Having lived his early life during the Great Depression, Don Jewett of Langley is stoic about today’s economic calamities.

“Keep things close to the vest,” he advises. “Be sure you’re on the Burpee seed list and have a little spot to raise vegetables.”

“And beware of the Madoffs,” Jewett, 85, added with a wink, referring to financier Bernard Madoff, who swindled investors of $50 billion with a Ponzi scheme.

Jewett and other island residents who experienced the economic chaos of the 1930s see some unsettling parallels in what’s happening today.

Banks going bust, people losing their jobs, President Barack Obama’s ambitious plans to put people back to work.

But there’s an upside, too.

“The education you have today, the digital age,” Jewett said. “The world is wide open. It’s no time to be discouraged.”

There was optimism in 1929, too.

“These are days when many are discouraged,” John D. Rockefeller was quoted at the time. “In the 93 years of my life, depressions have come and gone. Prosperity has always returned and will again.”

The Great Depression was a worldwide economic downturn that most say started with the United States stock market crash in 1929. It lasted for some countries into the early 1940s.

It hit almost every country in the world. Construction came to a halt; farming and rural areas suffered as crop prices fell by roughly 60 percent, according to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.

Jewett was 6 years old and had just started school in southwest Minnesota when the stock market crashed in 1929.

“I still remember that,” he said. “My father lost his farm, and we moved into town.”

He remembers that his parents had a garden and a cow, and in the spring they would send away for 100 baby chickens, which he and his parents and two brothers raised for food.

He remembers when he was 12, his father gave him a shotgun and told him to go shoot pheasants for dinner.

He remembers his parents raising corn, and his mother making popcorn and sending him off to sell it to people coming into town Saturday nights.

Growing up, he mowed lawns and weeded gardens to make money. Summers, he worked on farms, harvesting grain.

He remembers trapping weasels, skunks and a mink, and delivering newspapers.

He remembers his father building roads with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a massive jobs program that was a cornerstone of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s recovery effort.

“Everybody was the same,” he said. “We didn’t really know about the Depression or that we were poor. But we never lacked for food, although there wasn’t a lot of it.”

“I thought everybody in the world lived like that,” he added. “We learned about the Depression in school.”

Lasting effects?

“I’m frugal, as people will tell you,” Jewett said. “When I get hold of a coin, I don’t let go of it easily.”

After graduating from high school in Minnesota, he started college, but joined the Army in 1942, during World War II. He later spent 35 years as a marketing manager with the Honeywell Corp., selling products to the defense industry.

“It’s been a good life,” Jewett said. “If anything, the Depression taught you to work.”

Other island residents also recall the 1930s.

“I remember the men standing on street corners selling apples in New York,” said retired builder Bruce Lippincott, 88, of Freeland.

“But I don’t have any recollection of destitution or hunger,” he added. “I think our parents concealed that fact from us.”

He sees disturbingly familiar signs in today’s economy, and worries that people don’t take money seriously.

“People need to save more,” Lippincott said. “That’s one of our failings, including my own. We’re big spenders, but not great savers.”

“I just hope we get out of this fairly quickly, but I’m not optimistic,” he added. “We’ll see what Obama can do. He will certainly be an improvement over the last president.”

Robert Desmond, 88, of Coupeville, was 11 years old in South Dakota in 1932, when the famous Dust Bowl storms “blew everything away.”

Before she lost her job, his late wife, Jane, was a teacher in a two-room schoolhouse.

“Kids came to school with lard in sandwiches,” Desmond said. “Half of them had no lunches at all. My wife and her mother would bring soup to school to feed them.”

He said he found work in the Civilian Conservation Corps, another Roosevelt New Deal program, and his wife found work with the WPA.

Desmond, a retired merchant seaman, is a strong union man, and also is worried about the state of today’s economy.

“We owe trillions in debt, and have one of the lowest savings rates in the world,” he said. “The other thing is, we don’t make anything.

“They used to say if you build a better mousetrap, they will beat a path to your door,” he added. “When’s the last time you heard that in this country?”

Desmond also urges people to live within their means.

“We have to get over having to have everything just because the Joneses have it,” he said.

Beverly Burgess, 78, of Langley, and her husband Frank, 85, were also children during the Depression.

She remembers their parents’ concealing hard times from the children, only later filling in the details.

Details such as her mother serving cornmeal mush breakfast, lunch and dinner. Or her father being unable to find work, eventually catching on with a WPA project digging sewer-pipe trenches by hand in Yakima.

“He always said don’t talk badly about the WPA, because it saved our bacon,” she said.

“We weren’t fully aware of our dire circumstances,” Burgess added. “We were poor, but we didn’t know we were poor. Everybody was poor. We accepted it as life.”

She said circumstances today “give us a terrible feeling in the pits of our stomachs,” especially when she thinks of her three grown children and their families.

“They’ve always been prosperous,” Burgess said. “I’m not sure they quite understand the idea of cutting back and saving. People are going have to change their lifestyles.”

“I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it,” she continued. “I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

She said both she and her husband “are very hopeful that Obama has a plan that will get the country turn around.”

“It’s a giant problem,” she said. “If I knew what to do, I’d be right up there with Obama, working together on it.”