Jack Owen Geller

Jack Owen Geller passed from this life on September 18, 2023, at his home in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Jack was born on April 18, 1935, in a farmhouse in Glencoe, Oklahoma. His parents were Lester Owen Geller and Ruth Annette Lile. He is survived by his wife, Barbara Grace (Tatum) Geller of the home. 

Jack moved to Stillwater at an early age and attended Stillwater Schools. Jack also attended Oklahoma A&M, where he obtained an Associates Degree as an electrician. He took a year-long course at Coffeyville Jr. College, where he built the first television his family ever watched. During his junior and senior high school years, Jack spent summers with his father cutting wheat and sleeping under the tailgate of his dad's truck. Jack also enjoyed wrestling while in school and placed third in the state wresting tournament. Jack served as secretary of his class for six consecutive years.

On January 27, 1959, Jack and his father moved to Nowata, Oklahoma where they both worked in the oilfield doing various jobs including being a roustabout on drilling units with Layton Oil Company. Jack met Barbara Tatum the first day he moved to Nowata, and they spent every day after that together until his passing. They celebrated sixty-three wedding anniversaries together throughout their beautiful marriage. 

Jack enjoyed many hobbies including coaching sports, quail hunting, and fishing. He especially enjoyed fishing for catfish and crappie. Jack loved setting limb lines, bank poles, jugs, and trot lines on Big Creek. He and Barbara spent countless hours fishing off the rocks at Winganon Bridge and below Oologah Dam. Jack was a very accurate deer hunter with his 30-30, and enjoyed hunting prairie chickens and dove. He also enjoyed hunting mushrooms, picking pecans, and finding snake root. He spent time buying calves, fattening them up, and selling them each Fall. He and a business partner bought some small oil wells which he really enjoyed working just like his father. 

Jack worked for CRA, Inc. also known as COOP Refinery for thirty-five years, of which he spent the first fifteen years a pipeline electrician. The following twenty years he was a pipeline gauger before retiring at 65 years old.  

Jack never met a stranger, he would talk to anyone about anything. He was a kind man, and he would help others in any possible way he could. Jack had three children, daughters, Vicki Diane Geller, Dana Louise Miller and husband, John Miller, of Dewey Oklahoma, and son, Randy Owen Geller and wife Susan Lynn Geller of Owasso. Jack is survived by a brother Roy Leon Geller, a sister Joanne Fowler, five grandchildren, as well as five great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his parents, Lester and Ruth Geller, sister, Alice Oneta Porter, and daughter Vicki Diane Geller.

A visitation for family and friends will be held at Benjamin’s Funeral Home in Nowata, Oklahoma, on Thursday September 21, 2023, from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm. Graveside services will be held Friday September 22, 2023, at 2:00 pm, at the Nowata Memorial Park Cemetery.