October Sky Festival on tap for Saturday
Anyone looking for a fun fall event might want to check out the annual October Sky Festival set for 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday (Oct. 19) in Oliver Springs.
Held every year, the festival highlights the roles the town and surrounding areas played in the 1999 film “October Sky,” about the coal-mining community featured in Homer Hickam Jr.’s best-selling 1998 autobiography, “Rocket Boys.”
Centered in Arrowhead Park in the south end of downtown, the festival also includes events at the Oliver Springs Historical Society Museum in the downtown area, along with other local sites.
Also included in the activities is the historic downtown railroad depot, which will allow 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 daylong festival is expected to attract more than 100 vendors, and bring in thousands of visitors.
“October Sky,” 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, where 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 autobiography, 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. 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.
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.
Festival events include model-rocket launches, along with entertainment, food and crafts vendors, games, and even a collector-car show along Main Street in the downtown area.
There will also be a “Kids Zone,” sponsored by the Oliver Springs Police Department, and Home Depot is sponsoring an “onsite kids’ workshop.”