Douglas Hegdahl was born on September 3, 1946 in Clark, South Dakota. Being from a small town, Douglas once joked with a reporter that he’d “never been east of [his] uncles’ Dairy Queen stand in Glenwood, Minnesota or west of [his] aunt’s house in Phoenix, Arizona.” So when a military recruiter approached Douglas in the 1960s, he saw an opportunity to see the world, answered the call, and joined United States Navy.

Looking back to when Laurel welcomed home first Southeast Asia POW (Lawrence Bailey)
The specially modified, intelligence-gathering C-47 plane lifted off from Vientiane, the capital of Laos, March 23, 1961, and headed north toward Xieng Khouangville, a Communist-held area. The experienced Air Force crew was accompanied by Army Maj. Lawrence R. Bailey, a Laurel resident serving as the assistant Army attache in Vientiane.



