Why he matters
Mort Kimsey was the bridge between the farm town and the charter city. He had been part of Scottsdale’s working machinery for decades before it had a government: his service station sat at Main Street and Scottsdale Road, and the local electric company kept its office there. When the town incorporated in 1951 he was one of the five men on its first council, and seven years later the council made him mayor.
His four years in the chair were the hinge of the boomtown era. The town crossed 10,000 people, argued with Phoenix over every square mile of county land around it, and in October 1961 voted itself a home-rule charter. He left office in 1962 with a city, not a town.
Where to find his era today
The Little Red Schoolhouse. The 1909 schoolhouse served as the town’s government building in these years, and a councilman who served under Kimsey remembered meetings there with the police department in the basement.
Old Town. Main Street and Scottsdale Road, where his service station stood, is still the town’s busiest crossing. On Indian School Road, the development called The Kimsey carries the family name.
A town of 12,000 and four police officers
The best picture of Kimsey’s council comes from one of its members. John Knudsen, a Motorola engineer who joined the council in 1960 at 27, later wrote to the city that “Mort Kimsey was the Mayor and most of the Council Members were fairly young.” The town had about 12,000 people, four officers and two patrol cars, and a running fight with Phoenix, whose mayor told Knudsen Scottsdale should not annex north of Indian Bend Road. Scottsdale ignored that advice for the rest of the decade.
The day to read is October 31, 1961, when voters approved the charter that turned the town into the City of Scottsdale. Three weeks earlier, on October 9, Fashion Square held its first grand opening at Scottsdale and Camelback Roads.
The full story
The Kimsey family came to Scottsdale from Indiana in 1907, when the settlement was still a canal-side farm community. Mort’s father, William Kimsey, planted citrus, and in 1918 he joined Charles Miller and E.O. Brown in starting the Scottsdale Light and Power Company, which bought electricity from the Arizona Falls plant. Mort Kimsey ran the Scottsdale Service Company, one of the first garages in town, at Main Street and Scottsdale Road, and by the mid-1920s the power company’s office was inside it. When the Central Arizona Light and Power Company bought the local utility in 1939, Kimsey became its Scottsdale manager, and he stayed on after the 1952 merger that created Arizona Public Service.
That made him a natural pick for the first town council. When the town incorporated on June 25, 1951, with Malcolm White as mayor, Kimsey was one of the five appointed members, and he won four two-year terms from 1952 on. He also served as president of the Chamber of Commerce in 1954. For years he lobbied his own company to install the gas streetlamps that lined downtown in the mid-1950s, and he was unhappy when they started coming down in 1963, calling it a loss to the town’s western atmosphere.
On June 12, 1958, the council named him mayor. In 1960, when Scottsdale began electing its mayor directly, voters chose him, and the census that year counted 10,026 residents, five times the 1950 figure. The town adopted its first sales and property taxes to pay for the infrastructure the growth demanded, set up a recreation department, and annexed land in every direction to keep it out of Phoenix’s reach. The Boston Red Sox had taken over spring training at Scottsdale Stadium in 1959.
His second term ended with the biggest change since incorporation. Voters approved a home-rule charter on October 31, 1961, and on April 3, 1962, Bill Schrader took office as the first mayor elected under it. Kimsey stayed in civic life and was among the founders of the Scottsdale Historical Society, part of the old-timers’ effort in the late 1960s to keep the boom from erasing the farm town he grew up in. The Scottsdale Area Chamber of Commerce put him in its History Hall of Fame in 1994.
The site’s sources do not give his birth or death years, and this page won’t guess. The 1950s chapter tells the story of the town he helped run.