The Bell Curve:

The banner headline on the front page of the Los Angeles Times recently was stark. Stark enough to bump the Metrolink tragedy to second place. It read: “Wall St. scrambles as banks teeter.” And to scattered handfuls of us left around to write columns built of nostalgia, that headline conjures up some vivid memories.

In my household, the memories began with the increasing disappearances of my father and growing tension each time he came home. I was 9 then, and although I didn’t know what was going on, I was very aware of the tension.

Finally, he left and didn’t come back, and I watched my mother make agitated phone calls to my brother, who was a sophomore at Northwestern University in a suburb of Chicago. Then the phone calls stopped, and my mother told me my father was sick but he would be all right and would come home again soon.

And thus the Great Depression became a vivid reality to me.

Only many years later did I understand what had taken place during those anguished early months. My father was a merchant who rode the gravy train of the 1920s to modest wealth. He founded a chain of what we then called 5- and 10-cent stores, which were quickly prosperous. He had no difficulty finding money to expand, and so he had some 15 stores in surrounding small towns, funded by borrowed money, when the stock market crashed in 1929. The funds procured so easily — rather like the sub-prime mortgages at the root of our problems today — were all call loans. And, like the Times headline, they teetered, starting my father on a downward spiral.

As the loans were called in, my father was frantically trying to get new money to stop the slide. But there were no more loans available, and his stores were dominoes that tumbled, one over another, until they were buried in foreclosure.

The last domino was our house, which had been milked dry in an effort to save the early stores. And so it all came down.

My father went to Chicago, seeking enough money from old business connections to save our house. When that last desperate effort failed, he suffered what we then called a nervous breakdown, and my brother found him in a Chicago hospital. And brought him home.