Dr. C. Douglas Keeley
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Dr. Keeley was born in Blytheswood, Ontario in 1916 and went to public school in Windsor and high school in Essex. Graduating with his MD from the University of Western Ontario in 1941 he interned for one year at Victoria Hospital before joining the Canadian Navy as a surgeon lieutenant from 1942 to 1946. His years of service included Halifax, Newfoundland, the North Atlantic and the channel invasion of France on the destroyer H.M.C.S. Saskatchewan. He also spent time on the H.M.C.S. Prevost in London, instructing in anatomy at the medical school and at the commando training center at Comox, on Vancouver Island.
In 1948 Dr. Keeley opened a consultation practice in operative and general surgery in Chatham where he was also the chief of surgery for the Public General Hospital and consultant in surgery at St. Joseph’s Hospital. He would later become the president of the Kent County Medical Society, president of the Western Ontario Surgical Association and a board member of both the Royal Canadian College of Surgeons and the American College of Surgeons.
Dr. Keeley became involved with the Senior Maroons and worked tirelessly in the background to make the operation run smoothly. He would become president of the club in 1960 and later travel to Russia with them after they won the Allen Cup that year. He would stay with the club until it folded after the first year in the IHL due to the high cost of traveling to many distant American cities.
Interested in figure skating as well, he supported his wife, Betty, and two daughters, Stephanie and Patsy, by taking on the presidency of the Chatham Figure Skating Club which he helped form when the Memorial Arena first opened in the 1940s.
Dr. Keeley is also a past president and charter member of the Maple City Golf Club and past president of the Kent Club of Chatham. In retirement he has stayed busy with golf and his other hobby of totem pole carving.