Great-Grandpa Goodman

The pharmacy counter

To understand how George Nicholas Goodman became the most durable politician in Mesa's history, start at the drugstore counter. In 1924, he and Clara opened a pharmacy on Main Street—later known as Apache Drug—and for the next thirty-five years, that counter was where Mesa happened. To grasp its function, strip away the modern concept of a sterile, fluorescent-lit chain pharmacy. Apache Drug was the civic nerve center of an agricultural town. The cotton growers came in from the blistering fields to complain about Salt River Project water rights. The schoolteachers came in for aspirin and gossip. The city council members gathered around the soda fountain at 5:00 AM to debate unpaved roads over bitter coffee. George heard it all, and he remembered it all.

He was not a dramatic man. Contemporaries described him as having "great humility with a Will Rogers type philosophy"—the kind of leader who diffused tension with a dry joke and framed complex municipal policy in the plain language of the ranchers he served. He managed insulin-dependent diabetes at a time when the condition required constant vigilance, boiling glass syringes, and primitive, painful injections. He once missed a council meeting because of an insulin reaction, a stark reminder of his physical vulnerability. Yet he played softball while serving as mayor, and he kept a palomino horse in a corral behind his house on North Grand, just north of University Drive, riding it through the increasingly paved streets of Mesa whenever time allowed.

From St. David to a Mesa drugstore

He was born in 1895 in St. David, Arizona Territory — the same Mormon settlement his grandfather William Nicholas Goodman had helped build. George was the eldest of eight children. The family moved to Safford in 1904, where he came of age in the Gila Valley's tight-knit farming communities.

He married Clara Platt on June 30, 1916. Clara was a druggist's daughter, and George worked in her father's pharmacies in Pima, Thatcher, and Safford — but neither of them was content with just apprenticeship. They moved to Los Angeles for pharmacy school. Both completed the two-year program. Both returned to Arizona as licensed pharmacists. In 1924, they staked their claim in the Salt River Valley and opened the drugstore in downtown Mesa.

The five-term mayor

During George's era, Mesa citizens elected the city council, and the council chose the mayor from its own ranks. That meant his five terms — across three separate decades — required the sustained confidence of his peers, not just a one-time campaign win.

The war years and Falcon Field

In July 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor, Mayor Goodman stood alongside Governor Sidney P. Osborn at 10:30 a.m. and dug the first shovels of dirt for both Falcon Field and Williams Field—on the very same day. This was not a mere photo opportunity; it was a total transformation of the local economy. As America mobilized for a global war, those bases brought thousands of Royal Air Force cadets and U.S. Army Air Forces personnel to Mesa. They injected massive federal payrolls into the local economy and planted the seeds for the aerospace industry that still anchors the city's identity today.

That January, he had joined the federal wartime rationing board for Maricopa County, making hard decisions about which neighbors received tires and sugar. By April 1942, he was in Washington, D.C., walking the halls of Congress to lobby for construction materials—securing federal concrete and steel for a desert town that was still, in many ways, an unpaved farming village bursting at the seams from the wartime influx.

The Cubs, the streetlights, and the one-vote loss

George was a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan. In 1952, under his mayoralty, the Cubs began holding spring training in Mesa. It was more than a sports story — it was a tourism coup that linked the name "Mesa" to a national franchise and brought Midwestern visitors every March. The partnership endures over seventy years later.

In 1953, he flipped the switch on a new downtown streetlight system that replaced the original 1922 installation. The new lights delivered twice the illumination at half the energy cost, with a 6,000-hour guarantee. It was the kind of unglamorous civic work that defined his tenure — practical, measurable, permanent.

His political career ended in 1956 with a recount loss by exactly one vote. The council presented him with a gold wristwatch — a token of "admiration and respect" from the peers who had chosen him five times.

Statewide reach

George led the Arizona Pharmaceutical Association in 1947–1948, pushed for a five-year pharmacy program at the University of Arizona, served as president of the Arizona Municipal League in 1954, and chaired the local Red Cross chapter. In 1958 the League named him a Life Member — its highest honor.

Death and the bomber flyover

In 1956, he was appointed executive secretary of the Arizona State Fair Commission — the organization's top administrative role. The two previous holders had resigned in quick succession and had been paid $1,800 more annually; George accepted the job at $8,400 a year.

He died unexpectedly on November 3, 1959, at his home in Mesa, still serving in that post. He was sixty-four. At his funeral two days later, a squadron of bombers flew over the fairgrounds in Phoenix while a Marine color guard paid respects at the services in Mesa — a last salute from the pilots whose bases he had helped bring to the Valley.

He is buried in the City of Mesa Cemetery. Clara joined him there in 1984.

Recognition

• 1955: Named Mesa's Most Valuable Citizen of the Year
• 1955: Rotarian Citizenship Award
• 1958: Life Member, League of Arizona Cities and Towns
• 1988: Chandler Unified School District names Clifford J. Goodman Elementary in honor of his son
• 2019: Arizona Pharmacy Association Hall of Fame (posthumous)