Lanzot remembers watching the explosion live with her class.
"It crashed on television!" she says. "I didn't want to be an astronaut any more...[Before the explosion,] we would have to draw pictures of what life would be like on a space station--we stopped doing that."
Writers in their twenties have called the Challenger explosion the most significant news event of a generation. But for current college students, that memory may be fading fast. Even many seniors say they were too young to be genuinely moved by the tragedy.
"I don't think I knew enough to appreciate what had really happened," Dave E. Rosow '00 says.
Earlier news events, like the 1984 presidential election, seem to have disappeared from students' memory almost entirely. Few have memories of Ronald Reagan's landslide victory over Walter Mondale.
"I remember thinking I would vote for Reagan, but now of course I hate Ronald Reagan," Rosow says. "He was so much more telegenic than Walter Mondale.
The choice was simpler for Emily T. Kuo '97, now a student at Harvard Law School.
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