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; on July 12, 1966 the city took title to the 201-acre field from the Seventh-day Adventists for $750,000. City Manager Bill Donaldson told the Progress the money had been given to the city by Landel Inc., the developer planning industrial lots around the field; the city’s 2012 historic context says instead that federal funds paid for it. In September Mayor Bud Tims, whom the council had chosen in January to succeed the late Bill Clayton, broke ground on Scottsdale Municipal Airport, which opened on June 16 of the following year. It was a modest municipal field at first — but the city was buying an asset, not just an airstrip.
The payoff came fast. The surrounding land became the Scottsdale Airpark, whose first tenant broke ground in 1968, 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.
Downtown, the city bet on itself twice more. On September 28 voters approved a $2.4 million bond for Bennie Gonzales’ Civic Center, two to one, a year after rejecting it — City Hall and the library would be dedicated in October 1968. And along Indian Bend Wash, where a county bond for a concrete channel failed that year (three to one in March, the city’s context says), the city acquired 55 acres for Eldorado Park, which opened in 1967 as the first piece of what would become the Greenbelt. 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, toward the land that would become the Airpark, McCormick Ranch, and the long northern city of today. That reach is the story of 1967, the decade’s championship year, and of the 1960s chapter entire.