Elizabeth P. Geare, a former school business manager and World War II veteran, died of lung cancer Friday at the Broadmead retirement community in Cockeysville. The former Gibson Island resident was 84.
Elizabeth Walker Englar was born in Baltimore and raised in the city's Guilford neighborhood and Gibson Island in Anne Arundel County. She was a 1941 graduate of Bryn Mawr School and attended Smith College in Northampton, Mass.
In 1943, she enlisted in the WAVES ( Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) and was a Link Trainer operator at the Pensacola, Fla., Naval Air Station, helping train naval aviators.
While stationed at Pensacola, she met James Lee Potter, who was in the Navy. She married him in 1944. After the war, the couple lived in Montana and at Gibson Island before returning to Baltimore.
During the early 1950s, Mrs. Geare was an officer of JNG Chemical Co. in Baltimore, a family-owned division of World Wide Rights LP., manufacturers of Grecian Formula 16, a men's hair-coloring product developed by her father, George Monroe Englar.
Her husband, who had been vice president and president of the company, died in 1986.
Mrs. Geare was business manager of Gibson Island Country School from 1960 to 1980 and had been a longtime member of the school's board of trustees. She also had been a trustee of the school's foundation for 40 years.
She had been a board member of the Gibson Island Club, Gibson Island Corp. and the Gibson Island Historical Society.
In 1995, she married John Edwards Geare, a Cumberland insurance executive, who was a partner in the firm of Beall, Garner, Screen and Geare, before he retired in 1979.
The couple, who spent winters in Marco Island, Fla., moved to Broadmead in 1999. Mr. Geare died in 2003.
She was a communicant of Immanuel Episcopal Church, 1509 Glencoe Road in Glencoe, where a memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Friday.
Surviving are a son, James Lee Potter Jr. of Baltimore; two daughters, Midge P. Thompson of Hunt Valley and Anne S. Potter of Annapolis; a stepson, J. Scott Geare of Crozet, Va.; a stepdaughter, Jane G. West of Deland, Fla.; two grandsons; and two great-grandsons.