When the stock market crashed in 1929, Phyllis Lorimer of Greenwich, Conn., had a brother studying at Dartmouth. Her once-wealthy family was now struggling, but they worked mightily to keep it from him.

"He was fortunate enough not to know what was going on at home," she said. "Whatever money there was went to keep my brother at Dartmouth. We were living on a form of relief. We had cans of tinned bully beef. And we had the gas turned off. . . . We cooked everything in an electric corn popper, so it was gay in certain aspects. . . .

"My brother was socially oriented, a tremendous snob. While we were eating bully beef, he was living extremely well at Dartmouth. Nobody told him how bad things were. He lived magnificently, with a socialite friend, in a house with a manservant. He came back and found the truth, and the truth was ghastly."

Lorimer recounted this story for Studs Terkel in his 1970 classic, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. Terkel's death late last month, overshadowed by the election frenzy, had us rummaging around for our dog-eared college copy and rereading Terkel's amazing collection.

What we found: tales of true financial horror that quickly put the country's current economic distress into perspective.

Terkel conducted wide-ranging interviews with laborers and political activists, blacks and whites, the rich (and formerly rich) and the poor, office workers, farmers and artists - asking them all to recall the Depression more than three decades on. They described shocking poverty, illness from poor nutrition, enormous job loss, violence, political radicalism and the promise of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Even those neighborhoods most ravaged by sub-prime lending and job loss today cannot compare to the sweeping hardship of the 1930s.

Most of Terkel's subjects were from his native Chicago, New York and the West, but he collected a few glimpses of Depression-era New England, too.

Gordon Baxter, for instance, recalled his education at Yale and Harvard Law School as preposterously cloistered. "Children in eighth grade today have more knowledge of what's going on in the world than I had all during college," he told Terkel. "I was sitting there listening to William Lyon Phelps lecturing about Tennyson and Browning, the most terrible crap in the world, but I didn't have the judgment to know it was a lot of crap. Those times people went through school insulated from everything except the immediate environment."

William Patterson, an African-American lawyer, experienced quite a different New England. He came to Boston to protest the execution of Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchists convicted of murder.

There he met American Communists, who were recruiting members convinced that American capitalism was on its way out. They linked the Sacco-Vanzetti case with the oppression of blacks - and it changed Patterson's life.

"I was struck by the clarity of the cause. I gave up the practice of law and joined the Communist Party," he told Terkel. For three years Patterson studied in the Soviet Union - at the University for Toiling People of the Far East.

Among the many ways the Great Depression differed from the current economic downturn is this: In the 1930s, the newly poor often regarded themselves not as victims of Wall Street greed or predatory lenders or a general unraveling of the national economy but - right or wrong - as personal failures.

"The suddenly idle hands blamed themselves, rather than society," Terkel said. "No matter that others suffered the same fate, the inner voice whispered, 'I'm a failure.' "

When Phyllis Lorimer's brother returned from Dartmouth, he took that lesson to heart. "It set for him a lifelong thing: He was never going to be caught in the same trap his parents were - never ever going to be the failure his father was," she recalled.

Terkel's brand of storytelling was eye-opening for historians and journalists alike. He wrote about ordinary people and through them described the times. His book is worth another read. His death is a terrible loss.