Oliver landed his first mine job in his late teens. It was difficult work, with danger forever lurking in the sweet mountain air, peril beyond the gradual debilitation of all that coal dust accumulating in the lungs. When two pieces of heavy equipment collided underground, violently slamming him against a wall, he was lucky to escape with his life. “There wasn’t room for his pelvis to turn over,” said Goff, whose life was closely entangled with the Powers family. “It sort of crushed him, and he didn’t walk straight after that.”
Hardened by the mining life, frustrated by his circumstances, Oliver could be “gruff and loud,” recalled his daughter, Jan Powers Melvin, born while her father served a hitch in the US Army. She was six months old when she was introduced to Oliver for the first time; the baby girl immediately started bawling in apparent fright. “We knew he loved us, but he wasn’t the type of man to easily show affection.” Still, as a grown man with a houseful of kids, he remained remarkably deferential to his own father, demonstrated by his habit of hiding his lit cigarette whenever a disapproving James walked into the room.
Like most mine wives, Ida, who was slightly heavyset and usually trying to lose weight, took pride in her toughness in the face of all those daily hardships. But she could be very loving. Deeply religious, she made sure the family regularly attended services at the Church of Christ, which required a significant commute when they lived in Harmon. A good neighbor who was always eager to help, she was usually the first one to show up at someone’s house when a new baby was on the way.
At various times, especially during the Depression, the mines shut down or cut back on personnel, leaving Oliver without a way to adequately provide for his family. On occasion he would run some moonshine, but eventually he opened a shoe-repair shop, first as a side business and then as his full-time occupation, escaping the mining life for good. He dreamed of a better life for his children, especially his only son.
Francis Gary Powers, born on August 17, 1929, at the hospital in the nearby community of Burdine, Kentucky, just two months before Wall Street crashed, grew up knowing how it felt to go to bed hungry. He saw the desperation in his parents’ eyes, unable to help. Years later, he remarked about how the mining life “made people like my mother and father old before their time.”1
Shaped by parents who engendered in him a strong sense of right and wrong and left him free to roam the surrounding countryside, Francis grew up empowered by a sense of gathering independence, hunting, fishing, swimming, and spelunking in the distant hills. Sometimes he hiked to a favorite spot, the top of a high cliff overlooking the surrounding valley, and let his thoughts drift to faraway places, beyond the overarching mines, which he saw “poisoning everything.”2 Doted on by his five sisters, he became, by his own estimation, “something of a loner.”3 If he was not outside doing something physical, he could often be found in his room reading, especially books dealing with history.
Young Francis could be an irritating brother, such as the times when Jan, two years younger and shorter, endured his childish picking, victimized by his much longer arms. Sometimes she tried to “smack” him, but he was always able to keep her at arm’s length. And he could also be their protector. One day when they were very young, Jan, Jean, and Francis were walking through a nearby pasture. They didn’t see the bull until he started chasing them. “Scared the daylights out of us,” Jan said. The Powers kids ran all the way home, with Francis pulling Jan forcefully by the hand, up onto the cement steps of their little house, just ahead of the rampaging animal. Once they reached the safety of a closed door, they could look out the window and see the mad cow snorting ominously but harmlessly on those cement steps. “That was a close call we’d never forget,” Jan said.
Without extra money for luxuries such as vacations, the children recognized their day trip to West Virginia early in World War II as a rare treat. Several hours into their adventure, in Princeton, they happened upon a county fair, where a pilot was offering airplane rides in a little Piper Cub for the princely sum of two dollars and fifty cents. Oliver looked at Francis. He could see the gleam in his fourteen-year-old son’s eyes.
Three-quarters of a century later, Joan, relaxing in her modest house several miles from the old farm on the outskirts of Pound, remembered the pivotal moment like it had happened that very morning. Her eyes brightened at the way her father indulged her brother. “Anything Francis wanted,” the elderly lady said with a girlish laugh, “Oliver was going to get it for him.” She paused and smiled. “You know how it was. He was the only son.”
Working steadily, the patriarch of the clan felt good about his ability to splurge on his boy, who soared through the clouds for several loops around the surrounding countryside, never to be the same.
“There was a lady pilot doing the flying and she must’ve liked Francis, because she kept him up there longer than he had paid for,” Joan said. “I guess she could see how much he liked it. Well, I never will forget. He’s standing at the back of the truck with the biggest grin on his face and says, ‘I left my heart up there.’ I was only 9 or 10 and I didn’t quite understand. I thought he had fallen in love with that lady pilot!”
The experience struck a nerve deep inside Francis.
“It was quite a thrill,” he recalled many years later. “I was so nervous, just shaking all over, because it was such a thrill to me.”4
What Oliver could not have guessed then was that the flight would alter not just his son, but American history.
During the final year of the war, Oliver landed a good-paying job in a defense plant in Detroit. The father and his son moved first, until he could send for Ida and the girls, having secured two small adjoining apartments in an area near the industrial center of River Rouge. The wide-eyed country folks felt like strangers in a foreign land, encountering skyscrapers, streetcars, and the bustle of urban life. For the first time, the Powers family owned an icebox, with daily deliveries of ice to fill it, which made them feel prosperous. Thrown into a big-city melting pot, they became acquainted with people from vastly different backgrounds.
On his way home from school, Francis encountered a large bunch of white boys beating up on one small African American child. “He took the black boy’s part [and] started helping him fight the rest of ’em,” Jan recalled. Relating the incident to his sister, Francis said, “It just wasn’t fair for all those big boys to be picking on one little boy, no matter what his skin color was.”
Not long after the Japanese surrendered, the Powers family moved back to the farm, where Francis played left guard on the Grundy High School football team and joined his best friend, Jack Goff—who would one day marry his sister Jean—in various adventures. As younger boys, they had sent off some box tops from their corn flakes and formed a Junior Airplane Spotters club, carefully watching the distant skies and learning to tell the difference between the various American military planes of the day, such as the P-51 Mustang and the P-47 Thunderbolt. This activity remained a favorite pastime after the war, along with picking wild strawberries—“The cattle grazed those hills, but they’d leave the strawberries alone,” Jack recalled—and exploring caves. They got to know the game warden, who helped them locate new caves to explore; the boys delighted in the pulse-pounding excitement of crawling through the dark, not knowing what they would find or how far they could go before the walls became too narrow and they would have to turn back.