Memorial Service for Sam Shelton

August 1, 2026

We attended the Memorial Service for longtime friend Sam Shelton. The location chosen by his two daughters and family was the 57th Fighter Group Restaurant located just beside the runways of the Dekalb-Peachtree Airport. Sam was a pilot of experimental aircraft so perhaps that played a role in that location choice. Rod knew Sam from 1957 when they both entered Georgia Tech. Their close association was in the Baptist Student Union, and a number of persons at the service were friends from that association, which had been maintained for over 60 years. Our friendship with Sam through the BSU ranged from playful to inspirational and included a cross-country motor trip in 1960 to pick up John Baxley in Oregon after his Alaska summer missions experience.

Sam was called home on June 20 at age 87 from complications of Parkinson's Disease. Sam was a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech starting in 1968, the same year that Rod became a professor of Physics at Georgia State University, and both stayed in those positions until retirement in the twenty-teens.

Brenda and Rod drove to the 57th Fighter Group Restaurant on Saturday, Aug 1, for the 1pm service and spend a few minutes there in close proximity to a runway and watched planes take off or land every few minutes. A very interesting place.

After we had explored a bit, we began to find familiar faces, some of which we had known for decades. Here, L-R are Jane Strange, Gayle Shaw, Brenda Nave, Barbara Petty, and Sam's daughter Stacy Shelton Malena who was one of our hostesses.

Things quickly became more relaxed and jovial with the arrival of Norman Petty and John Baxley.

With Norman and John's help, the situation immdiately became a celebration!

Good to see Laddie Rollins and John

A happy group, L-R Norman Petty, Laddie Rollins, Barbara Petty, John Baxley, Jane Strange, Gayle Shaw, Brenda Nave.

Gayle Shaw, Brenda Nave, Becky Rollins. There were good opportunities for conversation.

We were glad to see Aubrey and Carol Bush arrive. Norman Petty, Carol and Aubrey, Laddie Rollins, John Baxley, Gayle Shaw, Brenda Nave.

?, Leland Strange, Carol Bush, Norman Petty, Aubrey Bush, Nancy Baxley, Laddie Rollins, John Baxley, Gayle Shaw, Brenda Nave.

Laddie Rollins, John Baxley,Gayle Shaw, Aubrey Bush, Norman Pettty

They provided a beautiful lunch for us. Barbara Petty, Brenda Nave, John Baxley, Jane Strange, Carol Bush

Gayle Shaw, Barbara Petty, Brenda Nave, John Baxley, Jane Strange, Carol Bush

Aubrey Bush, Brenda Nave, Gayle Shaw, Becky Rollins,Laddie Rollins, Norman Petty, Carol Bush

Barbara Petty, Leland Strange, Jane Strange, Nancy Baxley, John Baxley

After lunch we gathered on the dance floor for the memorial celebration. Our old BSU group was maybe a third of the total and we didn't know the others,.

We heard memories and stories off tribute from Sam's daughters Stacy and Suzie

Leland Strange provided tribute and history from his long friendship with Sam..

We heard tribute and history from Sam's three granddaughters, daughters of Suzie.

Memories from the family

Dr. Samuel Viron Shelton, engineer of Olympic torches, pioneering energy expert, and professor to thousands of Georgia Tech's mechanical engineering students between 1968 and 2006, died Saturday, June 20, 2026, from complications of Parkinson's Disease. He was 87. Sam lived a life defined by an insatiable curiosity, a keen interest in energy and engines of all kinds, a love of flight, and a commitment to the next generation of engineers he could shape and inspire.

In the lead-up to Atlanta's Olympic moment in 1996, Sam was chosen to lead a team charged with building 17,000 torches for the longest Olympic torch relay in the Games history. He worked with companies like Coleman to manufacture the needed parts. He tested the prototype by bringing it into the shower, holding it high in the air while cruising on the Downtown Connector in his Mazda Miata convertible. Once the relay started in Los Angeles, Sam rode along and often had to problem solve on the fly. Long after his career-crowning triumph, he most often talked about the emotional impact of witnessing the human wave of joy, hope, and community spirit as the Olympic flame passed from one everyday hero to the next. He acted as an advisory engineer for subsequent Olympic Games and major multi-sport events through the mid-2000s, directly sharing his specialized burner blueprints, fuel mix calculations, and safety schematics with international design committees. He led the team in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, and advised teams for the 2000 Sydney, 2004 Athens, and 2006 Turino Olympics.

Sam was born on January 26, 1939, in Boynton Beach, Florida, to an adventure-loving couple from Kentucky, who wanted to experience one of America's last great frontiers on the outskirts of the Everglades. He grew up on a plant nursery that his father managed, helping landscape West Palm Beach mansions. While his father had only an eighth-grade education, his mother was a teacher who clearly imprinted a love of learning on her only son. She gave him coffee with breakfast when he started first grade to make sure he was awake and ready to learn. Even before he could read, Sam was taking apart clocks and other mechanical objects, trying to figure out how they worked. He told anyone who asked that he wanted to be an engineer even though he had never met one.

When Sam arrived at Tech in 1957, to sign up for classes, it was his first visit. He essentially never left. For the next 50-plus years, Tech was the center of his academic and professional pursuits, as well as the place where he made lifelong friendships at the Baptist Student Union and among his fellow faculty members. While working on his doctorate at Tech, Sam met the inimitable and contagiously joyful Sharon Hudson. He was the fifth man to ask for her hand in marriage, and he was the one she'd been waiting on. They married within a year, on December 16, 1962. Four years later, with his PhD and two young children in tow, the family moved to Pasadena, California where Sam served his ROTC military obligation at Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on Apollo 11, the first space mission to land humans on the moon.

Sam returned to Tech in 1968. His primary research focused on the development and commercialization of sustainable energy technology, and his work attracted more than $30 million in funding. He held eight patents in sustainable energy technologies and founded two companies to develop, manufacture, and market energy-efficient products, the last of them Wave Air which developed the first gas-powered heat pump technologies.

As a professor, Sam emphasized practical knowledge. Theoretical research never interested him as much as solving real-world problems, and he taught his students to do so in cost-effective ways. That made him the obvious choice in 2004 to become the founding director of Tech's Strategic Energy Institute, which is dedicated to working with industry to facilitate near-term, high-impact solutions to national and regional energy challenges. Sam also helped public officials reach appropriate decisions on energy policy, and enthusiastically shared his knowledge with tens of thousands of people across the globe through one of Tech's first massive open online courses titled Energy 101.

While living in Stone Mountain, and then north Decatur, Sam and Sharon raised two daughters, Suzie and Stacy, and joined a large, loving community of friends who became family at First Baptist Church of Decatur. Sam and Sharon's home was always full of love and laughter, with dinner parties, book club meetings, and their legendary Christmas parties. For their girls, they valued the gift of experiences over things, often taking off on Christmas Day for skiing in Colorado or trips to the Bahamas.

In 1976, they took their preteens to Europe for three weeks, where Sam caught the bug for international travel. He became a Delta million-miler on frequent trips to Europe, Asia, and throughout the U.S., mostly for business but often for fun too. Starting in his 50s, Sam became a private pilot of experimental aircraft; his favorite hobby was tinkering with and flying his Burt Rutan-designed Long-EZ out of Gwinnett County Airport and then PDK.

When Sharon and Sam became empty nesters, the couple continued their careers but, as always, found time for adventure. They bought a yacht and sailed to the Bahamas. In 1998, with some Decatur friends, they bought a condo on Little Gasparilla Island in Florida, which became Sharon's favorite place on Earth. They spent summers in Metz, France, where Sam taught at the Georgia Tech-Europe campus.

In 2003, Sharon died of pancreatic cancer at 66. For the year and a half she lived with the disease, he dedicated himself to her care. She underwent Whipple surgery at Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, and then he took her on several trips of a lifetime, including one to Mexico, to see the migration of the Monarch butterflies. Losing Sharon unanchored Sam. But he continued parenting his two grown daughters, helping fill some of the void Sharon left, and delighted in seeing his three granddaughters grow into amazing women in Portland, Oregon. He fully retired from Tech in 2016.

Sam never remarried though he found companionship with Phyllis Abramson; and later, Genia Howard, his fifth-grade girlfriend. At Hanover House in Colony Square, where he and Sharon moved in 1989, he became a fixture as the HOA president. True to form, he resolved a complex air conditioning issue that saved the community hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In February of this year, Sam attended the opening of Georgia Tech Library's "Centennial Summer: Georgia Tech's Olympic Legacy," an on-going exhibit celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Centennial Olympic Games. His five Olympic torches are the centerpiece.

Sam is survived by his daughters, Suzie Puetz (Jim) of Portland, OR, and Stacy Shelton (Malena) of Decatur; his granddaughters, Anna Puetz of Chicago, Bailey Puetz - soon-to-be Bailey Rahier (Ben) - of Portland, OR, and Greta Puetz of Portland, OR. He was predeceased by his wife, Sharon; his sister, Barbara Snyder; and his parents, Samuel Homer and Edna Martin Shelton.