River & Desert

An orphan’s Atlantic crossing, a wagon trail into the desert, and the water that made towns possible.

In the fall of 1882, a man with failing lungs loaded his wife and children into a wagon and pointed south toward Arizona. William Nicholas Goodman was forty years old, an English carpenter who had crossed the Atlantic two decades earlier with nothing but his younger brother and a convert’s faith. He had built homes in Utah. Now Utah’s cold was killing him. ^[S7]

They stopped first in Mesa, then pressed on to St. David — a tight-knit farming settlement in the San Pedro River Valley, named for the Mormon leader David P. Kimball. Margarett’s sister Maria had already settled there with her husband Joseph McRae. Near the cemetery, William and his sons molded adobe bricks by hand, cut mesquite, and dug irrigation ditches. They planted wheat and barley in desert soil. ^[S27]

Profile: William Nicholas Goodman↗

William died on March 8, 1885 — three years after arriving, at age forty-three. His death could have ended the Goodman story in Arizona. Instead, his widow Margarett stayed. Their children married into local families, established their own farms. William’s grandson George Edward Goodman would father the future five-term mayor of Mesa. ^[S7]

The desert transformed

The land around Mesa and Chandler was naturally hostile to farming. What made it possible was water — specifically, the Salt River and the network of irrigation canals that turned desert hardpan into agricultural gold. The Tempe Canal was one documented piece of that network, a vital artery in the system that let families like the Goodmans and Ellsworths put down roots. ^[S15]

Chandler’s gamble

In 1891, a veterinarian named Dr. A.J. Chandler bought eighty acres south of Mesa and taught himself irrigation engineering. By 1900, he had assembled an 18,000-acre ranch — though not without controversy. Chandler exploited the Desert Land Act of 1877, recruiting employees and associates to file land claims in their own names through an “Improvement Company.” Each participant received forty acres free; in exchange, Chandler’s company took mortgages on the remaining six hundred — mortgages designed to default. Historians have called this “land fraud,” noting that claimants perjured themselves by denying any outside financial interest. ^{[S13] [S26]}

When the Salt River Project charter capped each landowner at 160 irrigated acres, Chandler pivoted. He brought planners and architects to lay out a townsite and market farm lots to the public. ^[S13]

By mid-May 1912, excursion trains brought hundreds of buyers to Chandler’s townsite office. The day’s sales topped $50,000. The “town” consisted of a few wooden shacks, a dining hall, and a small grocery — just enough to mark a beginning. ^[S13]

Chandler’s plan centered on a landscaped park bisected by a canal, with a promised Hotel San Marcos and deed restrictions requiring landowners to build within a year. It was an orderly, ambitious blueprint for a desert town that bet everything on growth. ^[S13]

Townsite & Enterprise

A pharmacist couple, a five-term mayor, and the ostrich feathers that went to the Chicago World’s Fair.

George Nicholas Goodman was not the first of his family in Arizona — his grandfather William had died of tuberculosis near St. David in 1885 — but he was the one who turned frontier survival into civic architecture. Born in St. David in 1895, George grew up in the Gila Valley before marrying Clara Platt in 1916 and leaving for Los Angeles, where both earned pharmacy degrees. ^[S12]

They returned to Arizona and opened Goodman’s Pharmacy on Mesa’s Main Street in 1924. The store sold prescriptions, but it also served as a neighborhood clearinghouse — the kind of place where you learned who was sick, who was building, who had just arrived. ^[S12]

Profiles: Great-Grandpa Goodman↗ | Clara Platt Goodman↗

Clara Platt: the woman who kept the engine running

Clara’s story is as foundational as her husband’s. She grew up in her father’s drugstores in Pima, Thatcher, and Safford — Dr. William Erastus Platt was a physician known as the “Healer of the West.” In an era when women rarely pursued scientific professions, Clara earned a full pharmacy degree alongside George in Los Angeles. ^{[S12] [S30]}

What made Clara essential went beyond the counter. George was insulin-dependent diabetic — a complex, precarious condition before modern monitoring. Clara, a trained pharmacist, understood the pharmacology, the dosing, the dietary balancing acts. In a very real sense, George’s sixteen years of public service were made possible by his wife’s medical stewardship. ^[S12]

Through the Platt side, Clara also connected the family to national political history: her mother, Isabell Hill Romney, was the full sister of Gaskell Romney, making Clara a first cousin to Governor George W. Romney and a first cousin once removed to Senator Mitt Romney. ^{[S33] [S37]}

The mayor behind the counter

Goodman spent sixteen years on the Mesa City Council — ten of them as five-term mayor. Across the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, he guided Mesa through utility upgrades and civic modernization. He later served as president of the Arizona Pharmacy Association and the Arizona Municipal League. At his death in 1959, he held the title of Executive Secretary of the Arizona State Fair Commission. ^[S12]

A town takes shape

Agriculture powered the East Valley economy in those years. Chandler raised cotton, grains, alfalfa, and even ostriches — whose feathers were prized for fashionable hats in New York and Europe. ^[S13]

The Ellsworth enterprise

While the Goodmans built pharmacies, another family was building something stranger: an ostrich empire. The Ellsworth family ran one of the East Valley’s early ostrich operations — a large ranch with hundreds of birds, their plumes destined for the millinery trade. Louis Ellsworth was among Arizona’s first cotton producers, but it was his ostriches that reached the widest audience, exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair as proof of what the desert could produce. ^[S2]

Profile: The Ellsworth Family↗

Earl Ellsworth, born in Mesa in 1903, married Leona Dana in 1922. Their daughter, Leoma Earlene Ellsworth, grew up in this world of farms and civic pride. In 1940, Leoma married Clifford J. Goodman Sr. — the son of George and Clara — blending the Goodman and Ellsworth lines into one family and setting the stage for the next chapter’s medical legacy. ^{[S2] [S12]}

Medicine & Service

A country doctor builds a town’s first hospital, then dies before his son can follow him into the exam room.

In the early 1940s, Clifford J. Goodman Sr. and his wife Earlene — née Leoma Earlene Ellsworth — moved to Washington, D.C., where Clifford completed his medical training. Their first child, Clifford “Cliff” Goodman Jr., was born there in 1943. ^[S35]

The doctor comes home

They returned to Arizona and Clifford opened a family practice in Chandler in 1951. The town had no hospital. If you broke a leg in Chandler, you drove to Mesa. If your baby was coming, you drove to Mesa. The gap was obvious to every resident — and it was Clifford Sr. who organized the effort to close it. ^{[S35] [S29]}

In July 1961, Chandler Community Hospital opened its doors. Clifford served as its first Chief of Staff. Beyond medicine, he sat on the Chandler School Board and eventually became its president. ^{[S35] [S29]}

On March 28, 1962, Clifford Sr. died at age forty. He had practiced medicine in Chandler for just eleven years. ^[S35]

At the VIP reception for the new Chandler Community Hospital, Mom saw a plaque on the medical library door: "In Memory of Clifford J. Goodman, M.D., first Chief of Staff, 1921–1962, by the Family."

Journal entry, 1984-02-24 [S4]

Dedication of Goodman Elementary School in Chandler, named after Dad. Family members gave speeches and tributes.

Journal entry, 1989-02-03 [S4]

The Chandler Unified School District named Clifford J. Goodman Elementary in his honor in 1988. ^[S35]

Profile: The Goodman Medical Dynasty↗

The son’s return

Clifford Sr. died young. His son, Cliff Jr., was eighteen — old enough to feel the weight of it, young enough that the path forward was uncertain. But the pull of medicine held. After college, a mission in Germany (where he met Nadina Hofstätter), and medical school, Cliff Jr. returned to Chandler on June 23, 1976 to open an OB/GYN practice. ^{[S35] [S10]}

He was recruited by Eddie Basha — the grocery magnate and Chandler civic leader — to modernize labor and delivery at Chandler Regional Medical Center. That small clinic grew into the MomDoc group, serving thousands of families across the valley. ^[S10]

Cliff Jr. became one of only two OB/GYNs in the hospital’s history to serve as Chief of Staff — and the only Chief of Staff to serve two terms. During one of those terms, the hospital relocated from its original site at McQueen and Chandler Boulevard to its current campus. It was the same town, the same family mandate. The thread ran straight. ^[S35]

Global Paths & Homecoming

A missionary from Arizona knocks on a door in Hamburg. Behind it: three generations of Viennese scholarship, a father who served in the Wehrmacht, and the woman he will marry.

In the early 1960s, Clifford Goodman Jr. arrived in Hamburg as a young LDS missionary. He was the grandson of a five-term Arizona mayor, the son of a country doctor who had built Chandler’s first hospital. He came from a family whose idea of medicine was a drugstore counter and a stethoscope. ^[S35]

The Hofstätter household

The household he entered in Hamburg was something else entirely. Nadina’s father, Dr. Peter R. Hofstätter (1913–1994), held the Chair of Psychology at the University of Hamburg. Peter had studied in Vienna under Karl Bühler’s circle before the Anschluss scattered his teachers across the globe. He served as a Wehrmacht psychologist during the war, then reinvented himself as an American-trained empiricist at MIT and Catholic University of America before returning to Germany in 1956 to modernize the entire discipline of social psychology in the Federal Republic. ^[S36]

Behind Peter stood his own father: Dr. Robert Matthias Hofstätter (1883–1970), a University of Vienna gynecologist who had pioneered pineal gland research under Otto Marburg, survived the Anschluss by staying and ascending, and spent fifty years treating patients with bovine pineal extract under five successive political regimes. ^[S22]

Two worlds meet

Clifford and Nadina married in Arizona in 1966. It was a union that braided Arizona’s pioneer medical tradition — William’s adobe homestead, George’s pharmacy counter, Clifford Sr.’s hospital campaign — with Vienna’s intellectual legacy: Robert Matthias’s endocrine research, Peter’s transatlantic academic career, and a family culture in which scholarly achievement was the baseline expectation. ^[S35]

Profiles: Dr. Clifford Goodman Jr.↗ | Dr. Peter R. Hofstätter↗ | Dr. Robert Matthias Hofstätter↗

Coming home

They returned to Chandler in 1976. Cliff opened an OB/GYN practice that grew into the MomDoc group, serving thousands of East Valley families. He served as Chief of Staff at Chandler Regional Medical Center and helped guide the hospital through its 1980s relocation to the current campus — extending, by another generation, the family’s entanglement with the town’s healthcare infrastructure. ^{[S35] [S10] [S29]}

"Today was the annual family gathering ... to celebrate Grandma's birthday."

Journal entry, 1989-02-25 [S4]

Legacy & Living Memory

What connects a tuberculosis patient’s wagon to a pineal gland extract to a women’s health clinic — and why any of it matters to the people left standing.

The temptation in family history is to manufacture a theme: “We were always doctors,” or “We were always pioneers,” or “Service runs in our blood.” But the real pattern is messier and more interesting than that. William Nicholas Goodman was an English carpenter who converted to Mormonism and died of bad lungs in the desert. His grandson George became a pharmacist and the five-term mayor of Mesa. George’s son Clifford built a hospital, died young, and left an eighteen-year-old to figure out the rest. That eighteen-year-old went to Hamburg, fell in love with the granddaughter of a Viennese gynecologist, and came home to build MomDoc.

None of that was inevitable. All of it was shaped by specific decisions — to stay, to move, to marry, to practice in Chandler instead of Phoenix, to write down the bore of a well and the result of a school board vote and the cost of a hospital wing. This site tries to preserve those specifics, because they are what make family history different from mythology.

Extended Profiles

The essays below preserve complete draft narratives for each figure, with citations and source links. A privacy note: living family members are mentioned only at a high level.