1st: That Ronald Reagan became the 40th President of the United States.
2nd favorite childhood memory: That Jimmy Carter had to sit front and center and listen to this..One of, if not the greatest inaugural address ever given.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-kTC7cYvWM
I was 16 at the time so legally I was still a child, but seriously, I cannot think of a better time. My father was crying when all this happened and I NEVER saw him cry before in my life he was so jazzed. He absolutely hated the Kennedys and Democrats with a passion, felt JFK deliberately let the Russkies take advantage of the USA and felt the Kennedys gave the Catholic Irish a bad name. Reagan he said vindicated us lol. There was a lot of celebrating I can tell you that. Best time EVER.
My dad was almost the opposite, he was a life long democrat who had voted straight ticket since he cast his first vote for FDR. Reagan was the first Republican he ever voted for because Carter was just so that awful, I remember right after he voted, he walked in the door with this hangdog look on his face and said like he was confessing to a murder, "Well I did it, I voted for that damn Republican." The GOOD news is by 1984, he was driving around with Reagan bumper stickers on his truck and talking about Reagan like he was the second coming of Christ. Then after the Iran Contra deal, he got so angry at the Democrat party for the way they treated Reagan, he went and changed his voter registration and voted Republican until his death in 2000, just after Bush won the election (almost a blessing he didn't live long enough to see Obama get in).