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Bill Perks said that living through the Great Depression has contributed to his reluctance to throw anything away. It took the self-described pack rat a significant amount of time and energy to remove the camper van from his garage so he could give it to his grandson.

Dolores Reeder doesn’t think times are as bad now as they were in the 1930s. Not yet anyway. And if things do get worse, it won’t be in the same way, she said.

“Back then we didn’t even have a telephone, and they carry telephones with them now,” Ms. Reeder said.

The 79-year-old St. Joseph woman was born a few months after the Depression started in 1929. She doesn’t remember much about it. But she does remember during that time when her father couldn’t even afford the $10 it took to get her younger brother’s body from the hospital after he had died.

“They wouldn’t let Dad have the body until he paid,” Ms. Reeder said.

Bill Perks remembered his family having to eat hog ears, pig snouts and wild game during the 1930s. You either ate it or died from starvation.

It’s different today, where people in hunger can get a free meal at a food kitchen. And not everyone is poor today like they were back then. Nobody had anything. The banker was just as poor as the farmer.

“Some’s bad off today, but everybody was that way back then,” the 87-year-old Mr. Perks said. “And there wasn’t no hand-me-outs or anything. If you didn’t know somebody to keep you in food if you got down sick, it was rough.”

Adele Leffert remembered that her dad owned a general store during the Depression years. She also remembered that her father had to burn thousands of dollars’ worth of bills the area farmers owed him.

“He knew they couldn’t pay their bills,” she said.

Things may not be as bad today as they were during the Great Depression. Some say it’s too early to tell. Our current economic slump has really just begun, but the Depression that began in 1929 in the United States and Europe lasted about 10 years.

Still, there are troubling similarities.

Collapsing stock market prices, bank failures, rising unemployment, falling house values and an overall weakened economy feel historically familiar.

A recent Time magazine article even had a doomsday headline, asking if this is “The End of Prosperity?”

The United States and Western Europe are in the grip of a downward financial spiral, the accompanying article read. And total overall loss threatens to be even more before it is all over, some experts predict.

But Dave Leyland, executive director for Community Action Partnership, an agency that serves low-income families with heating and cooling assistance and other services, said today is much different than the 1930s. For one, there are more agencies out there to help people. And people are not roaming the countryside looking for work and food as they were back then.

Now, it’s the working poor who are suffering, he said.

“The stress is on people we know who are working two jobs,” Mr. Leyland said. “Even if you worked hard and you get what you think is a decent paycheck, you start subtracting from that the cost of rent, the cost of putting gas in your car — all of these things make it extremely difficult.”

But perhaps nothing beats knowing what to do in tough times like experience. Jeannetta Danford learned from hard times growing up that even when things eventually got better for her family, they still remained cautious with their money.

“They never felt the wolf was very far from the door” and bought only what they could afford, she said. That’s the best advice she could give anyone in these tough times, Ms. Danford said.

“We never knew we were poor,” she said. “Of course, we didn’t have designer labels. We wore hand-me-downs, but I would say definitely live within your means and pay your bills as they come in.”

Mr. Perks said many people don’t think far enough into the future. They want things now, rather than waiting until they can afford them.

“You got to sacrifice first to get it in the end,” he said.

Mr. Perks said he and his wife, Dottie, saved enough in their early years where retirement now is like “one long vacation.” But even that could change from circumstances beyond their control, he said, like the government’s recent $700 billion bailout.

“I squirreled away what I could my whole life. Now they want to take it away from me in taxes,” Mr. Perks said.

Alonzo Weston can be reached at alonzow@npgco.com.