Dallas-area rock collector may have found traces of an ancient cataclysm | Science and Medicine

Through it all, Tackel continued to collect and study his rocks. Typically frugal, he splurged on a $1,400 rock saw so he could see how the rocks looked inside. He carved some like slabs of bacon. Others he sliced into thin pieces that looked like petrified wood. He cleaned and polished them and mounted them in frames. He photographed hundreds of samples, posing them with quarters and pennies to show their size, and sent them to experts around the world.

For a time, he slept with a six-shot revolver to protect his collection from thieves.

He returned to the creek beds again and again until he could no longer walk, lugging 40-pound trash bags of samples from creek bed to truck and from his truck to his house. Sometimes he brought Jones’ two children, whom he helped care for.

Over the years, the samples accumulated under his bed, took over the guest room, lined the bottoms of drawers, huddled in his shower, spilled onto the patio, hid inside every cabinet and filled his garage. He bought a shed for them in his yard, but the collection outgrew the shed, too.

Eventually, the weight of the rocks cracked the foundation of his house and damaged his feet. A diabetic, Tackel ended up in the hospital in January  2014, after an infection in his toe reached his bloodstream and turned to sepsis.

With his life hanging in the balance, he spoke of little but the rocks.

“Before I die,” he told Patti, “I want someone to know what I’ve collected.”

A sweaty drive

Patti Jones, a real estate investor in her 50s, has long platinum blond hair, bright makeup and a warm, easy laugh. She lives with her husband and teenage son in Bluffview.

She had watched her father’s collecting over the years with trepidation. While she had rooted for his success, she had also fretted for his safety. “Some people play golf after they retire. Dad goes out and looks for rocks,” she told herself.

Throughout his life, Tackel had yearned to do something special.

Before joining the U.S. Postal Service, he served as a clerk typist in Arkansas during the Korean War, played minor league baseball for the Pampa Oilers in West Texas, worked as a supervisor for a brick company, sold insurance, raised chickens and once attempted to go into business baking mini-pecan pies.

One constant was his fascination with rocks. His earliest memory of them dates to the mid-1940s, when he was 12 and worked as a soda jerk at a pharmacy in Bridgeport, the Texas city where he was born and grew up.  The store’s owner used to prop open the front door with a large piece of gold ore.

“I admired that,” he said. “I never could afford a big piece of ore.”

After he met and married Jones’ mother and they raised a family, he took them on vacations through Colorado mining towns. In Cripple Creek and Silverton, they panned  for gold and visited rock shops.

Tackel and his wife divorced in the 1970s but remained close friends. A decade later he retired from the postal service after a 30-plus year career carrying mail in Denton and Garland. He had nothing better to do than go rock hunting, he joked.

Jones saw how important the rocks were to her father and decided to help him find an expert.

She started by calling the University of Texas at Dallas. Tackel had been in touch with a professor there years before, but that professor had retired. Instead, in September 2014, Jones reached the new head of UTD’s geosciences department, John Geissman. He was curious and agreed to meet with her.

She filled the trunk of her black Porsche Cayenne with rocks and drove to UTD’s Richardson campus. Geissman, a lanky 60-something with a walrus mustache, met her in the parking lot. She opened her trunk, and he peered inside.

“Wow,” he said.

The rocks were like nothing he had ever seen. He noticed that their texture and weight set them apart from any other rocks one might easily find in North Texas. Like Tackel, Geissman believed they must have melted under scorching hot temperatures. “I don’t know what these are,” said Geissman. “But there’s something to them.”

Jones exhaled with relief.