History, sometimes, becomes deeply personal. On March 30, 1981, I was a senior at Ogden High School. My mother—of blessed memory—was undergoing a medical procedure that, today, would be handled as an outpatient visit. Back then, it meant several days in the hospital and weeks of recovery at home.
My grandfather had come to stay with us, ostensibly to “help” with the five of us kids. In reality, it felt more like he was doing everything he could to irritate my mom. That morning, she was in tears—truly sobbing—because my grandfather, a full-throated survivor of the Great Depression and the best example I’ve ever known of someone who grew up so poor he barely had two sticks to rub together, had “improved” her smooth peanut butter by adding peanuts to it. He didn’t want to pay extra for the chunky kind, you see.
That’s how the day started: my mother crying harder than I’d ever seen, my grandfather chattering on obliviously, my dad playing referee, and me dreading yet another morning at a school I was more than ready to leave behind.
I was in the process of joining the Navy. My grandfather—who had been a conscientious objector during World War II—vehemently disapproved. He made his opposition clear to both me and my parents, expecting them to stop me. I was still seventeen, so he thought they could. What he didn’t realize was that my parents had decided it was better to support me than to fight a losing battle once I turned eighteen.
It was… a rough morning.
Just after noon, the news broke. I had skipped the class I was supposed to be in—Mythology, I think—to hang out with my best friend in his Home Economics class. In Utah back then, this sort of maneuver was considered “clever.” The TV was on, and we saw it live: President Reagan had been shot.
School was effectively over. I went home and glued myself to the television. The world seemed to freeze.
Later that day, my grandfather and I had the worst argument of our lives. This same man who had refused to fight in WWII because of his beliefs now declared that all communists in America should be rounded up and shot—no trial, no charges, no justice. They had, in his mind, shot the President. That was enough.
Maybe I was starting to understand the Constitution. I probably couldn’t have explained it well at the time, but I knew that in a few weeks I’d be raising my right hand and swearing an oath to protect that very document. The same oath Reagan had taken just weeks before. And if those words meant anything, they meant that even a lunatic with a gun, no matter his ideology, was entitled to due process.
Then Alexander Haig came on TV and told us he was in charge. Like I said—it was a surreal day.
Reagan survived—barely. My grandfather eventually returned to Oklahoma City. A year later, we tried to reconcile. It was… partly successful.
That day has stayed with me. From peanut butter sabotage to constitutional showdowns in the living room, from adolescent rebellion to a dawning sense of duty—it’s all embedded in my memory.
Like most Americans, I never got the full story. We absorbed what the news told us. We grumbled when Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. We questioned whether movies were corrupting society.
Fast forward to 2011. I was hosting a radio talk show when I received a book pitch: Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan by Del Wilber, a reporter from Washington, D.C. In May of that year, I had Del on the show—and it sparked a series of off-air conversations that went far beyond Reagan.
But for today’s Dave Does History, I thought I’d share that interview with you as it first aired on KFIV/KWSX in 2011.
For me, March 30, 1981, will always be about peanut butter, arguing with my grandfather, and beginning to understand that the oath I would take wasn’t just words. It was a covenant.
DAVE DOES HISTORY 
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