the law, and the town’s constable had been arresting whiskey sellers since 1922, but a pool hall was legal. 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.