At 2:15 p.m. on October 22, 1983, Ronald Reagan was on Augusta's 16th hole when Harris barreled down Washington Road in his 1974 Dodge pick-up and rammed through the locked gates. Harris knew his way around the club: He had grown up five blocks away and in high school had worked the scoreboard at The Masters. He screeched to a halt outside the pro shop, ordered seven people at gunpoint into a room and demanded to see Reagan, who was playing with Secretary of State and Augusta member George Shultz. "I wasn't there to kill him," Harris says. "I was there to give him my thoughts."

Everyone in town knew that Reagan was at the golf club. Harris, then 45, was angry at having recently lost his job as a millwright at a paper company, and when he heard on the news that U.S. Steel was laying off 4,000 workers because of foreign competition, he knocked back a few drinks and decided to go talk about it with the Gipper.

Kris Hardy was working in the pro shop when Harris stormed in. "The whole time he's waving the gun around, I'm thinking, 'This can't be real,' " Hardy says. Harris asked Hardy how old he was. "Nineteen," replied the 23-year-old. "You're too young," Harris said. "Get out of here."

As Secret Service agents and snipers moved in, Harris released his captives until only Augusta golf pro David Spencer remained. He threatened to shoot off Spencer's fingers unless he saw Reagan, who had been whisked off the course. Reagan phoned the shop. "This is the President of the United States," he said. "I understand you want to talk to me."

"He called me three times and I hung up on him three times," Harris says. "I was thinking they were trying to get my attention where they could sneak in and get me." After two hours of waiting for the president to show up, Harris surrendered. He had fired one shot--through a window to prove he was serious. Coverage of his protest lasted barely one news cycle: A few hours after the siege ended, a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines in Lebanon.

Harris was convicted in 1984 of false imprisonment and kidnapping and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was paroled in 1987.

"He didn't serve enough time," Hardy says. "Some articles made it sound like Charlie was just this good ol' boy who had too much to drink. If you hold a gun on somebody and threaten his life, you're not having a bad day. You did something wrong."

Today Harris lives just 14 miles from Augusta National but hasn't been back to the club since he left in handcuffs 22 years ago. "I was asked not to come back, but you'd have to pay me to go there," he says. "Used to be whoever was first could get a ticket. Now you can't."

At 66, Harris still isn't short on opinions (sample topics: immigrants, crooked politicians, Bibles in schools) but says he's mellowed since finding religion in prison. "God's in my life and that's all I'm about now," he says. "I used to be someone who if a man walked in a bar and said, 'I'm gonna whup the meanest thing in here,' I'd tell him right quick, 'I ain't the meanest, but I sure wanna try you.' "

His only regret about "that trick I done" at Augusta is that no one seemed to care what point he was trying to make. "President Reagan wrote my lawyer a letter and told him he didn't have no animosity against me, but I just went the wrong way about doing it," Harris says. "But how else do you see the president?"