My father was thrust onto the world stage, and I briefly became famous by association.

It was a seriously weird experience.

Ronald Reagan seconds before he was shot outside the Washington Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981. Secret Service Agent Jerry Parr is in the light-colored raincoat at left.

I was turning the key to my dorm room at Syracuse University when Judy Lodato walked up and asked if my father was okay. She said someone just tried to kill the president of the United States, and a Secret Service agent was hit. That’s why she was asking.

This happened 45 years ago, on March 30, 1981. My father, Jerry Parr, was head of the Presidential Protective Division for the US Secret Service. Traveling with presidents was part of his job, and I immediately assumed the worst.

Before I could panic, the floor phone rang. I had no phone of my own (it was a different era), and the public phone down the hall by the elevators was the main way people got in touch with me. My mother was on the other end.

“Daddy is okay,” she said. “He was there, but wasn’t hit. Are you watching the news?”

No, because I also had no television set. But Judy did, so to Judy’s room we went, where we watched the same clip of news footage, played over and over again, of Dad grabbing Ronald Reagan by his left shoulder, folding him over like a pretzel, and propelling him behind an armored door and into a limousine. The car pulled away, revealing three bodies splayed across a city sidewalk.

Secret Service agents scramble during the attempted assassination of President Reagan, March 30, 1981.

The gunman, John Hinckley, Jr., had been waiting among a group of news videographers outside the Washington Hilton Hotel that day, March 30, 1981. When Reagan stepped out and began waving to the crowd, Hinckley stepped forward, firing six shots in 1.7 seconds.

Early news coverage was almost as chaotic as the crime scene itself. Reporters initially claimed that Reagan was unhurt. But by the end of the day, the world knew three things: Four men had been shot; the president of the United States had been seriously wounded; and Jerry Parr, the Secret Service agent seen shoving Reagan into the car, had made the snap decision to divert the motorcade from the White House to George Washington University Hospital, likely saving Reagan’s life.

My sisters and I were all pretty shook. Dad had been in the Secret Service as long as we could remember; it was no big deal. It’s bizarre in retrospect, but never in a million years did I think he could actually be shot on the job.

Dad phoned each of us the next day. Aside from sounding a bit tired, he was the same gentle, soft-spoken father I’d always known. But things had changed.

Overnight, I became The Girl Whose Dad Saved The President. Even people who loathed Reagan (and there were plenty of them) thought the whole thing was quite badass. The event was covered ceaselessly in the media, and for several days, images of Reagan and Dad were splashed across the cover of every newspaper and magazine on campus.

Instructors stared at me in class. Other kids whispered and smiled shyly when I approached. Formerly cold and stand-offish people suddenly exuded warmth and familiarity.

An older, irritable woman worked behind the main desk in the dorm lobby. She seldom spoke but glared contemptuously at anyone who dared to ask about a delivery, a spare key, whatever. She had never said one word to me. But two days after the assassination attempt, she smiled and called out, “Good morning, Kimberly!”

Evidently, I’d been thrust into a parallel universe, a campus version of Cheers, where everybody knew my name.

I wasn’t the only family member basking in reflected glory. Both my sisters also became minor local celebrities. Jennifer, a high school senior, was formally invited to become a debutante. My parents were flattered but declined on her behalf; becoming a debutante was apparently crazy expensive.

It wasn’t all rainbows and adoration. Two reporters called me via the floor phone, aggressively demanding interviews. When I politely declined, one said, “Why not? What are you hiding?” For a while, a girl on my floor would scream, “Your father’s a f**kin’ asshole!” every time she saw me. Someone finally told her to shut it, and thereafter she merely scowled.

Eventually, the hoopla died down. Hinckley was tried and acquitted by reason of insanity, which was itself kind of insane. Dad was awarded US Congress commendations and kept on right working. I eventually met most of the agents who were present that day, and all of the men who’d been shot: Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy; DC Police Officer Thomas Delahanty; and James Brady, the former White House press secretary and most grievously wounded of all.

I met the president himself in the Oval Office the day Dad retired in 1985. When we walked in, Reagan joked, “You’re not going to throw me over that couch, are you?”

President Reagan with Jerry Parr and family in the Oval Office, 1985.

In the summer of 2015, Dad collapsed in his backyard. He was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and began a sad, slow decline. Over the next few months, I flew back and forth from Syracuse to Washington several times.

On October 8, I got the call: This was it, come now. I managed to reserve the last available seat on the last available flight out of Syracuse the next morning, and arrived to find him still alive but in a coma. We remained at his bedside in hospice for the next couple of hours while people from his church waited respectfully in the lobby outside his room.

It was hot for October, nearly 80 degrees, and the air grew heavy and sweetly pungent. A storm was definitely on the way. I was sorry Dad wasn’t awake to see it; he loved storms, the louder and more violent, the better.

A cold front soon surged into Washington accompanied by lightning, thunder, and torrential rains. As the storm eased up, my sister Trish and I decided to briefly step away to survey the damage. The late-afternoon sun was just breaking through the clouds, and the steaming pavement was littered with leaves and broken branches.

We went back inside and found Dad had slipped away. He had departed along with the raging storm, and the sun reflecting off the pavement filled his room with light.