Francy Powers Jr. - Spy Pilot - Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 Incident, and a Controversial Cold War Legacy

“Is your mom there?”

Chris did not recognize the woman’s voice and realized his mother didn’t want to be disturbed.

Because of Robert Conrad’s celebrity, the family was accustomed to crank calls and bizarre people showing up at the front door. Some insisted the tough guy take them up on his offer to knock the battery off his shoulder, echoing a well-known television commercial. For such nuts, Joan was always prepared, carrying a loaded .38-caliber pistol in her pocket.

Through the years, arriving at all hours of the day and night, unannounced, I learned to approach the Encino house with caution. Knowing Joan was packing, I always waved my arms in the air and yelled: “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! It’s Gary!”

The reply from the sweet-sounding voice was a confirmation that the human alarm system had been temporarily disabled. “Oh, Gary! Is that you, Gary?”

Mrs. Conrad spent most of her time locked in her room watching television, rarely cooking, and leaving the son and his friends with virtual free rein in his part of the house, which became the group’s clubhouse. When we were older, she sometimes bought us kegs of beer after extracting a promise that we would not drink and drive.

In this case, his mother happened to be standing nearby when the phone rang.

But Chris knew enough to lie when someone asked if his mother was available.

“Not really.”

He could hear a woman sobbing in the background.

“Uh… can we drop Gary off over there?”

“Oh, I don’t know….”

When Chris put his mother on the phone, he watched the anguish quickly rise across her face. She liked Frank and Sue very much. They were kind people. When she learned that Frank had died, along with cameraman George Spears, after his Channel 4 Telecopter crashed just a few miles from the Conrads’ home, Joan immediately felt compelled to do whatever she could to help.

Devastated, my mom struggled to deal with the situation. When word reached Dee, who was in the Air Force Reserve, our mother asked her to fly home—even though she was stationed at Norton Air Force base in San Bernardino, just a 75-mile freeway drive from Sherman Oaks. “Mom wasn’t making much sense, which was completely understandable,” Dee recalled.

Marvine Neff, one of Mom’s closest friends and part of the Rand McNally and Libby fruit family, decided she needed to remove twelve-year-old me from the scene for a while, so she could get a grip. Mrs. Neff dropped me off at the Conrads’, where Joan gave me a big hug. This is when I realized something was wrong, and I fought to hold back tears so that Chris would not see me cry.

“My mom took Gary and me to a toy store and bought us a bunch of toys,” Chris said. “That was her way of trying to deal with the situation. We just sat and played with trains and stuff.”

I remember the events of August 1, 1977, through a fog.

It was brush fire season in Southern California. In addition to his patrol of the freeways, which often included police chases, my father had been dispatched to the Santa Barbara area, north of Los Angeles, to capture footage of flames streaking ominously toward the sky.

“The helicopter was a real game changer for us in those days,” recalled longtime Channel 4 reporter Frank Cruz, who often worked with my father. “It made for some exciting television when you had something dramatic to shoot.”

Typically, the local news break during NBC’s Today program included a broad mix of news, sports, and weather. But on this morning, local anchor Cruz quickly tossed immediately to Dad, who offered a detailed report featuring some very captivating video, while hovering near the action. “It was all about the fire that day, and Frank did a great job of reporting, as he always did,” Cruz said.

A representative from KNBC told the media the pilot had checked in via radio around 12:25 p.m., reporting that he was flying to the Van Nuys Airport to gas up his Jet Bell Ranger and head back out on his next assignment. The copter crashed about 12:40, near a velodrome and a Little League baseball field at Balboa Park in Encino. One witness saw the tail rotor fly off as it plunged to the ground, though this was never confirmed. Dad died of blunt force trauma to the chest.

Police speculated that the pilot may have tried to put the aircraft down in the vacant lot to avoid the nearby playground. “Just south of there are single-family residences, to the west large apartments, and to the northeast there were kids playing ball,” reported Lieutenant Mel Melton of the Los Angeles Police. “I don’t know what was in his mind, but he didn’t hit any of them.” 1

Investigators determined that the helicopter ran out of fuel—impacted by a malfunctioning gauge that had been repaired. This fell into the realm of pilot error.

As grief enveloped the Channel 4 news team, where my father had been employed for ten months, a former colleague at radio station KGIL spoke of her sadness at the loss of the “sweetest, gentlest man I’ve ever met.” 2

“This station is devastated up and down the halls,” said Joann Larson, a controller at KGIL. 3

Some members of the family back in Virginia suspected foul play, reflecting the level of distrust and bitterness many harbored for the government. The difficult-to-accept truth was colored by an overwhelming irony: A man who had once survived a violent crash in the stratosphere followed by twenty-one months in a Soviet prison died because he ran out of gas less than five miles from his Sherman Oaks home.

Family friend Gregg Anderson arrived to help my mother work through various decisions she needed to make, including scheduling the memorial service at First Christian Church in North Hollywood.

Mom relied on Gregg very heavily because she was going squirrely.

Moving through the list, Anderson asked Sue where she wanted Frank to be buried.

“Arlington.”

To Mom, the decision was simple. Her husband had risked his life for his country and deserved to be buried among heroes.

The widow was walking around the house, with Gregg following closely behind, pressing the subject.

“Yes, I understand,” Anderson said, “but what if we can’t get him into Arlington?”

Sue was adamant. “Gregg, there’s no alternate plan. Frank will be buried in Arlington.”

Even at the most heart-wrenching moment of her life, she was focused on securing her husband’s legacy.

This was something my father and mother argued about when he was still alive. Dad told her, “They [the government] don’t want me at Arlington. Don’t waste your time. It will never happen.”

But Mom was stubborn. Understanding that the country was divided into two camps about her husband, she was determined to achieve the public validation that burial at Arlington National Cemetery conferred.

While working the problem, Gregg was provided with a telephone number to reach a certain figure at the CIA. He called the number and was greeted by silence. He would have to start speaking without any acknowledgment from the other party, which offered the real-estate developer—who built Westlake Village in the San Fernando Valley and other high-end properties—a window into that mysterious world. Gregg later told me it was the weirdest thing he’d ever done.

The family and several friends in the government, including Air Force General Leo Geary, successfully maneuvered through the system and secured Dad’s burial rights at Arlington, which ultimately required the authorization of President Jimmy Carter.

Before boarding the jet at Los Angeles International Airport, Mom insisted on visiting the cargo bay, where she lifted the lid on the casket to make sure it was indeed her beloved Frank. (In DC, she became embroiled in an argument with some of his sisters, who wanted him to have an open casket at the ceremony. “No fucking way!” she said. Aware that the event would attract press photographers, she was determined to deny them a picture of his cold, dead body.)