Consider what the Mayo Clinic was giving up by opening this door. For over a century the institution had been synonymous with one place — Rochester, Minnesota — and its mystique rested partly on that singularity: you went to Mayo, Mayo did not come to you. Expanding anywhere was a break with the founding geography. That the first branch in the clinic’s history landed in Scottsdale, Arizona, was not an accident of real estate.
The courtship
Valley civic leaders — Mayor Herb Drinkwater conspicuous among them — had spent years making the case, and the case was Scottsdale itself: the climate, the growth curve, and a city that had just spent the decade proving it could land institutions. The annexations of 1981–84 had given Scottsdale room in the north; the Princess and Hyatt Gainey openings of 1985 had shown the world-class treatment the city gave a flagship arrival. When Mayo finally said yes, it chose its date with characteristic care: June 29, the 126th anniversary of Dr. William J. Mayo’s birth, tying the desert campus to the founders’ lineage from day one.
So a clinic devoted to careful medicine opened at the start of a Sonoran summer, in a city better known for winter visitors. The symbolism cut the right way: this was not a seasonal amenity but a permanent institution, open through the heat like everything else that mattered.
What it became
The branch did not stay a branch. Mayo’s Scottsdale operation grew into a full academic medical center with a hospital campus and thousands of jobs, and it pulled Scottsdale’s name into a global referral network — patients who had never heard of the Greenbelt or the Arabian show now flew in for care. A medical economy took root beside the tourist one and grew until the two rivaled each other, giving the city a second engine that ran in every season and every business cycle.
June 29 was also only the middle act of an astonishing civic year. The same twelve months brought Colorado River water through the new CAP plant and the Phoenix Open to its purpose-built TPC stadium course — the trifecta that defines 1987 and stands as the institutional high-water mark of the Drinkwater decade.