Thunderbird Field II had been waiting for this. The airfield where pilots trained during the Second World War had sat out the postwar years while subdivisions crept toward it; in 1966 the city reopened it as Scottsdale Municipal Airport, giving the boomtown its own runway. It was a modest municipal field at first — but the city was buying an asset, not just an airstrip.
The payoff came fast. The very next year the surrounding land debuted as the Scottsdale Airpark, the aviation-plus-business district that would grow into one of Arizona’s largest employment centers — thousands of companies, corporate aviation up front, offices and industry behind. A war-surplus training field became the second economic engine of a city that already had tourism for its first.
The airport opening also says something about where Scottsdale’s center of gravity was heading. The city of 1966 — north of 54,000 people by the previous year’s special census and annexing steadily — was reaching well past the little downtown grid that had defined it, toward the land that would become the Airpark, McCormick Ranch, and eventually the long northern city of today. That reach is the story of 1967, the decade’s championship year, and of the 1960s chapter entire.