Senior citizens, today is a day for you to once again shove it in all our young, unblemished faces just how much better you are than us. Then again, Tom Brokaw pretty much already does enough of that for you.  Still though, when lesser men cowered, you looked danger right in the eye… and then asked if he would speak up a little more because you’re having trouble hearing. I kid, I kid.

What really happened was Bob Hayden, a retired police commander age 65, and a retired Marine Corps captain, subdued an unrulely passenger aboard a Minneapolis-to-Boston flight.

“I had looked around the plane for help, and all the younger guys had averted their eyes. When I asked the guy next to me if he was up to it, all he said was, ‘Retired captain. USMC.’ I said, ‘You’ll do,’ ” Hayden recalled. “So, basically, a couple of grandfathers took care of the situation.”

The best part of this story comes from Hayden’s wife, who, after 40 years of marriage, is not easily impressed.

Even as her husband struggled with the agitated passenger, she barely looked up from “The Richest Man in Babylon,” the book she was reading.

“The woman sitting in front of us was very upset and asked me how I could just sit there reading,” Katie Hayden said. “Bob’s been shot at. He’s been stabbed. He’s taken knives away. He knows how to handle those situations. I figured he would go up there and step on somebody’s neck, and that would be the end of it. I knew how that situation would end. I didn’t know how the book would end.”

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