Medicine & Service

The medical thread in this family runs through four generations and more than a century of practice: from a frontier doctor's butcher-knife appendectomy in the 1890s to a modern OB/GYN group delivering seventy babies a month.

The origin: a country doctor in the Gila Valley

T

he Goodman medical tradition does not begin with the Goodmans. It begins with Dr. William Erastus Platt, a frontier physician who practiced in Safford, Arizona, for over forty years. Platt earned his medical degree from the University of Louisville in 1893, learned five Indian tribal languages, and operated on patients using a dining room table and kitchen implements when proper surgical tools were unavailable. His patients hung white tea towels on their gates when they needed him, and he spotted the signals from his horse and buggy as he made rounds through the valley.

^{[S40]S40 — Journal ArticleAudrey D. Stevens, 'Dr. William Erastus Platt: Healer of the West,' Arizona Medicine, January 1969}

Platt's daughter Clara married George Nicholas Goodman, the five-term Mesa mayor and pharmacist. Clara grew up watching her father compound medicines from raw ingredients. She earned her own pharmacy degree in Los Angeles and co-founded Apache Drug with her husband on Mesa's Main Street in 1924. Two of Platt's other daughters also became registered pharmacists. Three of his grandsons became physicians.

^{[S40]S40 — Journal ArticleAudrey D. Stevens, 'Dr. William Erastus Platt: Healer of the West,' Arizona Medicine, January 1969}

The through-line from Platt's butcher-knife appendectomy to Clifford Goodman Sr.'s founding of Chandler Community Hospital runs straight through Clara's childhood apprenticeship in those back rooms. Read the full story: The Country Doctor.

Planting the flag in Chandler

In the early 1940s, Clifford J. Goodman Sr. and his wife Earlene Ellsworth moved to Washington, D.C., where Clifford completed his medical training at George Washington University. Their first child, Clifford "Cliff" Goodman Jr., was born there in 1943.

^{[S35]S35 — Family NarrativeFamily narrative draft: Dr. Clifford J. Goodman Jr. (2026-01-18)}

The doctor comes home

Dr. Goodman Sr. could have returned to Mesa, to his father's pharmacy, to established networks. Instead, he chose Chandler. In 1951, the town barely cleared 3,800 people. It was still essentially Dr. A.J. Chandler's ranch town: cotton was king, the annual parade ran down Arizona Avenue, and air conditioning was just beginning to make the Sonoran Desert habitable for newcomers. The population boom that would pull hundreds of thousands into the East Valley was still decades away. If you broke a leg in Chandler, you drove to Mesa. If your baby was coming, you drove to Mesa. The gap was obvious to every resident.

^{[S35]S35 — Family NarrativeFamily narrative draft: Dr. Clifford J. Goodman Jr. (2026-01-18)}

Clifford opened a family practice and immediately became one of the community's most trusted physicians. A "family practice" in 1951 meant everything: pediatric vaccinations, heart conditions, broken bones, delivering babies, treating heatstroke, setting fractures from farm accidents. He worked the civic channels, rallied support from the medical community, and pushed to close Chandler's most glaring infrastructure gap: the lack of a hospital.

^{[S35]S35 — Family NarrativeFamily narrative draft: Dr. Clifford J. Goodman Jr. (2026-01-18) [S29]S29 — UnknownSource: S29}

A hospital for Chandler

In 1956, members of the Chandler Lions Club determined that a town growing as fast as Chandler could no longer rely on hospitals in Mesa and Phoenix. A committee formed, fundraising began, and citizens rallied to meet a requirement of Arizona state law: any new hospital had to demonstrate two full years of operating funds before the state would approve construction.

Construction began in early 1960 on a site south of Williams Field Road on McQueen Road. On July 17, 1961, the hospital admitted its first patient. In those early years, the emergency room was not staffed around the clock; after-hours patients rang a buzzer for a doctor. Clifford J. Goodman Sr. was named first Chief of Staff, having been one of the driving forces behind the project. Beyond medicine, he sat on the Chandler School Board and eventually became its president, carrying the same civic instinct that had driven the hospital into the public education system.

^{[S35]S35 — Family NarrativeFamily narrative draft: Dr. Clifford J. Goodman Jr. (2026-01-18) [S29]S29 — UnknownSource: S29}

Life begins at forty

Weeks before the hospital opened, the family threw a celebration for Clifford's fortieth birthday: "Life Begins at Forty." Friends painted a custom banner. Tables of food spread across the backyard. Colleagues toasted a man whose best decades, everyone believed, lay just ahead. The hospital was open. The practice was thriving. Eight children filled the house.

On March 28, 1962, Clifford Sr. died at age forty. He had practiced medicine in Chandler for just eleven years. Eight children and a widow survived him. His eldest son, Cliff Jr., was eighteen, old enough to feel the weight of it, young enough that the path forward was uncertain.

^{[S35]S35 — Family NarrativeFamily narrative draft: Dr. Clifford J. Goodman Jr. (2026-01-18)}

Decades later, Clara Platt Goodman, moving into a nursing home at age eighty-five, was still asking: "Why were Earlene and the eight kids left alone?"

At the VIP reception for the new Chandler Community Hospital, Mom saw a plaque on the medical library door: "In Memory of Clifford J. Goodman, M.D., first Chief of Staff, 1921–1962, by the Family."

A school named Goodman

Twenty-six years after Clifford Sr.'s death, the Chandler Unified School District named Goodman Elementary School in his honor. The dedication ceremony took place on February 2, 1989. Dad's sister Stephanie gave the main speech, a history of their father that Dad had written. His sister Pam gave a tribute. Dad wrote that he "learned, or was reminded of, many things about Dad" while preparing the text. "It is a beautiful school," he noted, "one of the most modern and well laid out I have ever seen."

^{[J25]J25 — DocumentJOUR025 (Clifford J. Goodman Jr., January–July 1989)}

Dedication of Goodman Elementary School in Chandler, named after Dad. Family members gave speeches and tributes.

Profile: The Goodman Medical Dynasty

The son's return

Clifford Sr. died young. His son surrendered a scholarship to the University of Chicago and transferred to Arizona schools to stay close enough to help his mother raise seven younger siblings. After college, a mission in Germany (where he met Nadina Hofstätter), and medical school at George Washington University, where he earned the Kane-King Award as the outstanding senior in OB/GYN, Cliff Jr. completed a residency at GWU Hospital.

^{[S35]S35 — Family NarrativeFamily narrative draft: Dr. Clifford J. Goodman Jr. (2026-01-18)}

Before coming home, he fulfilled a two-year tour with the United States Navy Medical Corps, stationed with the Marines in California. Military medicine teaches efficiency with thin resources and early leadership responsibility. Every break, he rushed home to Arizona to moonlight at a Mesa practice and pay the bills for a growing family.

^{[S35]S35 — Family NarrativeFamily narrative draft: Dr. Clifford J. Goodman Jr. (2026-01-18)}

On June 23, 1976, Cliff Jr. returned to Chandler to open an OB/GYN practice.

^{[S35]S35 — Family NarrativeFamily narrative draft: Dr. Clifford J. Goodman Jr. (2026-01-18) [S10]S10 — News ArticleChamber Business News: MomDoc (Archived)}

Building MomDoc

He was recruited by Eddie Basha, the grocery magnate and Chandler civic leader, to modernize labor and delivery at Chandler Regional Medical Center. Basha was more than a businessman. He was a Chandler institution, a man whose family had been in Arizona since territorial days and whose civic commitments ran from education to healthcare. When Basha identified a gap in the hospital's maternity services and sought a physician to fill it, his choice of Cliff Jr. carried a specific kind of civic trust: one founding family endorsing the competence of another.

^{[S10]S10 — News ArticleChamber Business News: MomDoc (Archived)}

That small clinic grew. In the early 1980s, the practice moved to the Chandler Medical Building on Dobson Road, adjacent to the hospital. The waiting room had a front desk like any other, but it also featured a working stone mantel hearth and wood-burning fireplace: a striking departure from the sterile 1980s norm of stiff vinyl chairs and sliding glass reception windows. Whenever a sudden summer monsoon rolled across the desert, dropping the temperature and flooding the streets, the staff lit a fire. Expectant mothers checking in for prenatal appointments sat beside crackling flames while rain streaked the large windows. That fireplace was the seed of something larger.

^{[S4]S4 — UnknownSource: S4}

As the practice grew into the MomDoc group, Cliff Jr. formalized the patient-centered philosophy: aggressively hiring female providers, integrating certified nurse midwives alongside MDs and DOs in a collaborative "Women for Women" model, and designing waiting areas to feel like living rooms rather than clinics. MomDoc became the first OB/GYN in Arizona to offer 3D and 4D Live Motion Ultrasound.

^{[S10]S10 — News ArticleChamber Business News: MomDoc (Archived)}

By March 1990, MomDoc was hitting seventy deliveries per month and heading toward a hundred. "Things really are picking up in our practice," Dad wrote. "This is a result of a conscious choice, although rising overhead, especially liability insurance premiums, leaves us few alternatives." A typical on-call weekend meant ten deliveries, six surgeries, five ER calls, and at least forty after-hours telephone calls.

^{[J28]J28 — DocumentJOUR028 (Clifford J. Goodman Jr., March 1990) [Private due to Patient Privacy]}

Cliff Jr. became one of only two OB/GYNs in the hospital's history to serve as Chief of Staff, and the only Chief of Staff to serve two terms. During one of those terms, the hospital relocated from its original 1961 site at McQueen and Chandler Boulevard to its current campus on Dobson and Frye. The move required coordinating every department, every piece of equipment, every patient record, and every staff member's schedule. It was the kind of operational challenge that a freighter's grandson, raised on logistics and persistence, was built for.

It was the same town, the same family mandate. The thread ran straight from Dr. Platt's tea towels to Clara's pharmacy degree to Clifford Sr.'s hospital to Cliff Jr.'s delivery room. By the time of his death in 2022, MomDoc had grown to 21 offices across the Valley. His son Nick Goodman serves as current CEO, extending the dynasty into a fifth generation.

^{[S35]S35 — Family NarrativeFamily narrative draft: Dr. Clifford J. Goodman Jr. (2026-01-18) [S10]S10 — News ArticleChamber Business News: MomDoc (Archived)}

Profiles: Dr. Clifford Goodman Jr. | Dr. Clifford Goodman Sr.