Listening to the compelling presentation on Pan Am 103 by my fellow Washington, D.C.-area alumni leader and History Alumni Advisory Committee member Mark Zaid '89 on January 31, 2024 brought me back to those dark days following the tragedy. Simply put, no one has been as dogged in the pursuit of justice and remembrance as Mark. His selfless work and passion still bring comfort to so many who were directly impacted, as well as those of us on the periphery of this senseless terrorist act.
In the days after the tragedy, we learned that many of the Pan Am 103 passengers were students, including two Rochester undergraduates. Like them, I was returning home to the United States in December 1988 from a study abroad experience in the United Kingdom. In fact, I flew back on Pan Am from London-Heathrow to New York-JFK just a couple days previously. I can still remember vividly being glued to the television at home in my family's den as news slowly emerged about the downed Boeing 747 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
While mourning the loss of so many innocent lives aboard the aircraft and on the ground, I also recognized my close call. Because I was returning to Britain after the holiday break to complete the remainder of my full-year program at Keele University, I did not have contact information for my friends there. Moreover, because this was 1988, there was no social media for countless international travelers like me to share our status with others. Moreover, no one owned cell phones and very few people even had email addresses.
Thirty years later, my daughter Celia enrolled at Rochester and went abroad on numerous occasions. It was striking to compare the tectonic shift in connectivity that occurred in a single generation. Parent-student communication in the late 1980s, even between highly industrialized nations, involved my parents calling Keele's student union where a staff member would take their message and pin it on a bulletin board for me to see, then I would call home on a nearby pay phone, hoping to catch them rather than a tape-based answering machine. By contrast, within the past decade I could geolocate Celia in real time with pinpoint accuracy using our GPS-enabled cell phones, even when she was on the Galapagos Islands, one of the world's more remote locations.
As time passes, I hope our community will continue to join Mark in remembering the lives of those lost, as well as appreciating the remarkable opportunities afforded to us all. Life is too short to do otherwise.