DR. CHARLES R. GEER The Yankee scouts were sending offers but Dr. Charles Geer wasn’t buying in the 1930’s. More important for the versatile infielder was hard study at Tufts Medical School for the baseball and basketball star at Deering High.
Impressed with the ability to hit a curve ball and a sharp fielder, Geer played on a staunch Colby ballclub with the likes of Ralph Peabody, Danny Ayotte, Scrubby Sawyer, Arthur Brown and Ron (Rum) Lemieux. He was co-captain of the baseball team there in his senior season, graduating in 1936.
One day the recently elected member of the Maine Baseball Hall of Fame would soon forget was in high school against Portland—In a “battle of between Geer and George Blaisdell, Geer made eight errors, Blaisdell seven.
But Geer rarely had off-days. Playing different infield positions (the Yankees liked him as a second baseman) he was a valued member on the many teams he played for, including the Worumbo Indians. He retired in 1937, bowing out at the right time, soon after the Indians won the state and New England championship.
He served in World War Il as a medico and said the Allied surgeons were superior to the Germans in up-to-the-minute treatment of casualties. Geer took part in “D Day,” although he arrived a day after it began. “When the day was over, we were so tired that we would just fall down and go to sleep.”
In one of his big pay days as a baseball player for Haley’s Portland Green Sox, he received .50¢ for an important game. That was one reason Geer stuck to doctoring.
it sure paid better then.
If things were different in his day and today’s high salaries dominated baseball then, who knows, he might have became a Yankee. “Not me,” the 66-year-old family practitioner married to Mary Alice said. “I loved medicine as a profession, baseball as a game".
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