The decade ended the way it had run: without a local headline — the nearest thing was in Phoenix, where Bob Goldwater Sr. talked the Thunderbirds into reviving the dormant Phoenix Open, the tournament that would move to Scottsdale in 1987. Scottsdale in 1939 was still a couple of thousand people, still unincorporated, still governed by the county, the school board, and habit. The Depression years had been survived in style — guest ranches full each winter, the Old Adobe Mission six years old, Wright’s camp taking shape in the foothills — and nothing about the place suggested it was about to change.
It was about to change. War broke out in Europe that September, and within three years the conflict would drop a pilot-training field on the alfalfa north of town and fill the sky with Stearman biplanes. The farm town’s last quiet years belong to pages like this one; what came next is the 1940s chapter.