The only “C” I made in college was in economics. My brain freezes when dealing with anything involving numbers.

So I don’t pretend to have a deep understanding of what’s going on in our current banking crisis. I do, however, recognize panic when I see it. And we’re in a panic.

For months, we’ve suffered low-level apprehension, as the housing market sank deeper and deeper into financial quicksand, dragging the rest of the economy down with it. That was bad enough. Then, in the past few days, our national angst has ratcheted up quite a few notches. Things have been happening on Wall Street that would make Chicken Little reach for his (her?) anti-anxiety meds.

The Dow falls 500 points in one day. A financial company in business for nearly a century is swallowed up by a bank. Another files for bankruptcy. Takeovers, buyouts, bailouts — all of it accompanied by those funny-if-this-weren’t-so-serious photos of Wall Street traders with flailing arms and anguished expressions.

Rumors spread of bank failures. There’s talk about FDIC and whether it really has enough money to cover all of our deposits. People wonder out loud whether they should move their money around to different banks, or even withdraw it altogether.

No wonder we’re nervous. These are unprecedented events, scary, reminiscent of 1929.

You’ve read about 1929. Black Tuesday. The crash of the stock market. A riot on Wall Street. Distraught investors committing suicide.

This week I asked my mother about Black Tuesday. She lived it. She was 13 at the time, a junior high school student in Minneapolis. She’s in her 90s now, but her memory of that troubled time is clear.

“The banks just locked their doors,” she said. “People were caught unaware.”

Thousands of people who had invested in the stock market during the boom years of the Roaring Twenties lost fortunes. More cautious people, those who hadn’t become wealthy off the bull market, lost their life savings.

In school, my mother and her fellow students were learning finance by maintaining bank accounts into which they deposited 5 or 10 cents per week. Her balance was something like $12 or $13, she recalled. Like everybody else in the nation, she lost her money.

“And it took so long to collect that,” she said.

After that came the Great Depression. Closed factories. Unemployment. Bread lines.

“It was very tough,” my mother said. “You learned to scale down your living. You learned the value of things. If you had $5, you felt rich.”

For her high school prom, Mother borrowed a blue chiffon dress from a friend.

“If we saw something we wanted, we didn’t just go buy it on credit,” she said. “We figured out how to save for it. There were no credit cards. You didn’t buy anything unless you could pay for it.”

She stopped and thought for a moment.

“Those were simpler times, but they were better times. People weren’t greedy.”

I’ve heard financial analysts say that greed is what landed us in our current crisis. We should have listened to our mothers.

Jeanne Malmgren can be reached at malmgrenjeanne@yahoo.com.