Dr. Clifford James Goodman Sr.

A Wartime Education

Born on August 6, 1921, in Mesa, Clifford Sr. was the son of George Nicholas Goodman and Clara Platt Goodman, and the grandson of George Edward Goodman. He grew up in the family pharmacy in Mesa, watching his father compound medicines behind the counter of Goodman's Pharmacy on Main Street. Arizona had no medical school in the 1940s. For a young man from Mesa with ambitions beyond the pharmacy counter, that meant traveling east.

Like his mother Clara, who had earned a pharmacy degree in Los Angeles before returning to Arizona, Clifford chose to leave the state for his professional training. He enrolled at George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. Medical education during the early 1940s was compressed and intensified by wartime urgency, with students expected to serve in military or civilian medical capacities shortly after graduation.

Clifford Sr. married Earlene Ellsworth on January 10, 1940, in Florence, Arizona, before heading east for medical school. Their first son, also named Clifford James Goodman, was born on April 11, 1943, in Washington, D.C. ^{[S35]S35 — Family NarrativeFamily narrative draft: Dr. Clifford J. Goodman Jr. (2026-01-18) [S39]S39 — UnknownSource: S39}

Planting the Flag in Chandler (1951)

Dr. Goodman Sr. could have returned to Mesa, to his father's pharmacy, to established networks. Instead, he chose Chandler, a small agricultural community separated from Phoenix by miles of cotton fields and separated from Mesa by a stretch of two-lane road flanked by citrus groves. In 1951 Chandler's population barely cleared 3,800. ^{[S35]S35 — Family NarrativeFamily narrative draft: Dr. Clifford J. Goodman Jr. (2026-01-18)}

A "family practice" in 1951 meant everything. Pediatric vaccinations. Heart conditions. Broken bones. Delivering babies. Setting fractures from farm accidents. Treating heatstroke. Without the dense network of specialists available today, a general practitioner bore responsibility for the entire lifecycle of a patient, from delivery to autopsy. ^{[S35]S35 — Family NarrativeFamily narrative draft: Dr. Clifford J. Goodman Jr. (2026-01-18)}

Chandler at mid-century was still essentially Dr. A.J. Chandler's ranch town, a place where cotton was king and where the annual parade ran right down Arizona Avenue. Air conditioning was just beginning to make the Sonoran Desert habitable for people not accustomed to 115-degree summers, and the population boom that would pull hundreds of thousands into the East Valley had not yet started.

The Hospital He Built

In 1956, members of the Chandler Lions Club determined that their growing town needed its own hospital. The nearest options, in Mesa and Phoenix, were a long ambulance ride away for a population swelling with post-war families. A committee formed, fundraising began, and citizens rallied to meet a requirement of Arizona state law: any new hospital had to demonstrate sufficient operating funds for two full years 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. Dr. Clifford James Goodman Sr. was named first Chief of Staff, having been one of the driving forces behind the project. ^{[S35]S35 — Family NarrativeFamily narrative draft: Dr. Clifford J. Goodman Jr. (2026-01-18)}

The hospital would later be renamed Chandler Regional Hospital (1987) and eventually Chandler Regional Medical Center when it joined Dignity Health in 1999. His son, Dr. Clifford James Goodman Jr., would hold the same Chief of Staff position decades later, making the Goodmans the only family to provide two generations of Chiefs of Staff at the institution.

Life Begins at Forty

Weeks before the hospital opened, the family threw a celebration: "Life Begins at Forty." The party featured a custom banner painted by friends, tables of food spread across the backyard, and the toasts of colleagues who believed Clifford's best decades lay ahead. The hospital was open. The practice was thriving. Eight children filled the house.

Clifford Sr. died unexpectedly on March 28, 1962, at the age of forty. He was buried at the Mesa City Cemetery. He left behind his wife Earlene and eight children. His eldest son, Clifford Jr., was eighteen years old and had just earned a scholarship to the University of Chicago. ^{[S35]S35 — Family NarrativeFamily narrative draft: Dr. Clifford J. Goodman Jr. (2026-01-18)}

The Weight of His Absence

The reverberations of that loss shaped every generation that followed. Eighteen-year-old Clifford Jr. surrendered his scholarship to move back to Arizona, attending state schools to stay close enough to help his mother raise seven younger siblings. He chose his father's medical school, George Washington University, for his M.D., graduated with the Kane-King Award in OB/GYN, and returned to Chandler to practice at the very hospital his father had founded.

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?"

The question had no medical answer. But the family's response, across four generations, was to keep building what Clifford Sr. had started.