For the TIME correspondents who set out to bring the bare statistics on unemployment to life for this week's cover story, the job, oddly enough, was both easy and difficult. The easy part was finding sources to talk to; unemployed people usually have plenty of spare time. When Boston's John Yang telephoned to arrange an interview with a local parks department employee who had been laid off last April, the response was resigned: "Any time is fine. I've got nowhere to go." Says Yang: "That told me more about unemployment than any of the statistics and reports I had pored over."

Even though sources were readily available, however, the correspondents found their interviews a sobering and depressing experience. Says Detroit's Paul Witteman: "Visiting soup kitchens and day-labor offices, and interviewing people who were suffering or under stress, made me feel as if I was intruding on their pain. But since I arrived in Detroit last summer, this bureau has been reporting almost weekly on one or another aspect of unemployment; it has become our major sub-beat, primarily because of the three-year recession--make that depression--in the automobile industry."

San Francisco's Michael Moritz traveled to Oregon, where the lumber industry is hard hit, and discovered that fear pervaded not only those waiting in unemployment-office lines but even the clerks on the other side of the benefits counter. "There is a growing feeling that this can happen to anybody," he says. Chicago's Steven Holmes found one pervasive factor, a creeping uncertainty, which plagued his subjects and complicated his interviews. One unemployed executive told him: "I could handle this a lot better if I knew I would have a job in two months, or six months, or even a year--just as long as I knew."

All those involved in the story agreed that joblessness is a devastating psychological experience. Staff Writer Jim Kelly wrote the cover story, with the assistance of Reporter-Researchers Betty Satterwhite and Brigid O'Hara-Forster. Kelly, who lost a night desk clerk's job in a New Jersey hotel while he was in college, says: "It was only a part-time job and by no means the most important thing in my life, but I did wonder, 'What did I do wrong?' " Washington Correspondent Gisela Bolte remembers the struggle to land her first job in post-World War II West Germany. "Once," she recalls, "I was subjected to a full day's physical examination to qualify for a $40-a-month job in a chemical company that was polluting the air so badly I could not find its front door. It is very easy for me to relate to people who do not have a job."

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