Clara Platt Goodman

The other pharmacist

The Goodman pharmacy is remembered locally as George's domain, the mayor's drugstore, the de facto city hall where ranchers and councilmen debated policy over morning coffee. But Clara stood behind the exact same counter, holding the exact same license. Before Los Angeles, she had attended Tempe Normal School (now Arizona State University). She then completed the grueling two-year pharmacy program in Los Angeles in 1918, in an era when most American women could not yet legally vote, let alone compound highly regulated tinctures and powders. When Mesa residents called Goodman's Pharmacy a "family business," the emphasis belonged firmly on family. Her obituary listed her as a "retired pharmacist" and noted she had been one of the first presidents of the Arizona Pharmaceutical Association auxiliary.

A Romney granddaughter

Clara was born on March 4, 1898, in St. Johns, Apache County, Arizona, the daughter of Dr. William Erastus Platt and Isabell Hill Romney. Her father earned his medical degree from the University of Louisville in 1893, practiced in St. Johns until 1900, then moved to Safford in the Gila Valley, where he received Arizona medical license #41. He held a financial interest in the Apache Drug Company, the same pharmacy his future son-in-law George Nicholas Goodman would make famous in Mesa. Through her mother, Clara was the granddaughter of Miles Park Romney (1843-1904), one of the most prominent LDS colonizers of the Southwest, a man who settled St. George, St. Johns, and eventually fled to Mexico under anti-polygamy prosecution.

Her first cousin was George W. Romney, the Governor of Michigan and 1968 presidential candidate. George W. was born in Colonia Dublan, Chihuahua, Mexico, where Miles Park had fled under the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act. Senator Mitt Romney is Clara's first cousin twice removed. The connection links Clara's branch of the family to one of the most recognizable political dynasties in American public life.

The healer's daughter

Clara's father was known locally as the "Healer of the West." In an era before household telephones, when a doctor's circuit covered vast stretches of punishing desert, his patients developed a visual telegraph system: they would hang white tea towels on their wooden gates when someone was sick. Dr. Platt would spot these flags from his horse and buggy, pulling up to isolated ranches to treat everything from catastrophic farm machinery accidents to sweeping infectious diseases.

He owned pharmacies in Pima, Thatcher, and Safford. Clara grew up in the back rooms of these shops, watching her father meticulously measure and compound raw ingredients into medicines using brass scales and glass mortars. The future Goodman medical dynasty would not have existed without this childhood apprenticeship.

Professional partnership

She married George Nicholas Goodman on June 30, 1916, when she was eighteen. George had worked as a teenage apprentice in her father's Gila Valley pharmacies. In a remarkable and progressive decision for the era, the young newlyweds moved to Los Angeles together to attend pharmacy school. Both completed the identical two-year curriculum. Both returned to the Arizona desert as fully licensed pharmacists.

Apache Drug

In 1924, the couple opened Apache Drug on Main Street in downtown Mesa. The soda fountain became a community gathering place. Their children worked as "soda jerks," and customers ordered signature drinks like "Cokes with cream."

First Lady of Mesa

George served as Mayor for five terms across three decades. During the Depression, wartime rationing, and the postwar boom, Clara was the steady presence behind the public figure.

She was also, in a very practical sense, the reason George could serve at all. As a trained pharmacist, Clara was uniquely qualified to manage his insulin-dependent diabetes, a complex, life-threatening condition in the 1930s and 40s that required careful dosing and constant monitoring.