The crash Oct. 29, 1929

Kyvig, a professor at Northern Illinois University, says he stuns his students when he tells them what happened in Detroit, a particularly hard-hit city. Overwhelmed by demands from the needy, the city shut down its zoo in 1932 and slaughtered its animals to provide food.

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The parallels between October 1929 and today are striking.

Although the contemporary economy is far larger and more complex than it was eight decades ago, consumers were deeply in debt then, too. The gap between rich and poor had widened, thanks in part to tax cuts for the wealthy. Amid it all, the stock market -- lightly regulated -- grew into a speculative bubble, driven to unsupportable highs by investors who used borrowed money to purchase shares.

One key difference, however, might have been psychological. In 1929, people didn't have the benefit of history and hindsight. There had been recessions, most recently in 1921 and 1907, but nothing suggested the scale of catastrophe that loomed. The Great Depression was unknown -- and perhaps even unthinkable.

"Virtually no one was talking about a depression," says Klingaman, author of "1929: The Year of the Great Crash." "It was an 'adjustment.' That was the word they used. You don't get a sense of urgency at all in late '29 or '30. People thought this was a normal part of the business cycle, that we'll come out the other end."

It was still possible to see sunshine after Black Tuesday. The day after the Crash, the Washington Post carried a front-page story citing "98 leading businessmen" who insisted that the engine of American capitalism was still revving. "Our October sales are the largest on record," crowed R. E. Wood, president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., in the article. "While the shaking of public confidence may impair buying power somewhat in the next few months, I see no grounds for any real depression in business."

A few weeks later, the Economist magazine tut-tutted the doomsayers. "On the whole, the experts are agreed that there must be some setback, but there is not yet sufficient evidence to prove that it will be long or that it need go to the length of producing a general industrial depression," the magazine wrote. "If we are justified in assuming that the setback in American industry will only be temporary, we may look forward to steady development in 1930."

One commonly accepted notion about the time seems exaggerated, if not wholly false: The Crash didn't prompt tapped-out stock jockeys and bankers across the nation to jump out of buildings. Klingaman says some investors did kill themselves around this time, but their methods varied -- pistol shots, poisoning, asphyxiation by gas inhalation -- as did their locale. The jumper stereotype might have been popularized by Will Rogers, the folksy radio wit, who said, "When Wall Street took that tailspin, you had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of, and speculators were selling space for bodies in the East River."

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After the Crash, the Dow Jones Industrial Average began to climb again. By mid-April of 1930, the average was within a few percentage points of the pre-Crash levels of early October. But then the index began to march downward again; by the time it bottomed out in July 1932, stocks had fallen an average of 89 percent from their peak.

It would take an entire generation, almost 25 years, for the market to recover fully.