I desperately wanted to see the wreckage from my father’s plane. But no one seemed to know where it was. I wanted to see the Hall of Columns, but the closest we got was having someone point it out from inside a moving car.
It was an interesting time to visit Moscow. Mikhail Gorbachev was opening things up, and everyone was friendly, but I got the impression that they didn’t quite know what to do with me or how to deal with my desire to learn about what happened to my father.
I especially wanted to watch the May Day parade, to experience the Communist celebration in Red Square, where Khrushchev had once learned of my father’s shoot-down. But our handlers insisted that this was impossible. Only later would we learn that Soviet officials were determined to keep us Americans as far as possible from the parade, because they were expecting a crowd of protesters, reflecting the revolution just starting to gather strength. We had our first insight that the Soviet Union would disintegrate—as happened nineteen months later—and I remember Gregg making this prediction on the plane ride home.
On the way home, we visited Berlin, where I chipped off a piece of the quickly disappearing wall. The separate nations of West Germany and East Germany were starting to talk about reunification, which many thought they would never see.
There was this euphoria on the streets, a festive atmosphere. But what I remember most is the conversation I had with a bartender, who told me about how all of their lives, he and his peers in East Germany had been told what to do. Now that the wall was down, there was no one telling them what to do. A lot of the younger generation was lost. They didn’t quite know how to handle freedom. It was going to take time for them to transition out of that communist mind-set.
While retracing my father’s footsteps across the Glienicker Bridge, I was interviewed by a camera crew from NBC News, which was placing one of the landmark events of the Cold War into context as the epic struggle between East and West ended without a shot.
I tried to imagine how Dad must have felt walking across that bridge, to finally be free.
When my grandmother Ida passed away in 1991, I caught a plane to Virginia for the funeral.
After graduating from Cal State–LA the previous year, I had moved to Mammoth Lakes, California, with a friend, taking a construction job and then transitioning into a night auditing position at the Mammoth Mountain Inn, adjacent to the ski slopes. I was able to ski more than one hundred days that season, while figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. I used that time to get my head on straight.
Once back in Pound, I experienced a rather-unsettling realization: My Virginia relatives felt like strangers.
If I was going to get to know all about my father and try to understand him, I needed to spend more time with my family.
Since I was already thinking about graduate school, I eventually enrolled at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, which allowed me to visit my relatives. I got to know Aunt Jan, who lived in suburban DC, and frequently made the six-hour drive to Pound, where the Powers clan was surprised by my sudden interest.
“We didn’t know what to think of him at first,” recalled Aunt Joan with a laugh. “He wasn’t accustomed to us or our ways.”
The road to my past always reminded me of a rollercoaster. Carefully steering my way along the narrow, curvy, bumpy country road in southwestern Virginia, plotting a course for the isolated hollow where my father’s story began, I was headed for a place of shadows and ghosts. My father’s. And my own.
Sometimes I flashed back to that miserable trip to the Pound in 1978. I remembered how empty the place felt without my father. But time slowly changed me, allowing me to put that painful memory in perspective.
By the early 1990s, my trips to the old hometown no longer felt obligatory. Each time I arrived to a warm welcome and set up camp in Joan and Walton’s or Jack and Jean’s spare bedroom, I felt a bit closer to my father and the world that shaped him.
“It didn’t take us long to figure out what a fine young man Gary is,” Joan said. “He was making a real serious effort to get to know all about his daddy and the family. We told him all the stories we could remember. He always wanted to know more.”
I wanted to know all about the pivotal day when my father took his first flight; the jobs he held; how Oliver felt when his son decided not to go to medical school; and the day those government men showed up in the shoe-repair shop to tell Oliver his son had been “lost” while flying a routine weather-reconnaissance mission.
They told me about the day when the pilot came home after returning from the Soviet Union and helped a newsman get his car out of the mud. “Francis was trying to keep his distance from the press, but what was he going to do?” Walton recalled. “It had rained a bunch and the road got muddy. The man needed help. Naturally, Francis got out there and helped him push his car out of the mud. That’s the kind of guy he was.”
I learned that Dad used to run track and liked to compete with his hands sticking straight out, as opposed to in a fist; that he sometimes hopped the rails to get back to Pound; and that he had been inducted into the local Masonic lodge, convinced by his childhood friend Jack Goff that it would be good for career advancement.
Walton told me about the day when he and Francis drove a truck off a mountain road on a hairpin turn, an accident which very nearly ended in disaster. He took me to the scene and walked me through the mishap.
“Gary wanted to know all there was to know… like it was all one big mystery,” Goff said.
One of the memories I held close from my childhood was how Dad and I always stopped for milkshakes at Robo’s, a little drive-in with a walk-up window and picnic tables on the road between Pound and the home place. I was happy to see the little restaurant still open in the early ’90s. Pulling over for a shake or perhaps a chilidog would remain one of my regular rituals every time I returned, well into the twenty-first century.
At a meeting concerning POW/MIA affairs inside a hotel at Pentagon City in 1995, I stood up from my seat in the audience and introduced myself. Murmurs rumbled across the room. Is that really HIS son?
Fighting through nervousness, I told the crowd I was trying to find out all I could about my father and that I would appreciate any help. This led to a series of introductions, which enabled me to start maneuvering through the bureaucracy to learn the still-hidden truths.
Around this time, I heard about an upcoming conference concerning the U-2 in Bodo, Norway, where Dad was supposed to land on May 1, 1960. Not having much money, I bartered my way into the event, agreeing to set up an exhibit of U-2 artifacts, including a piece of the plane, fragments of the crashed helicopter, and a rug Dad had woven in prison, in exchange for having my airfare and hotel accommodations covered. The exhibit remained in Norway for six months and later was displayed at the National Reconnaissance Office, Central Intelligence Agency, and Defense Intelligence Agency headquarters. It has been traveling the world for more than two decades (and is currently on long-term display at the Strategic Air Command and Aerospace Museum near Omaha, Nebraska).
One part of the trip was especially memorable: Meeting Sergei Khrushchev, son of the late Soviet leader.
In September 1991, the younger Khrushchev started a one-year contract as a visiting professor at Brown University’s Institute for International Studies. Three months later, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, his permanent position back home disappeared. He decided to stay in the United States, eventually becoming a proud American citizen. Nothing reflected the end of the Cold War quite as powerfully as Khrushchev’s son happily pursuing his own version of the American dream as an instructor at an Ivy League university, as well as a lecturer at the Naval War College.