The town’s first high school died of the city’s growth. Scottsdale High, opened on Indian School Road in 1923 on land Charles Miller gave, had 1,226 students in a district that had built newer schools everywhere the subdivisions went. In January the board voted 3–2 to close it; the 61st class graduated in May 1983 and the doors shut. The campus was demolished from 1987, Old Main in 1992, and the land went commercial. Sixty years of Beavers — named for the beavers in the canals — ended as the annexed north was filling with the families who would have gone there.
The year’s most consequential news was underground. In 1981 the solvent trichloroethylene had turned up in Scottsdale and Tempe city wells, traced to the industrial plants along the McDowell Road corridor; on September 8, 1983 the EPA placed the 13-square-mile Indian Bend Wash Area on the first National Priorities List of Superfund sites. The cleanup — treatment plants, pumped wells, decades of monitoring — was not declared complete until 2006, and the plume is the reason the city’s south-side water story is more complicated than the Greenbelt’s green looks.
The city was spending, too. On June 21 voters approved $69 million in bonds, all five questions, for water and sewer lines, streets, city buildings, parks and storm sewers. North of the airport the city’s new Horseman’s Park opened on federal flood-control land, the seed of WestWorld. In May the council consented to Fountain Hills becoming a town, a consent it would take back in 1985 (see the annexation page).
Weather and golf finished the year. The remnants of Tropical Storm Octave sat over Arizona from September 28 to October 4 and produced the state’s costliest flood — 14 dead, some $500 million in damage, the worst of it in Tucson — while the Greenbelt, finished in stages since 1973, did its job through the Valley’s share. And that November, on Jack Nicklaus’s new Desert Highlands course below Pinnacle Peak, Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson and Gary Player played the first Skins Game for $170,000 on NBC, with Vin Scully calling it. Player won, and north Scottsdale’s desert-golf future had its first national broadcast. The Oakland A’s played their last spring at Scottsdale Stadium that March; the Giants arrived in 1984, and the 1980s chapter follows the Drinkwater decade from there.