Aug. 9--Looking at the photos from 26 years ago, it's hard to believe that, economically, anything short of the Great Depression could be worse.

It was January 1983. The double-barreled recession of 1981 and 1982 had chewed up a couple million jobs and hit the industrial Midwest hard. Wisconsin unemployment was peaking, at 11.8% -- nearly 300,000 willing job-seekers out of work.

But in the middle of the month, a bit of hope shone through. A.O. Smith Corp., one of the manufacturing giants that once defined Milwaukee's economy, announced it would take applications at State Fair Park for welders and press operators.

There were 150 to 200 jobs available. More than 15,000 people showed up.

Hundreds of them camped out overnight, bundling in blankets and sleeping bags against temperatures in the teens and building fires in trash barrels. By noon the line of applicants stretched for nearly a quarter-mile outside the old Family Living Center. Inside, thousands more queued up in scenes reminiscent of the bread lines of the 1930s.

But as tough as times were then, Mary Schneidewind said, what's going on today looks just about as bleak.

"It seems like almost everybody's laying people off," she said. "And when there is a job opening somewhere, they have two or three or four or five hundred people applying for just one job or a couple of jobs."

She has standing to speak on this. Now 62 and retired, Schneidewind was among the thousands who lined up for -- and didn't get -- one of the A.O. Smith jobs.

"I remember it was pretty cold," she said. ". . . We stood out in line for a long time, and I don't even remember whether me and my friends got to put in applications or not because there were so many people there."

'Deeper and longer'

Now, the A.O. Smith factory jobs in Milwaukee are long gone, along with tens of thousands of others, and the city, the state and the country have been battling through what many view as the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Nationwide unemployment hasn't hit the 10.8% of November and December 1982, noted Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.

"But by basically every other measure, we have surpassed -- and in some cases far surpassed -- the loss, the contraction of the early '80s," she said.

The evidence is strong.

Mortgage foreclosures are worse than in the early '80s. Stocks have plunged much more deeply. Unemployment has risen more steeply. Gross Domestic Product has retreated further.