Miller's Crossing

Sue Woelfel, his second wife before they divorced in 1985, recalls him telling her how at a young age he sized himself up against his peers and saw that he wasn't the best-looking kid in school. So he strove to become the brightest.

"He said, "In order to be popular, I had to do something. That something was to be the smartest kid in school.' And so he always was. I'm sure he's considered a genius," Woelfel says.

Quarles's scholastic prowess was enough to get him into the California Institute of Technology, where he found himself amid some of the finest minds in science.

But forced to work as a night watchman while tackling a rigorous course load, young Quarles faltered. He took a leave of absence after his junior year and got a job as a government inspector on a canal project in Yuma, Arizona. There, he met his first wife, Norma, a high school Latin teacher. Quarles later returned to Cal Tech and received bachelor's and master's degrees in geology.

Oil brought the couple to Texas, where they raised three daughters. The family also had a two-year stint in France. Patricia Richardson, Quarles's eldest daughter and an ecologist in Austin, says her childhood was a happy one. The two words she uses to describe her dad are "interesting" and "focused." He was a master at inventing diversions.

"If you went swimming in a river, he would say, "Let's divert the channel, let's change the flow of water,' " she says. "We would spend all day building a dam out of rocks and wear our hands bare. But he was always intriguing -- you didn't just sit around."

Many of their pastimes involved games. She recalls a rare occasion when she beat Quarles at Ping-Pong at an early age.

"I won a game and I was so excited. I beat him!" she recalls, copping the thrilled tone of a child who has pulled off a miracle. But then she noticed the pained look on her father's face. "He was glad that I had won and wasn't taking anything away from that, but he must have been saying to himself, "I could have done better. I shouldn't have lost.' I ended up crying because winning was much, much more important to him than it was to me."

Quarles brings intense passion to his hobbies. He has amassed a tremendous collection of gems and minerals, which seem to fill every conceivable tabletop, shelf and drawer in his home and office. He took up karate at the age of 52 and earned a green belt. His enthusiasm for bridge led him to develop a related game that sold thousands of copies.

It was through bridge that Quarles caught the eye of Woelfel, his second wife, in the late 1960s. He and Norma had divorced after 32 years of marriage. Woelfel, a secretary at the oil company where he worked, was the only one who showed up one day for his lunch-hour bridge class. So Quarles showed her some memory tricks. He had her flash the cards from two shuffled decks. When she finished, he recited back all 104 cards in their exact order.

She says she enjoyed her 13 years of marriage to Quarles, calling him a man of "intense integrity" who was fun to be around.

"But he's peculiar, and I had a hard time living with him, and that's why we eventually divorced," she says. One thing that troubled her was what she saw as a jealous streak. Quarles considered her a natural-born flirt, she says, and the two bickered about it. Quarles ended up channeling his frustrations into a book he wrote called All You Want to Know about Married Flirtation.

"It was really a cute book, but I resented it because he used my nature as part of the reason he wrote that book," she says.

The divorce was amicable. She kept the house; Quarles took the rocks and minerals. He slipped back into bachelorhood like a bass cut from a line.

He was a successful older gentleman with two ex-wives, three grown children and a fantastic collection of rocks. He now was working exclusively as a well-paid consultant. He had much more time to devote to his hobbies, and reflect. But when he ruminated on the big picture, what he saw was death.

Quarles did not view old age as a mellow phase of ripening before death. The avowed man of science saw it as nothing less than a painful, fatal disease. It pissed him off.

"I am a very healthy, happy and active human being who thinks it's ridiculous that I've been condemned to death," he wrote in 1989, at the age of 76.

Patricia Richardson remembers getting a call from her dad around that time. He sounded uncharacteristically glum.

"He said, "I guess I'm kind of upset because statistically I only have ten more years to live and I just love life. Do you think if I learned about genetics I could make a difference?' "

Richardson, a scientist herself, told him that she believed he could.

"I said, "go for it.' So he did."