I'm not sure where the "helmet generation" starts, but I'm almost 23 and we never wore helmets for anything. It sucks when a classmates dies though, I've only had 2 die that I went to school with, luckily I didn't know either one. One died from complications during brain surgery and the other was killed while my friend was drunk driving ( the kid wasn't wearing his seatbelt and flew out the window and was smashed between the car and a tree.
The second incident had the most effect on me, I never knew the kid that died but I knew the driver. The whole thing literally split the school in half.