The Hearing Center began its life in the early 1970s when the Boyd County Chapter of the Kentucky Easter Seal Society, Inc., decided the children of the Ashland-area deserved speech and hearing services. Members of the group began work to make it happen. Davis Geiger, in particular, worked tirelessly to meet the need he saw in the Tri-State community. Geiger had served Easter Seals at the local, county, state, national and even international levels.

When the center opened on July 1, 1972, it was named the Geiger Easter Seal Speech and Hearing Center in honor of Geiger’s efforts. The original location was on Greenup Avenue in downtown Ashland in Scope Towers #2. Initially, the center provided speech and language evaluations, speech therapy and hearing screenings to both children and adults. Lucy

Diamond, current operations manager for The Hearing Center, joined the Geiger Easter Seal Speech and Hearing Center as a secretary Sept. 15 of 1972.

With instant success and overrun with clients, the Geiger Easter Seal Speech and Hearing Center quickly outgrew its space in Scope Towers. Davis Geiger was again instrumental in the facility’s growth when in December of 1972 the center moved to the first floor of King’s Daughter’s Medical Center.

In 1973, the center added a two-room sound treated testing booth and clinical testing equipment. It was in 1973 that a clinical audiology program was added to the center. During the center’s early years, it branched out to include services to KDMC inpatients and home health areas. Screening services were provided by the center to area schools and the Commission for Children with Special Health Care Needs. Additional speech-language pathologists were added to the staff with their schedules remaining full. The center became a graduate clinician site for Marshall University’s Speech Pathology Department and services again were broadened. Working with the Boyd County School System, the staff of the Geiger Center was able to establish the first hearing-impaired classroom in Eastern Kentucky.

During 1974-75, the center became the first of its kind to apply for accreditation from the state of Kentucky. Because the center had built a network of affiliations with the school systems, vocational rehabilitation, comprehensive care facilities, physicians, local health departments, and other agencies that provided rehabilitation services, the state licensed the Geiger Center as a full rehabilitation agency. It was the first such licensing for any hearing facility in Kentucky. From its humble beginnings to unprecedented successes, the center continued to