Earlene Ellsworth Goodman

Arizona Pioneer Roots

Earlene Ellsworth (1922–1994) was the eldest of seven children born to Earl Ellsworth and Leona Dana. Earl and Leona married on July 14, 1922, in Mesa. Their children were: Earlene, Adeline Josephine, Virginia, Paula Dean, Dana Earle, Vicki, and Linda.

She grew up in the East Valley during the Great Depression, surrounded by the vast ostrich and cotton farms that her family had helped establish. Her grandfather, Louis Ellsworth, was one of Arizona's largest ostrich farmers, maintaining over a thousand birds and exhibiting them at the Chicago World's Fair. But by the time Earlene was born, the ostrich feather market had already collapsed, victim of the automobile (women couldn't wear elaborate plumed hats in open-top cars) and the austerity of the First World War. The Ellsworths had pivoted to cotton, which itself buckled during the Depression. Growing up in the 1930s East Valley meant knowing families who lost their land to foreclosure, watching irrigation canals run low during drought years, and understanding that agriculture was as much a gamble as a livelihood.

Wartime Marriage

In 1940, she married Dr. Clifford James Goodman Sr. in Florence, Arizona, uniting two pioneer families: the agricultural Ellsworths who helped build Queen Creek, and the civic-minded Goodmans who helped build Mesa.

The timing was significant. In 1940, America was watching the war in Europe with growing unease. Roosevelt had just signed the Selective Training and Service Act, the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. Young couples across the country married quickly, uncertain of what the next year would bring. The Goodmans' marriage was part of this national wave, a generation pairing off before the world changed.

Washington, D.C.

The young couple moved to Washington, D.C. while Clifford completed his medical training at George Washington University School of Medicine. Their first child, Clifford "Cliff" Goodman Jr., was born in the capital in April 1943, the same month the Jefferson Memorial was dedicated and the same year the Pentagon completed construction across the river. Wartime Washington was a city bursting with temporary workers, military personnel, and the anxious energy of a nation at total war.

After his medical education, the Goodmans returned to Arizona and set up his practice in Chandler in 1951. Together they had eight children and established themselves as pillars of the community, with Clifford eventually founding Chandler Community Hospital and becoming its first Chief of Staff.

The Widow's Watch (1962–1994)

Their lives were unalterably changed on March 28, 1962. When Clifford Sr. died unexpectedly at age forty, Earlene was left to raise eight children alone. No life insurance policy could replace a father or a husband. In 1962, a widowed mother of eight in a small Arizona town had limited options: there was no established social safety net for families of deceased physicians, no bereavement leave, no counseling infrastructure. The family's income, which had depended entirely on a single medical practice, stopped.

Their eldest son, Cliff Jr., was just eighteen and stepped into the role of family patriarch alongside his mother, sacrificing an academic scholarship to the University of Chicago to attend state schools closer to home. He chose his father's alma mater, George Washington University, for medical school, and eventually returned to Chandler to practice at the very hospital his father had founded.

Earlene Ellsworth, later known affectionately in family circles as "Grandma Queen Bee," survived her husband by three decades. The nickname was earned: she presided over family gatherings with the quiet authority of a woman who had already faced the worst and rebuilt. She kept the Chandler house running, watched her children graduate, marry, and start families of their own, and maintained the Ellsworth tradition of resilience that her father Earl had exemplified.

Legacy

She lived long enough to see her son become Chief of Staff at the very hospital her husband had founded, a symmetry so precise it feels scripted. She passed away on September 22, 1994, in Phoenix, at the age of seventy-two. She was buried at the City of Mesa Cemetery alongside Clifford Sr.

The eight children she raised alone became the next generation of the Goodman dynasty: physicians, business leaders, and the parents of eighteen grandchildren. Every one of them traces their foundation to a woman who, at age thirty-nine, chose to hold the family together rather than let it scatter.