Oliver Springs plans October Sky Festival for Saturday, Oct. 19
Visitors to last year’s October Sky Festival walk through Oliver Springs’ Arrowhead Park, the main location for the annual event recognizing the town as a prime shooting location for the 1998 film. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
This event recognizes the part the town and surrounding area played in the 1999 film “October Sky,” about the West Virginia coal-mining community featured in Homer Hickam Jr.’s best-selling 1998 autobiography, “Rocket Boys.”
During the festival, held mostly in Arrowhead Park in the south end of downtown, the Oliver Springs Historical Society Museum will also be open, and guided tours will be available.
A daylong event, the festival is expected to attract more than 100 vendors, and bring in thousands of visitors.
The historic downtown railroad depot will also be open, allowing 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.
The movie, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Laura Dern and Chris Cooper, told the story of Hickam, a coal miner’s son who grew up in a small West Virginia mining town. There, he began building model rockets as a prelude to a career in the aerospace industry, rather than following his father into the mines.
Based on Hickam’s life, the film was shot primarily on location in Oliver Springs and the surrounding area.
It 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.
Dern plays his science teacher, who encouraged his rocket hobby. Homer Hickam Jr. went on to become a NASA aerospace 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, food and crafts vendors, games, and even a collector-car show along Main Street in downtown Oliver Springs.
There will also be a “Kids Zone,” sponsored by the Oliver Springs Police Department.
Also, Home Depot is sponsoring an “onsite kids’ workshop.”