October Sky Festival on tap in Oliver Springs on Saturday
Visitors to last year’s October Sky Festival at Arrowhead Park in Oliver Springs check out the car show. (photo:G Chambers Williams III )
Each year, the festival is held to recognize the part Oliver Springs and the surrounding area played in the 1999 film “October Sky.”
The movie told the story of Homer Hickam Jr., a coal miner’s son who grew up in a small West Virginia mining town, where he began building model rockets rather than following his father into the mines.
It starred Jake Gyllenhaal, Laura Dern, and Chris Cooper.
This year’s festival, held mostly in Arrowhead Park in the south end of downtown, will include more than 100 vendors.
During the event, the Oliver Springs Historical Society Museum will be open, and guided tours will be available.
Also open will be the historic downtown railroad depot, which allows visitors to see how it felt to be a station manager, conductor or engineer. The museum has a vintage caboose that will be open to visitors, as well.
There will be a “big car show on Main Street in downtown,” according to the festival’s Facebook page.
In Arrowhead Park, where the vendors will be set up with crafts and unique items (which make ideal Christmas presents), there will be entertainment on stage, the Facebook post says.
“Fair food” will be available, and “the Oliver Springs Police Department is sponsoring Kid Zone, a fun-filled safe place for our young visitors,” the post noted.
In the railroad depot, there is a museum of train history as well as the coal miners exhibit that shows how coal, trains and a hotel helped build Oliver Springs.
Also this year, the festival features “Heritage at the Depot,” a presentation of the genealogy of Oliver Springs families. Several genealogy groups will also be set up. The depot will also feature an exhibit of handmade quilts.
“Across the grass, past the fire wagon, you will see a brick building with two big wonderful windows,” the post says. “That’s the Oliver Springs Historical Society, a building just full of surprises.”
New this year is a permanent display called Oliver Springs Streetscape to allow people “to get the feel of what it was like in the ‘50s downtown,” the post says.
“Our building is a wonderful example of the restoration of a historic building,” the Facebook entry says. “Once the Abston Garage, full of car bays and the smell of fuel and oil, [it] is now a beautiful community building with meeting room, theater and home to the area archives.”
Based on Hickam’s autobiography, “Rocket Boys,” the film was shot primarily on location in Oliver Springs and the surrounding area, and chronicled Hickam’s foray into rocket building after seeing the news about the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the first satellite launched into space.
Cooper plays his father, Homer Hickam Sr., who isn’t amused by his son’s interest in rockets, and Dern plays his science teacher, who encouraged his rocket hobby. Homer Hickam Jr. went on to become a NASA rocket engineer, whose father finally came around to his point of view.
The annual festival celebrates the film and pays homage to the community where much of the filming was done. According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), nearby Petros was the film’s main set for Hickam’s West Virginia mining community, while Oliver Springs was used for “business and residence locations.”
Other sites for the movie’s production included Wartburg (where the model rockets were launched), Oak Ridge, Harriman, Knoxville, and the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum in Chattanooga.
The movie was shot from Feb. 23-April 30, 1998, and was released in February 1999.
Annually, the festival even includes model-rocket launches, along with entertainment, the food and crafts vendors, games, and the collector-car show.
Stop in and visit the “gently used” items for sale or buy some delicious homemade bakery items (calories don’t count at a festival right?).
For more information, visit the website, octoberskyfestivaltn.org.
