October Sky brings crowd to Oliver Springs
Destiny Soloman, left center, and her friend Kristen Loy of LaFollette walk through the October Sky Festival grounds in Arrowhead Park in Oliver Springs with pup Milo, a choc- olate Yorkie. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
This festival highlights the role the area played in the 1999 film “October Sky,” about the coal-mining community featured in Homer Hickam Jr.’s best-selling 1998 autobiography, “Rocket Boys.”
Besides more than 100 food and craft vendors and other exhibitors lining Arrowhead Park in the south end of downtown, the festival also included entertainment, model-rocket launches, games, and displays of antique and collector cars, trucks and other vehicles along Main Street in the downtown area, sponsored by the Fast N Classy Car Club of Oak Ridge.
Other events were held at the Oliver Springs Historical Society Museum in the downtown area, along with the historic downtown railroad depot.
“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.
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.”
The movie was shot from Feb. 23-April 30, 1998, and was released in February 1999.