Lawrence Thies — Larry to everyone who knows him — was born in 1934 in a log cabin three miles south of Campbell Hill, the first person in his family to attend high school. He was part of the inaugural class at Trico, graduating in 1952. He grew up playing ball on the streets of Campbell Hill from about age five and was Athlete of the Year as a senior. He made his way through life by following one thread he trusted: adventure. He is 91 years old and still lives in California with his wife, Mary — married 64 years — who grew up with him in Campbell Hill, attended Trico with him, and went to SIU with him.

After graduating from Trico, Larry enrolled at SIU with thoughts of playing baseball. Five semesters in, the money ran out. His solution was the Marine Corps — let the government pay for his education. He served three years, receiving orders for Taiwan just as the Chinese Communists were shelling the islands of Kinmen and Matsu in the Taiwan Strait. President Eisenhower's public threat to use atomic weapons prompted a stand-down, and Larry's orders were rerouted to 29 Palms, California, where he was assigned to an artillery and later a rocket unit. His final year included a six-month Mediterranean deployment with the Navy — a warm cruise following rough days in the North Atlantic — with stops that included Gibraltar and Beirut.

He returned home, finished college at SIU with a physical education degree, and took his first job at O'Fallon, Illinois, as a basketball coach, baseball coach, and American History teacher. His team was the all-conference co-champions that year. After two years, the classroom wasn't satisfying enough. A friend mentioned the Office of Naval Intelligence — then beginning what would evolve into NCIS — and Larry interviewed in St. Louis and Chicago. Three months later, he was accepted as a civilian Special Agent. He spent six months training in Chicago, then four years in Indianapolis, before volunteering to transfer to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the work was unlike anything he had encountered before.

San Juan meant investigating murders, drugs, and Castro-directed bombings. Six agents handled five murder investigations simultaneously. Puerto Rican nationalists were targeting U.S. companies with incendiary devices — a Kmart was burned weeks after opening, and a bomb was later found in the lobby of a Howard Johnson hotel where Larry's family had recently stayed. He flew by helicopter to Vieques, where Marines trained, and landed at least once on the USS Saratoga. "The work down there was unique," he says simply.

After Puerto Rico, he returned to Illinois, then transferred to the Defense Investigative Service — now the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency — which brought the family to Orange County, California, where Larry and Mary have lived for more than fifty years. He retired from federal service at age 50, after forty years, then took contract work with the FBI, interviewing Iranians and Iraqis as ground sources in the Middle East, and later worked for the State Department and the Treasury Department's Reconnaissance Office — all managed from home. He earned a master's degree from the University of Illinois. Both children graduated from UCLA.

In retirement, Larry turned to screenwriting, producing scripts about Metropolis and its Superman statue, about Charlie Berger (the last man hanged in Franklin County), and about a Pearl Harbor spy family. The Pearl Harbor screenplay led him to write a letter in 1994 to a woman whose family had been involved in espionage. She refused him permission to proceed, and the project was shelved. Thirty years later, her daughter Christine Kuehn wrote a book called “My Family of Spies”, uncovering the same story — and in the first chapter, references a Hollywood screenwriter who had written to her father decades earlier. That screenwriter was Larry Thies of Campbell Hill.

He was inducted into the Trico Hall of Achievement on February 10, 2018. His son arranged for the family to spend the night before the ceremony in St. Louis with a room overlooking Busch Stadium, lit up in the February night. Larry has been a Cardinals fan since 1946. The family gathered — children, grandchildren, the whole group — to honor a man who started life in a log cabin in southern Illinois and somehow ended up landing on aircraft carriers, investigating Castro's operatives, and being cited in a spy memoir. "As far as preparing me for the future," he says of Trico, "I didn't know what kind of future it was going to be. But it was a very good experience all the way through."