The war was still somewhere else in 1940. Scottsdale entered the decade as it had spent the previous one: an unincorporated farm-and-ranch crossroads of roughly two thousand people, living off winter. The guest ranches that had carried the town through the Depression — the Jokake, the Camelback Inn, the dude outfits that mixed real cattle work with paying easterners — were still the cash economy, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, three years old, was wintering in the McDowell foothills.
What the record does not show for 1940 is any local inkling of what was coming. Within two years the alfalfa north of town would be an Army airfield and the Valley would be ringed with flight schools. For now the town stayed quiet, seasonal, and legally nobody’s responsibility — no city government, no fire department, no paper of record. Every one of those would arrive, improvised, before the decade was out.
The full arc is in the 1940s chapter; the peacetime world about to end is in the 1930s.