The Grandpa Frank Collection

It was a Saturday, and the store was packed. As I rang up one customer after another, a man walked in, went straight to the corner, and stood there with his arms folded — not saying a word, just watching me. After a while I finally asked, "Sir, can I help you?"

He looked right at me and said, "Do you buy rocks?"

"Sure," I told him, "depends on what you have." Without another word, he turned and headed out to his truck, parked right in our driveway. A moment later he came back in carrying an old milk crate filled with rough rocks. Then another. And another. Before long our entire sales floor was covered with around fifteen crates.

"What would you like to do with these, sir?" I asked. "Just give me a few hundred," he said. I offered to look through them first — surely there was time to do this properly — but he wasn't interested. "I just want a few hundred." So, with the store still buzzing, I handed him a few hundred dollars, tossed in a small Megalodon tooth to sweeten the deal, and shook his hand.

The man who dropped them off was older than me — and I was born in 1966. He told me the rocks had belonged to his grandfather, Frank, and had been sitting in his garage for a good thirty years. And so, though we never learned much more about him, the collection earned its name: Grandpa Frank.

Only a few of Grandpa Frank's pieces remain in the store today, mostly those remarkable Illinois Fluorites. Every one of them is a reminder that you never quite know what's going to walk through the door on a busy Saturday afternoon.