Scottsdale ended 1997 in mourning. Herb Drinkwater died on December 28, at 61 — cancer, less than two years after leaving office. Flags dropped, thousands paid their respects, and the shorthand the town had used for years — “Mr. Scottsdale” — hardened into an epitaph. No local politician before or since has matched the personal bond he built with the city, one handshake and one remembered name at a time, dog usually at heel.
The ledger of his sixteen years (1980–96) reads like the modern city’s origin story: the Scottsdale Princess and Hyatt Gainey resorts, the Mayo Clinic’s first-ever branch, WestWorld, Colorado River water, the TPC and its Open, and the annexations that carried the city to 185 square miles. His final terms also incubated the preserve movement — the Land Trust, the 1994 resolution, the 1995 tax vote all came on his watch — which his successors carried to its more-than-30,000-acre conclusion. He ran a boomtown like a small town, and enough people believed it that the small town stayed real.
The memorials arrived in the city’s own idiom: Drinkwater Boulevard, and at the Civic Center a statue with the dog at heel, naturally. Around the grief, the city he built kept moving — the Preserve closings continued, the north kept filling in, and the decade rolled toward Loop 101 and the century’s end. His build-out years have their own chapter: the 1980s.