Between the war’s end and the boom’s beginning sits 1946, a year the record mostly keeps to itself — its one opening was the Paradise Inn, raised beside the aging Jokake below Camelback for the postwar winter trade. The airfield’s cadets were gone and the prison camp’s war was over; what arrived instead, family by family, were the veterans — men who had trained at the Valley’s flight fields and returned with GI Bill loans and no intention of shoveling snow again. Scottsdale was still an unincorporated crossroads of about two thousand, still living off winter visitors and guest ranches, still without a fire department, a newspaper, or a government of its own.
The improvising was about to start. Within two years the town would acquire a chamber of commerce, a cooperative craft center, a private fire brigade, and a paper of record — the organs of a real town, assembled ad hoc for a place that legally was not one. 1947 began that scramble.