Their early years were spent in a time of great economic uncertainty. Now, as the children of the Great Depression reach the end of their years, they find themselves again in a time of economic uncertainty.

The Great Depression seems like it was a lifetime ago to those who only know of the financial devastation that wrenched this country in the 1930s through sepia photographs and WPA murals.

Yet it was a time that changed the course of Bill Dietrich's life. He still cries at the memory of his family's home on Grandview Avenue being sold at sheriff's sale, as was his family's business.

A bright young man, Mr. Dietrich, now 90, of Upper St. Clair, had earned his acceptance to Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1935. But when his family lost everything, he entered the mill at National Tube instead.

"It was a hell of a mess," he said.

Joe Lober, 91, who lives at Friendship Village in Upper St. Clair, was 5 years old when his father died. His little brother, Andrew, was born the next week. Their mother died three years later and the boys were raised in a foster home in Carnegie.

Times got even tougher when their foster parents lost their home and had to move the Lober boys and their own children to a farm. Mr. Lober dropped out of school at 13 to work that farm in order to help feed the family.

"I remember standing in line for a sack of flour once a month," he said.

He also remembers waiting for the trains loaded with coal to pull up to the water tower to refill their tanks so he could join other boys in climbing into the cars to throw out coal for the people waiting below who used those pickings to heat their homes.

"There were just no supports in those days," said George Herchenroether, 93, of Upper St. Clair, whose father owned a dry goods store on the North Side. His father carried his customers when they could not pay.

Angie Dietrich, 85, Mr. Dietrich's wife, said when her mother died, she found an old account book that showed there were some families who were financially troubled during the Depression and never caught up on their payments to her mother's grocery in Galeton, Potter County. She said her mother couldn't turn away people with children.

"We didn't really suffer too much," Mrs. Dietrich said, "but a lot of people suffered."

People are suffering today as well, but measures enacted in the wake of the Great Depression, such as creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which insures deposits in banks, have mitigated the suffering.

Mrs. Dietrich said her parents lost $100 when the Galeton National Bank failed, something that wouldn't happen today.

"It took a long time for people to trust the banks again," she said.

Marvin Goodfriend, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, said there are key supports that will protect the economy today that weren't in place in the 1930s. In addition to the FDIC, he said, Social Security has saved many people.

"Social Security is a government annuity that is stable against the forces of the economy," he said. "The deposit insurance is equally important."

Also, there are stark differences between the economy of the 1930s and today. Unemployment during the Great Depression hit 25 percent though it averaged 17.1 percent, with underemployment -- such as people working part time instead of full time -- up to 50 percent.

The current unemployment rate is 6.1 percent, with underemployment being estimated at up to 11 percent.

Mr. Goodfriend said another difference between then and now is that workers who are unemployed have unemployment insurance, which did not exist then and provides a cushion for people who lose their jobs now.

What has been seen so far, he said, is a contraction in the real or macro economy, which is how employment, production and distribution are classified, and a panic in the financial economy.

"I think what we saw in the last month is going to be classified as a panic up there with the great ones," he said.

He said he knew it was a panic on Sept. 17, two days after Lehman Brothers announced it was filing for bankruptcy and a day after the AIG bailout, when investors flocked to three-month treasury bonds that had become essentially a zero yield security.

Bank failures in the 1930s brought the financial crisis to the overall economy. People who had money in banks lost it, and even those with paychecks to cash couldn't when all of their local banks failed.

Some families wound up relying on a different sort of bank.

Jack Brannan, 85, of Upper St. Clair, remembers a time about 70 years go when his father, a surgeon in Morgantown, W.Va., asked him and his brother to go get their piggy banks.

Mr. Brannan had plenty of patients, but his patients did not have much money.

"He got paid in potatoes and sides of beef," Mr. Brannan said. One patient wallpapered the inside of Dr. Brannan's house. Another painted the outside.

On that day, at lunch, when his father asked him for his piggy bank, Mr. Brannan said his father took the money and promised he would pay it back.

"That is the most stark memory that I have of the Depression," he said. He also remembers that there were no banks open in the area where he lived.

"Every bank in Morgantown failed," he said. "Every bank closed except Mellon's."

His wife has a similar piggy bank memory. Though her father was employed as a university professor, there was no place to cash his paycheck and they survived until the banks re-opened on whatever money was in the house.

Lida Stell, 87, of North Braddock, was 8 when the stock market crashed. Her father was a postman and secure with a government job.

"They took a cut, but they worked every day," she said of the U.S. Postal Service employees.

It was only years later that Mrs. Stell found out her father had shared his good luck with the people on his route when they would tell her that every now and then, he would deliver the mail and include a roast for the family with it.

That sort of generosity is something many of the Depression era children remember.

Betty Wiest, 91, of Upper St. Clair, was born and raised in Philadelphia. She remembers her parents helping the hobos by giving them food. And she remembers people coming in from the countryside with apples to sell.

John Koepke, 84, who also lives in Friendship Village, has that same memory and said the hope was people would donate the nickel instead of buying the apple.

Mr. Koepke's father was the general foreman of a foundry that was on Pittsburgh's North Side where Heinz Field is now. During the Depression he knew that his father went to work every day; what he didn't find out until later was that his father wasn't getting paid and the family was living off its savings.

It wasn't until 1935 that the foundry owner paid his men everything they were owed. The next day, Mr. Koepke said, there was a new Dodge parked in front of the house -- even though no one in the house knew how to drive.