Geiser, Carl

Carl Frederick Geiser was born in Orrville, Ohio on December 10, 1910. He was the oldest of six children and is maternal grandparents raised Geiser and his siblings. In the early 1930s, Geiser wrote press releases and edited International Labor Defense bulletins, organized for the League against War and Fascism, and in 1936 was elected to the National Committee of the Young Communist League. In 1937 Geiser joined the International Brigades and served in the Spanish Civil War. He served as an ammunition carrier at the Battle of Brunete, saw action at Quinto, and advanced to the rank of lieutenant. Following the Battle of Belchite in September 1937, Geiser was promoted to Political Commissar and charged with the organization of a training school for commissars at Tarazona. Wounded at the conflict at Fuentes de Ebro, Geiser was hospitalized for three months. Returned to the front as Commissar of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion in January 1938, he was captured by fascist forces on April 1, 1938. For the next year, he was interned at San Pedro de Cardeña, along with over 650 International Brigades prisoners. Through the efforts of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the U.S. State Department, Geiser and a group of 71 Americans were released in April 1939. Geiser returned to New York and secured an engineering position with Liquidometer, a manufacturer of aeronautic equipment. Working with the company in various capacities for the next 40 years, Geiser filed numerous patents and, as a research director, supervised the testing of a component used in the first lunar mission. He also served briefly as president of Local 1227 of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America. He had two sons with his first wife, Sylvia, before they divorced in 1946. With his second wife, Doris, he had a son and a daughter. In 1956 Geiser enrolled at Columbia University’s School of General Studies as a psychology major, and graduated with a B.S. degree cum laude in 1963. After his retirement, Geiser began to research and write a history of American volunteers captured during the Spanish Civil War. With the assistance of fellow prisoner Robert Steck, Geiser amassed biographical information on the 120 Americans incarcerated in Spanish prisons. Prisoners of the Good Fight, a shortened version of his account, was published in 1986. Geiser died on November 28, 2009 in Corvallis, Oregon.