Why he matters
Paul Messinger’s public life ran the whole length of Scottsdale’s growth. He was born on a farm when the town was a crossroads, opened a business on that farmland as the boom began, helped win the city its college, governed it through the early 1970s, represented it in the Legislature and spent his last decades writing down what it had been. He died in April 2025, at 95.
Where to find his work today
Scottsdale Community College. The campus on Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community land exists because his committee lobbied the county board for two years.
Messinger Mortuary, on the family’s old farmland, still carries his name.
The college
The college came out of the city’s citizen-planning program, STEP. By Messinger’s own account, Mayor Bud Tims met business people in the spring of 1966 to test support, and City Manager Bill Donaldson and the council formed a STEP college committee with Messinger as chairman. “I served alongside Billie Gentry and 12 others,” he wrote. The committee went to county junior college board meetings for about two years. In 1968 Chancellor John Prince offered several sites, among them 160 acres leased from the Salt River Indian Community, and the board sent a bond to county voters that included money for a Scottsdale campus. The college held evening classes at Scottsdale High from 1969 and opened on the leased land in 1970.
On the council
The council appointed Messinger on November 1, 1971 to the seat Ken Murray had left, and voters elected him to a full term in 1972. He served until April 6, 1976, through the 1973 charter amendments, the greenbelt bond and the start of the Hillside debate, alongside Billie Gentry and Herb Drinkwater. The city’s 2025 tribute credits his term with helping create the city’s water department.
In the Legislature
After two years on the city’s Airport Advisory Commission, Messinger ran for the Arizona House when District 28’s Rep. David Kret died in May 1979. He won a special election on September 11, 1979, and was re-elected in 1980 and 1982, serving until January 1985, by the state’s legislator records and the city’s tribute.
The storyteller
In later life Messinger wrote a “Scottsdale Memories” column for the Arizona Republic, published two books of local history, and helped found the Scottsdale History Hall of Fame in 1994. His reminiscences are among the sources on early Scottsdale that this site and the city’s own histories use, and they are one man’s memory: valuable for what he saw, and to be checked for dates.
He died on April 22, 2025, at 95, and was buried on April 30. His family is not named here.
What the record doesn’t show
- The committee’s minutes and the other members of the STEP college committee.
- His votes and positions on the council’s big questions of 1971 to 1976.
- His legislative record in the Arizona House.