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.

The impact of these events — multiplied millions of times over — was profound and immediate throughout the U.S., most of all on middle class Americans who couldn’t imagine — as they can’t today — being touched by poverty. My family wasn’t spared. We just draped a middle-class patina over poverty. Not to set us apart, but because we didn’t know how to do anything else.

My brother dropped out of college and never returned. My father was able to turn his retail experience into a series of dismal jobs, mostly commission sales, all short-lived and hopeless. And as we moved about with my father’s jobs, my mother and father struggled unsuccessfully to find the closeness they once knew. And I went to a new school every year and learned how to deal with the vulnerability of that place after being beaten up a few times as a matter of rote for new kids.

But we survived, which wasn’t true of a frightful number of families like the Bassetts, who lived next door in our pre-Depression years. Mr. Bassett, who was an insurance company executive, had only daughters and so he embraced me as his “helper” on household projects.

I learned many years later that Mr. Bassett invested badly, borrowed against his splendid home and was facing foreclosure. And so he bought a large life insurance policy, then hanged himself in the garage we so often shared so his family could have a home for the rest of their lives.

Such stories were legend in the 1930s, along with vast unemployment, bread lines and a kind of bewilderment that this could be happening. And as the crisis grew, so did the determination of President Hoover and the corporate officials who surrounded him not to use federal money to come to the rescue of millions of hungry and jobless Americans.

Examples abound in Arthur Schlesinger’s “Crisis of the Old Order.” When the federal Farm Board bought a supply of wheat, Hoover rejected a suggestion that it be used to feed hungry people, saying it was wise for the federal government to feed starving cattle but wicked to feed starving men, women and children, a job that voluntary organizations and community services could perform.

Similarly, the head of Hoover’s Organization on Unemployment Relief said that federal aid would be a disservice to the jobless because it would help them break down the principles of individual and social responsibility, thus “striking at the roots of self-government.”

It remained for an ingenious and determined new president — who didn’t fear phony charges of socialism — and a world war that put us all to work to get us turned around and back on our feet. We have used the governing tools Franklin Roosevelt gave us — wrapped in a new concept of federal aid that grew out of the Depression — many times since to prevent economic disasters.

But there has always been a strong element who would reject the kind of federal oversight that might well have prevented the Great Depression as well as the fractured economy that has banks teetering today. Only quick and powerful help from the feds kept us thus far from going over the edge, most recently just this week when the Federal Reserve bailed out the American International Group Inc. to the tune of $85 billion.

Maybe before the current crisis runs its length we will finally become convinced that “the roots of self-government” are nourished, not destroyed, by the lessons that my generation learned 75 years ago. And that the first step in that direction is to rid ourselves Nov. 4 of the party that got us into this mess.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.