October Sky Festival on tap for Saturday in Oliver Springs
October Sky Festival visitors stroll past the Oliver Springs Fire Department booth in Arrowhead Park during last year’s festival. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
Expected to attract more than 100 vendors and bring in thousands of visitors, the event will be held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The event is held primarily in the city’s Arrowhead Park south of downtown, but it also includes the Oliver Springs Historical Society Museum.
Oliver Springs’ historic downtown railroad depot will also be open to allow visitors to see how it felt to be a station manager, conductor or engineer. The museum has a vintage caboose that visitors can walk through.
“October Sky,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Laura Dern and Chris Cooper, told the story of Homer Hickam Jr., a coal miner’s son who grew up to become a rocket scientist.
It’s set in a small West Virginia mining town, where he began building model rockets rather than following his father into the mines.
Based on Hickam’s autobiography, “Rocket Boys,” the film 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.
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.