Thursday, April 20, 2000 | 9:33 a.m.
Ruthe Deskin is assistant to the publisher. Her column appears Thursdays. Reach her at [email protected]
"One of the worst crashes in Wall Street history."
-- U.S. newspapers, 2000
"The worst crash in Wall Street history."
-- U.S. newspapers, 1929
The recent financial catastrophe on Wall Street had some of us old-timers remembering those Depression days of the early '30s and hoping it would not happen again. New regulations and closer surveillance of Wall Street activities are supposed to preclude a repetition of the great stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression.
But the symptoms are there.
Prior to October 1929 prosperity seemed to have been established on a firm basis. Stock prices soared. Employment was at an all-time high. All but a few pessimists basked in the euphoria of continued opportunity and increased wealth.
When the market broke there was a wild rush to buy, followed by an equally wild rush to sell. Savings of a lifetime were wiped out. At first political and business leaders treated the matter as a mere "spasm" of the market, but as time went on and things got worse it became painfully apparent that we were facing a Great Depression.
Soon factories were closed, mortgages foreclosed, banks failed, commodity prices fell and unemployment grew in staggering numbers. Financiers leapt from skyscraper windows rather than face the inevitability of financial ruin. They were years of precarious existence as millions stood in bread lines for food and jobs.
Whether the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt turned the economy is a matter for historians to decide. We know for sure it was the beginning of big government in the form of Uncle Sam coming to the rescue of our citizens.
There are safeguards to protect us from the terrible desolation and frustration of the Great Depression -- or so we are told. But some of us have vivid memories of that period in our nation's history. We don't want it to happen to our children and grandchildren.
One can't help wondering how today's materialistic society would react to the real poverty many of us endured in the '30s. Let's hope history doesn't repeat itself.
The hoopla created by the media over the Binion trial is being shared less and less by average citizens.
Proof is in the TV shots of an empty courtroom during most of the proceedings. In the beginning they were drawing lots to see who got seats. "Standing room only" no longer applies.
Teacher and nurse shortages are easy to understand when their annual salaries are compared to other professions, especially those of bureaucratic functionaries.
Pro-Hillary diehards will consider Peggy Noonan's book, "The Case Against Hillary Clinton," a travesty.
Anti-Hillary diehards will pass the book to a friend with a "See, I told you so."
Noonan exposes what she considers the "real" Hillary, and the result isn't flattering.
One passage from the book, however, concerns our country in general and bears repeating:
"What is happening in America today is unparalleled in history. We are rising to the top and falling to the bottom; we are becoming wealthier as individuals and baser as a society; we are more powerful than ever and less mindful; we share a level of prosperity that is so high that it is a new thing in history ... and yet this wonderful thing we share has not made us closer as people."
Think on it.
The practice of medicine in Las Vegas in the '40s and '50s was nothing like it is today.
Annie Blachley, in her book "Good Medicine," details the lives of four Las Vegas doctors -- Gerald Sylvain, Joseph George, James Barger and Leonard Kreisler.
It's an amusing story of medicine before malpractice, Medicare, HMOs and time-consuming paperwork, as practiced by the early doctors and hospitals of Las Vegas.
A reader of this column advises: If you look like the photo on your driver's license, you are not well enough to drive.
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