Sharon Fales interview by Heidi Welte, 02 March 2026
Transcript of Fales Welte Interview
Interviewee
Fales, Sharon
Interviewer
Welte, Heidi
Interview Date
3-2-2026
Description
Sharon Fales is the widow of the late Dr. James Fales, an engineering professor at Ohio University. After growing up in Wisconsin, her parents moved to Florida when she was a senior in high school, where she went on to attend Palm Beach Junior College. That is where she met James Fales, and they became college sweethearts. Upon graduation, she pursued an education degree at Florida State University. After she graduated, she and James Fales were married. She became a first-grade teacher. He would often visit her at school and often helped decorate her classroom. Seeing how much she enjoyed teaching inspired him to go back to school to become a teacher himself. After earning a degree in education from Miami University, he earned his master’s degree and PhD from Texas A&M. His first teaching job after earning his doctorate was at Purdue University. Eventually, he was hired at Ohio University as a department head and full professor, where he spent the rest of his career. Since he had often been a nontraditional student himself, he was especially attuned to his own nontraditional students and established a scholarship to assist these types of students. Sharon Fales still resides in the Athens, Ohio, area and worked as a first-grade teacher.
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Keywords
Athens, Ohio University, teaching, bar codes, engineering, travel, Ohio, non-traditional student
Disciplines
Oral History
Publication Date
2026
Digital Publisher
Ohio University Libraries
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
00:32:07
File Format
audio/mpeg
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Fales, Sharon and Welte, Heidi N., "Sharon Fales interview by Heidi Welte, 02 March 2026" (2026). HIST 4798/5798: Recording Memory: Methods and Uses of Oral History. 28.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/hist4798/28