The economy has had its ups and downs since the '30s, but it has never quite fallen into the trough into which it descended before World War II. But that doesn't mean that those who experienced those terrible times have gotten over them. I count myself as one of the Depression generation even though I came out of it remarkably unscathed.

That wasn't my fault but rather an odd set of circumstances, that shielded me from most of the Depression's ill effects. My father had died in the '20s and my mother moved back home to live with her parents and to help take care of them.

While they weren't wealthy by today's standards, they were "well fixed" and we never had to want for much of anything. For us the Depression was present but it was just far enough away so we didn't think of it as our problem.

But for millions of Americans, now mostly dead, the Great Depression left a scar on their psyches that endured for the rest of their lives.

There was, for example, my oldest uncle, a mining engineer, who had unwisely invested his life savings in a Nevada silver mine. The collapse of the price of silver brought about his collapse, too. From a smart apartment in San Francisco overlooking the Marina he and his wife suddenly awoke to find they were living by the grace of a brother-in-law in an old abandoned cabin on a ranch above Fairfield, drawing water by pump from a well and using an outhouse. There was no other plumbing.

My uncle never really recovered from this blow, never really had a job in mining again and spent the rest of his life remembering the good days, forever gone.

Then there is my mother-in-law, who found herself in the '30s with a child, later to be my wife, no husband (he had died), 80 cents in her pocket and few prospects. For the rest of her life she feared this would happen again and no matter how much money she accumulated, she never really felt financially secure.

The same was true of the author Tillie Olsen, who was married and had four children and who also was desperately poor. The experience of poverty left its mark on all her writing but particularly on an unfinished novel about mill workers that is both grim and unyielding in its story of the struggle to survive.

The Depression produced many such works.

Slowly from the ruins the country recovered but not without its mark on the national psyche.

It's no fun to be poor. It's degrading; it destroys one's self-respect, leads one into desperate measures and sometimes results in revolutions. In retrospect the New Deal barely got us out of the Depression and World War II helped to pull us the rest of the way back to prosperity. We've been there, more or less, ever since.

Today those days when one-third of a nation, as our president said, was "ill clothed, ill hosed and ill fed" are ancient history. Generations have come and gone. We have mounted into prosperity and world domination. We don't have many beggars on our streets anymore.

Back then we had a lot of them.

Even I can remember riding on the bus through Sacramento's "waterfront" and seeing hundreds of unemployed men gathered around the city's blocks, waiting to get a meal from a soup kitchen.

Few of them had homes or jobs or money or hope. Men "rode the rails"--that is, crossed and recrossed the country in empty railway cars looking for work, for a future, for something missing from their lives.

I've often wondered what some of them might have thought had they been magically transported into the future to view the delights of the Food Channel with its unending recipes for all kinds of cooking.

The Depression was not a time when America worried about carbohydrates or calories. Or even the quality of food. Mostly folks just tried to find something to eat and most of what they ate was, to say the least, unfortunate.

But if what we worried about then was survival, today what we seem to be struggling with is values, the intangible but important rules by which we live.

I don't remember the Depression generation being much concerned with these. Values were understood whether we were rich, adequately cared for or just poor. They just were and they were not a subject of much debate.

I certainly don't want another depression, but it would be nice to worry less about values and once again more about sustenance.

Lean times don't necessarily mean lean lives. Rather, they can be times, which are rich in intangible rewards.