The Ostrich Festival

In March 1989, the Chandler Rotary Club organized what they called the First Annual Chandler Ostrich Festival. The name was not arbitrary. Chandler, Arizona, owed its early economy in part to the ostrich farming boom of the early 1900s, when the Salt River Valley had become one of the world's major centers for raising the birds. Plume feathers sold for more per ounce than almost any other commodity in the global fashion trade. The connection between the festival and the Goodman family ran through a single, vivid line of descent.

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The Chandler that hosted the festival was built on the same dirt that the Ellsworth ostriches once roamed. When Dr. A.J. Chandler opened his townsite office on May 17, 1912, the settlement consisted of three wooden shacks, a billboard marking the future site of the San Marcos Hotel, and the surrounding ranches that supplied the town's economic engine. Steam-powered crews paved the intersection of Buffalo Street and Arizona Avenue while the San Marcos rose in the background. Within a year, the hotel's grand opening drew the governor and the vice president. The ostriches, the cotton, the hotel: they were all part of the same speculative gamble on the Salt River Valley.

Harry Sisak, a fellow member of Dad's Rotary club, was organizing the event. Dad had mentioned to him, probably in passing, a family fact: his grandfather, Earl Ellsworth, had grown up on A.J. Chandler's ostrich farm in Mesa. "Great-granddad was a business partner of Dr. Chandler," Dad wrote. Earl's father, Louis Ellsworth, had operated one of Arizona's largest ostrich ranches, running more than a thousand birds at the operation's peak.

^{[S2]S2 — Archived WebsiteWikipedia: Falcon Field (Arizona) (Archived)}

Harry had an idea. He wanted Grandpa Earl, now eighty-five years old, to ride in the parade as Grand Marshal.

From horse to horsepower

Dad explained, with characteristic precision, exactly why the feather market collapsed. Earl "was about 12 at the height of the ostrich business," he wrote. "The bottom fell out of it when women started riding in open cars and the feathers were too much bothered by the wind at the high speeds they drove then. Paris fashion quickly responded to this, and the ostrich feather was no longer the 'in' thing."

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

That single sentence compresses a global economic shift into a mechanical observation. The automobile killed the ostrich feather industry the same way it killed the buggy-whip industry: by making a specific physical arrangement obsolete. Feathered hats worked in enclosed carriages, where air moved slowly and a woman's ensemble could be admired at rest. In open cars traveling at thirty or forty miles per hour, the plumes whipped, broke, and tangled. Fashion, which had driven a feather to sell for more than its weight in gold, pivoted overnight. The Arizona ranchers, who had invested in breeding stock, fencing, and feed operations scaled for thousands of birds, were left with large, aggressive animals and no market.

Louis Ellsworth pivoted to cotton and farming. The ostriches became a family legend. The farm became a memory.

The Grand Marshal

On Saturday, March 11, 1989, the parade stepped off in downtown Chandler. The route wound past the same Arizona Avenue storefronts that dated back to Dr. Chandler's original colonnaded town plan, past the park where the Commonwealth Canal once split the plaza in two, past the San Marcos Hotel that had anchored the town's identity since 1913. Dad took the younger children. "The three older ones were all tied up," he noted. Grandpa Earl rode in the parade as Grand Marshal.

"He was very pleased!"

That exclamation mark is rare in Dad's journal. He was a precise writer who deployed punctuation with medical discipline. But the image of his eighty-five-year-old grandfather riding through a festival named after the birds his family once raised appears to have cracked through the clinical detachment. Here was a man who had witnessed the feather bust as a child, who had watched his father's operation dissolve into cotton fields and feed lots, now riding as the honored elder through a civic celebration that had turned the failure into folklore.

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

The second year

A year later, the Second Annual Chandler Ostrich Festival arrived on March 10, 1990. Dina was up at 5:00 AM to go horseback riding with Jerry Tyrell and Vicki Davis. "The kids have a little part in Chandler's Second Annual Ostrich Festival Parade this morning," Dad wrote, "but I will have to miss it, as I have office hours."

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That afternoon was the annual reunion of George Goodman's descendants at Grandma's house (now Sue's) at 528 N. Grand in Mesa. The usual crowd gathered: all of Pete's family, most of Sherry's, Sue and Frankie, "most of our little family and Hazel." Mom actually came on her own and had a good time. None of Hazel's kids or his siblings attended.

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

The two events, the ostrich festival and the family reunion, fell on the same day by coincidence, but they mapped to the same underlying geology. The Ellsworth line and the Goodman line, both rooted in Arizona's pioneer settlements, both shaped by agriculture and civic duty, both producing children who carried the family names into the next generation's institutions. The grandchildren marched in a parade named after the birds Louis Ellsworth once raised. That afternoon, they gathered in their great-grandfather's house in Mesa.