Hello Ocala! Meet your neighbor: Barbara Scales

Barb Scales poses for a photo at a park with a gazebo in the Americana neighborhood at On Top of the World in Ocala on Thursday, June 15, 2023. [Bruce Ackerman/Ocala Gazette] 2023.

Barbara Scales is a woman of many hats. She is a registered nurse (retired), an author of children’s and adult books and other publications, a Lion’s Club activist and a neighborhood group member. She helps anyone needing her care and expertise… be it family, friend or neighbor.

Scales lives in the On Top of the World (OTOW) community and said she enjoys amenities such as archery, swimming and aerobic exercise. To say she is busy is an understatement.

“Ocala is so beautiful with all the trees and flowers,” she said, adding “when we visited friends here and went through Ocala, we just fell in love with it. At OTOW there is just so much to do.  Sometimes you have to remember to slow yourself down.”

Scales was born in Chittenango, New York, an Indian settlement just east of Syracuse. The name of the town means “where the water flows north,” she shared. She was the sixth of 11 children. With such a large family, Scales’ father worked three jobs and her mother worked nights as a nurse’s aide to make ends meet. Scales’ first job was when she was 12 years old, cleaning house for a neighbor. 

“She taught me to do it right,” Scales exclaimed. “She was a nurse and inspired me.”

Scales said she feels privileged to have worked alongside her mother at the nursing home when she was old enough.

Scales met her future husband, Wayne Scales, while she was in 10th grade in high school. She was 14 years old. When she was 16, and he was a senior in high school, he asked her to marry him. She said no, she was too young. So, after high school, he enrolled in the U.S. Air Force and served two years in active duty, then was stationed near his hometown for the next four years when his mother became ill. 

“He has a good heart and is very outgoing,” she said of her husband.

Scales earned three scholarships and is a graduate of the St. Joseph School of Nursing in Syracuse. After her graduation, she and Wayne married in 1979. She worked as a nurse for 42 years, 10 of those at St. Joseph’s Hospital, and then as a traveling nurse at the Navajo Nation in Fort Defiance, Arizona, for a short-term assignment. She also worked in South Carolina, then in Miami. Friends in Bell, in north Florida, told her she should look at Ocala. That is when they decided to settle here. 

Although she is retired from active nursing, Scales has kept her license active. She said she took a course in healing touch in Virginia and is educated in Reiki and therapeutic touch therapy, having personally been helped by those methodologies.  

“1998 was a major change year for me,” she said, “in learning Reiki and other therapies.” 

After his tour of duty, Wayne became a machinist with the Lamson Corp., where he worked for 18 years. Due to plant closings, he became a school bus driver, then a school custodian until his retirement. Scales shared that her husband has had two open heart surgeries and is medically disabled and is now legally blind.

The couple lives in the Americana Village at OTOW, where they are involved in neighbor-to-neighbor monthly get-togethers. They both participate in archery. Wayne has created a special eye device fitting so he can see the target.

Scales’ writing history includes writing for nursing and holistic journals over the years, including articles on peri-anesthesia nursing, an article in “RN Magazine” and in “Northeastern Holistic Resource Magazine.” Included in her repertoire is a short story anthology in the book “Everyday Heroes.”

The creative fiction books she has written are available on Smashwords.com and Amazon. One is titled “Beckoned,” written after a nursing experience of unusual circumstances, and after participating in a study of psychokinesis. “All Kilts Are Off” is a romantic comedy. “Ada of the Angels,” she explained, is a true story of alternative intervention therapy, which she was involved in at the time. She is currently working on others.

The two children’s books Scales has written are “Max and Jax – The Haunted Pumpkin Patch,” and “Wally the Whale with the Crazy, Wavy Hair,” which she wrote as a bedtime story for her grandson. Her books are self-published.

The Scales’ have one daughter, Margaret (Maggie) Korycinski, and a grandson, Alan, 16, who live in Marcellus, New York. She has siblings in Alaska, Virginia, Arizona, Indiana and New York.

“My sister Sandy has been a huge influence on me,” Scales shared. “She taught me what it means to believe in God. She has a ‘can do’ attitude.”

At the Lion’s Club at OTOW, Scales initiated the Shoebox Express program, to help provide essentials for local school children.  

“Some children go to school without shoes or underwear,” she reports. 

Scales said she goes to second-hand stores and gets clothing items, then washes and repairs them, and takes them to schools to be given to children who need them. Some of the items are taken to the Ocala Sexual Assault Center, where there are women with children.

“The reason I do what I do today is that I love to help people,” she said. “My mom and dad always helped everyone, and others helped them in return.”

Scales hopes to organize a public movie night this summer at OTOW to benefit the Shoebox Express program. Admission will be a donation of money or canned goods, boxed goods, clothing items … “whatever someone can donate,” she explained. Those interested in donating, or learning the date of the event, may reach Scales by email at [email protected] or by text at (315) 440-0142.