Jon Teperson, who became my friend in the seventh grade, recalled: “Word got around that the morose giant kid’s father had just died. That’s all. Just a kid with a dead father. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just a kid going through hell. And he looked it. No one knew his dad was a star in the first few weeks of seventh grade. No one knew his dad was also a villain. Gary would walk around the school with a blank expression. Looking distant.”
When I was fifteen, after my mother went to bed, I started running the streets of the San Fernando Valley with my friends, including Conrad, Patterson, Teperson, and Bob Kallos. We rode bikes through the darkness; slipped into bars with fake IDs—produced by printers we bribed, sealed with the lamination machine in Conrad’s room—so we could drink and party; drag-raced on Mulholland Drive, often using cars from the fleet of Robert Conrad’s production company; and played gorilla golf with balls dipped in a glow-in-the-dark substance… until somebody invariably heard the commotion and called the cops. We usually made it home around 4 or 5 a.m., time enough to grab a couple hours’ sleep before heading off to school, where we fought the power structure by testing the strict dress code, sometimes sporting Hawaiian shirts and prescription sunglasses to stand out from the crowd.
We were not out to cause any harm. We were just out having fun—pushing the edge, when our parents thought we were asleep.
Late one night, after they discovered the pillows I had carefully arranged to make it appear that I was sleeping under the covers, Mom and her boyfriend went looking for me. Finally, she saw me walking out of an arcade and began embarrassing me in front of several buddies.
“What are you doing here? We were so worried! You come with me! You are grounded!”
Eventually Mom realized she was powerless to prevent me from sneaking out.
One night after playing a round of gorilla golf, we got hungry. With no restaurants open, we broke into a Mediterranean place on Sunset Boulevard and cooked our own breakfast. After doing the dishes, we left a wad of money on the counter and walked off into the darkness.
“We were just bunch of drunk guys who got hungry after playing some golf,” Conrad recalled. “The way we looked at it, no harm, no foul.”
Many times during high school, a bunch of us guys would drive off to the California mountain resort of Mammoth Lakes on a Thursday night—which required skipping school Friday, protected by a series of carefully crafted lies. After skiing and partying all weekend, we drove home Sunday night, arriving back all bleary-eyed in time for the first bell at Montclair on Monday morning. “The teachers kept trying to catch us but never did,” said Conrad, who often pulled up to school with snow still covering parts of his car.
During those days, I started experimenting with marijuana, often joining fellow employees from the pizza place to share a joint in a nearby park. One of the first times I smoked pot at a friend’s house, Mom and my sister arrived to pick me up.
Trying to hide the smell, the friend sprayed me with disinfectant. When I got into the car, they started teasing me about the overpowering smell of disinfectant, and as I tried to make light of it, attributing the odor to horseplay, I was overwhelmed with a powerful thought: “Can they tell I’m stoned?”
Dee suspected it, but she didn’t give me away.
Some of my friends worried when I appeared to be using more and more illicit drugs.
They were right to be concerned. I was looking for a way to escape. Smoking pot was just another way to avoid the depressing and complicated realities of my life. It was just another way for me to test the boundaries. Looking back on those days from the vantage point of a middle-aged man, I can see where the teenage me was heading in a dangerous direction and could have ended up in jail or, worse, dead.
Always one of the biggest guys in my age group, I slowly matured into a good athlete. At my mother’s suggestion, I joined the Blizzard Ski Club and became a very good skier, winning a long list of competitions and having a pipe dream of someday participating in the Olympic trials. Eventually I blew out my knee, but the success I enjoyed on the slopes gave me a jolt of self-esteem.
I yearned for a positive male role model, someone to show me how to be a man.
Would I have rebelled less—or more—with a dominant former military man looking over my shoulder? I don’t know the answer to this question. I know I needed guidance that I wasn’t getting.
When I was in the seventh grade, Robert Conrad showed up at Montclair and announced he was going to coach the school’s flag football team. He was a big star, so no one argued. Soon his friend Red West, onetime bodyguard to Elvis and a co-star on Conrad’s TV show Baa Baa Black Sheep, joined the effort.
Instilling a sense of discipline, toughness, and ambition, and teaching sound techniques, Conrad and West pushed the guys relentlessly. The first year, we posted a winning season. The second year, we were undefeated.
“Mr. Conrad was the epitome of macho, this very dominant male figure,” Joe Patterson said. “He was a great influence on all of us—an inspirational figure. Those two guys were out there teaching us how to be men.”
It mattered not that Conrad had been largely absent in his son’s life, which caused resentment to bubble up on the practice field when Chris suddenly found himself interacting with his father as a coach, or that he often walked the sidelines drinking a beer. Sometimes, he would hand me an empty beer can during the middle of drills and tell me to dispose of it in “the wall,” our code for a hole in the concrete wall adjacent to the athletic field.
Out of that experience I learned a lot about teamwork and competition. It also helped me get my mind off Dad. It was a good distraction at a time when, as Teperson said, I was like “a guy in a giant whirlpool grabbing at little pieces of flotation devices.”
“Gary was still lost all through high school,” Jon added. “He didn’t know what he was searching for. He couldn’t articulate it.”
A couple of years after Dad died, Mom started to date a man named Bob, who worked on black ops programs at Area 51. Many times, she corrected and disciplined me in front of Bob, but he never got involved. Nobody was ever going to take my father’s place, and Mom never allowed Bob or anyone else to cross that line.
It might have been different if she had decided to remarry. But she never did. As much as she grieved for my father, I always got the impression that Mom never wanted to stop being Mrs. Francis Gary Powers. This was a role that was deeply imbedded in her identity… even as I viewed my name with mounting ambivalence.
Often, while hanging out in the basement, my friends would ask questions about my father. “Everybody now forgets that no one knew what happened back then,” Teperson said, recalling our late-night conversations, usually while Mom was passed out upstairs. “Did he not pull the ejection because he thought it was wired to blow? Was he supposed to use the poison pin and didn’t? Gary grew up surrounded by this, smothered by this.”
This extended conversation was the beginning of something. I could not imagine what. Not just yet.
Mom didn’t realize it at the time, but one of the ways her son dealt with the loss of his father was by becoming a spy.
As part of my fascination with puzzles and ciphers, I taught myself how to pick locks. It started out with me wanting to get into Mom’s drawer or Dad’s desk, just to prove I could. I became pretty good with a paper clip.
It eventually evolved beyond picking locks. Bored and irritated by what I thought was unfair grading by some of my teachers, I developed a routine of writing tiny crib notes on a pen, which I repeatedly clicked to reveal answers during tests.
“We had a signal,” Conrad said. “I’d say, ‘Ah, my pen ran out of ink… and he’d say, ‘Oh, I have a pen’ and throw it to me.”