The decade announced itself with a number and a name. The number was 88,412 — the census count for a city that had held 67,841 just ten years before, when the Labor Day flood cut it in half. The name was Herb Drinkwater, a downtown wine merchant who won the mayor’s office in 1980 and would keep winning it for sixteen years, long enough that the whole period reads in retrospect as his.
Drinkwater’s method was retail politics of a very literal kind: he greeted nearly everyone, remembered names, and usually had his dog along. Voters found it irresistible, but the friendliness rode on top of a shrewd agenda. His Scottsdale would court exactly the growth that fit the brand — resorts, medicine, horses, golf, corporate aviation — and go get the raw desert needed to control its own northern destiny.
None of that was visible yet in 1980. The year’s most tangible novelty was smaller and perfectly on brand: the Molly the Trolley shuttles began looping downtown, ferrying visitors among the western storefronts and the growing gallery blocks. A tourist town polishing its tourist machinery — while its new mayor eyed the empty land to the north.
What he did with it — the annexations, the mega-resorts of 1985, the trifecta of 1987 — is the story of the 1980s chapter.