Oral history interview with L. Raphael Geisler, 1976 June 10

Louis Raphael Geisler was born in 1890 in Portland, Oregon. He attended the University of Oregon and graduated in 1912, then taught high school for a few years. He then studied law at Columbia College (now Columbia University) in New York. During World War I, he served as U.S. vice consul to Cologne, Germany, from 1916 to 1917, and to Zurich, Switzerland, from 1917 to 1919. After the war ended, he returned to Columbia College and completed his law degree. He then worked in the foreign banking department of the Irving Bank and Trust Company, managing branches in London, England; Berlin, Germany; and Paris, France. In 1919, he and Gertrude Blackmar were married; they later had one child. When the Depression struck in 1929, the Irving Bank branches closed, and Geisler returned to the U.S. to become a patent lawyer. He returned to Portland around 1935. After Gertrude Blackmar's death in 1957, he and Florence Elton married in 1960. He died in 1982.