WATERLOO - Rising unemployment, failing banks, stocks in decline. For many Americans, it is a time of anxiety.

But stories from seniors across the Cedar Valley who have seen much worse offer hope, wisdom and perspective. Even those who survived the Great Depression say it is hard to imagine the same hardships in today's society. Yet not a single one of the dozen men and women in their 90s and 100s interviewed by The Courier recalled feelings of desperation to match the misery so many endured.

At Rosewood Estate in Waterloo last week, most recalled communities and families that banded together to ensure people had enough to eat and a roof over their heads.

"We lived on the farm here in Orange Township, so we grew our own food," said Kay Cunningham, 93. "We came from such a great family, we weren't even aware we were supposed to be suffering."

Not all were as fortunate. Betty Jones, 99, remembers struggling to feed her children on a Missouri farm hit hard by drought and grasshoppers. One evening as she prepared to fill her children's lunch pails for school the next day, she turned to her husband to tell him the cupboards were bare.

"What am I going to do? They don't have anything to eat," she recalled saying.

Kathryn McGrath, 101, vividly remembers the terrible dust storms, a punch to the heartland the country could ill-afford. The ominous dark clouds blowing in from the Dakotas slithered their way into everything. She remembers Des Moines hospital operating rooms shut down. In homes, mothers wrapped babies in cloth to protect their tiny lungs.

"The weather was hot, and it was a very fi ne dust," McGrath said. "It was just like it was the air. You had to try to fight it back, protect the babies and that sort of thing."

Leonard Dankinbring, 93, recalls his mother couldn't scrounge up three cents for a postage stamp. Others cut seed sacks into clothes. His first job: Building roads as part of the Work Progress Administration.

He never forgot his high school teacher announcing in 1933 that every bank in the country had closed as part of a four-day emergency holiday that stopped mass withdrawals from ruining banks. The move came too late for Fred Mast, 99, who lost all of his savings, about $100, when his bank in Illinois went out of business.

The early years of the Great Depression predated the New Deal and the social safety nets that resulted. So, Lucile Trask, 91, spent days standing in line in Waterloo for county relief, which consisted of bacon and little else.

"You needed a magnifying glass to see any meat," she said. "It was all fat."

After her father, a molder at John Deere, fell ill and died, the bank repossessed her parents' home, a comfortable fourbedroom house with a large garden. Trask, her mother and five sisters moved into a twobedroom house where they slept two to a bed.

Most said they did not live extravagantly before the Depression hit, so they don't recall feeling poor.

Virginia Phelps, the daughter of a Cedar Rapids banker, had plenty to lose when her father's bank failed in 1932, the year she graduated from high school. She talked of life before then in a detached manner, sometimes in the third person, as if that person had vanished long ago.

"My whole group of friends grew up belonging to the Cedar Rapids Country Club," she said. "You know, we played our way through life. We played tennis, we swam, played golf."

For college, she chose Sweet Briar, an expensive women's college in West Virginia, because it taught horseback riding. But when her father lost his job, she withdrew her application. She loved school and it showed in her grades, which earned her a four-year scholarship to Coe College. But her family had no extra income.

To put herself through college, she waited tables and cleaned a woman's home three times a week. Though Phelps took the sudden changes in stride - she was too busy falling in love with her future husband - her mother had a harder time.

"My mother was just brokenhearted that I had to take a job cleaning house for a lady," she said. "You just learned to do without. I think that's the big philosophy I got out of the Great Depression."

It is a lesson they fear would be difficult for people to learn today, said Frank Trask, 95, Lucile's husband.

Earlier generations strived to create a better life for their families, and succeeded so well young people enjoy a standard of living they never dreamed of. They have more to lose than he ever did, Frank Trask added. Frank and Lucile Trask, who celebrated their 69th wedding anniversary in November, have historical perspective.

"I hope our grandkids and great-grandkids don't have to go through what we did," Frank said.

Contact Jens Manuel Krogstad at (319) 291-1580 or jens.krogstad@wcfcourier.com.