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

On the morning of the interment, with various members of the family gathered at my mom’s parents’ home in Fairfax, Virginia, Mom was standing at the kitchen sink when suddenly something outside the window caught her eye.

“There’s Daddy!”

Dee was startled. “What are you talking about?”

Sue pointed to a white dove fluttering beyond the glass, which she took as some sort of sign.

“A great calm came over her at that point,” Dee recalled.

Before the limousine pulled up to Section 11, Lot 685-2 of the massive graveyard, Mom handed me half of a sedative to steady my nerves. It was hot and humid, and I fidgeted in my suit. I was seated between my mother and grandmother Ida, who looked very frail as they lowered her boy into the ground with a twenty-one-gun salute.

Surrounded by a sea of simple white markers stretching into the horizon, commemorating thousands of others who had served their country honorably, a gathering of friends, including many spooks, shielded our family from the media and anyone else who might want to intrude on our privacy.

“A lot of people were concerned Barbara might show up and cause a scene,” Joe Murphy recalled.

At the church services, three days after the crash, Barbara had made an appearance. Everyone felt uncomfortable. This was the only time I was ever to catch a glimpse of my father’s first wife.

At the burial, Barbara stood in the distance, silently paying her respects. She had remarried and apparently had transcended her troubled past, which gave Murphy a good feeling on a sad day.

When the enormity of my father’s passing began to sink in, I welled up with emotion. My very masculine father had always taught me that big boys don’t cry. And my mother had made me aware of all the photographers who were waiting like vultures to capture the family’s weakness in a time of stress. So I fought against the emotion of the moment, determined to honor both my father and my mother, at one point biting my lower lip. I was not going to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me cry.

Like many people, my mother drank alcohol to unwind. She and Dad typically shared a cocktail or two when he arrived home from a stressful day of flying. They laughed and talked and enjoyed each other’s company while gathering a little buzz. Drinking was part of the context of Mom’s daily life. She loved to tell the story about how she and her beloved Frank spent the hours before the cameras rolled on a pivotal, late-night scene of NBC’s movie about the U-2 pilot on location in Long Beach: Sipping martinis with Lee Majors in his trailer. As a result, Majors was drunk when they shot the scene of him walking across the bridge.

Sometimes, she stumbled over the line.

“Every single year, my dad would take my mom out to dinner on her birthday, and every single year they would get into a fight,” Dee said. “I’m sure it was her drinking. She was not a good drinker. She could get really nasty when she drank.”

When Mom got drunk and abusive during a party at the Andersons’ house, Dad politely said his goodbyes and led me out the front door. We walked home more than two miles through darkened streets, leaving Mom to sleep it off.

When Dad died, Mom’s drinking became much worse.

“She crawled inside a bottle, and that’s where she lived her life till she died,” Dee said.

One night, when she was falling down drunk in the house, I had to help her to bed.

You never forget that.

After watching her spiral into a dark place, I made a call to an alcoholic support group. I wanted to get my mother some help and learn how to deal with her problem. But I wound up not attending any meetings, because I was sure they would want to know my name.

This was a conversation I didn’t want to have—not at an age when I just wanted to fade into the wallpaper.

I knew I couldn’t go there. My own anxiety trapped me into not doing anything.

Left without a father at the most critical time of any young man’s development, and forced to deal with a mother who abused alcohol as a way of coping, I headed into my teens riddled by insecurity.

My closest friends witnessed my struggle.

“Gary’s life was turned upside down overnight,” Chris Conrad said. “His dad had been the center of his universe, his hero, his role model. Boom. He’s gone. And his mom is dealing with her own pain. So Gary sort of felt like he was on his own, which must have been a pretty lonely feeling.”

The summer after Dad died, I flew to Virginia by myself to visit my family. It was the same farm where I had once delighted in shooting targets and handling chores with my father. But something was different. Separated from the fast pace of Los Angeles, I quickly grew bored. At one point, I placed a long-distance call to a friend back in California, whining about how much I disliked the Pound.

I was miserable and couldn’t wait to go home. Without my father, it felt like a totally different place. Without my father, I felt lost.

Even though Dad’s passing left us in a much more difficult financial situation, Mom somehow managed to keep sending me to Montclair Prep, a prestigious private school in the San Fernando Valley, where I was surrounded by the sons and daughters of the rich and famous. Sometimes, in that rarified air, I felt invisible. Earning spending money by working at a pizza place and a video arcade after school and on weekends, I eventually drove to school in a Chevy Citation, which I parked alongside the Mercedes, BMWs, and Porches that filled the school parking lot.

I felt very out of place. I was trying to figure out who I was without my dad, and being in a school where I never felt like I fit in made it worse.

I tried to convince Mom to let me enroll in a nearby public school. She would not hear of it. We often argued about the subject, cutting straight to the heart of my struggle for identity and a sense of belonging.

Joe Patterson, who has been my friend since second grade, saw me begin to withdraw into a shell. “You could tell he was struggling with the situation,” Patterson said. “He was devastated by his dad’s death, which made the usual teenage problems much worse.”

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.