One number says it all: 61,000.

Of all the figures generated by the economic downturn, this one puts the enormity of the employment crisis for St. Louisans in context.

Neither percentage, forecast nor trend, it's a simple head count of the toll exacted on our friends, neighbors and loved ones.

And they should be counted one at a time.

In the nearly three years I've spent covering employment, I've been able get to only about 500 area residents displaced by a recession that allegedly ended 27 months ago.

One by one, they've shared their stories.

Sixty-one thousand people could overflow Busch Stadium by half, fill the Scottrade Center three times over and nearly fill the 70,000-seat Edward Jones Dome. One, by one, by one, each of them bears the scars of a job crisis the likes of which we last endured during the Great Depression.

When all this started, we never expected we'd have to count so high.

As the economy headed down, my editors assigned me to cover an emerging and important story the experts predicted would dominate the economic conversation for maybe the next year.

That was three years ago; the story shows no signs of fading any time soon.

The mere fact that I have a full-time job covering jobs - even as the newspaper business has shed thousands of its own workers - underscores the degree to which job security has become the central focus of our lives. I used to cover education, a beat that spawned hundreds of stories on the benefits of a college degree. Now even an education doesn't guarantee you a job.

My only comparable reference point to what I've encountered on this beat are the years I spent as a young police reporter, interviewing shocked relatives reeling from the homicides and accidents that stole the lives of loved ones.

George Batten, a laid-off area executive out of work three years, put it in perspective last week: "A lot of carnage comes with losing a career," he said. "It carries into your family. It attacks your life."

That was never more clear than on the morning a year or so ago that I wandered into a salon for job-hunters at the moment the facilitator was conducting a word association exercise.

"First word that pops into your head when I say, ‘Unemployment,' " said Bonny Filandrinos, the owner of Staffing Solutions in Clayton.

"Failure," the No. 1 response, was followed closely by "desperation," "helpless," "embarrassing," "isolating" and "helpless."

Their voices cracking, most could barely manage to summon the associative word.

The carnage described by Batten cuts across class and racial lines.

It has struck experienced workers hired young by St. Louis' old-line employers fully expecting to walk out the door with a gold watch at age 65.

It has stepped on the expectations of 20-somethings told since kindergarten that gainful employment waited at the end of the college rainbow.

And it has blurred the assumption among minorities that a diligent work ethic can thrust them into the American middle class.

That the unemployed are beleaguered is undeniable.

But with good reason they are equally angry. In fact, furious.

They direct their ire at a digitized hiring process that dispatches artful cover letters and meticulous résumés down a black cyberspace hole, without a word of acknowledgement, let alone thanks, from down-sized corporate human resources departments.

They are enraged by the public relations contrivances known as career fairs that force job-seekers, many dressed to the nines, résumés in hand, to wait in lines for up to 30 minutes for the opportunity to spend 20 seconds with a corporate recruiter who hands out cards directing them to a link on the company website.

When they talk to me, there invariably comes a pause, an involuntary catch in the throat that acknowledges the enormity of what's been lost and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

But what stands out from all those conversations is determination, the preternatural ability to remain upbeat in the face of the bleakest realities.

When the jobs crisis blessedly draws to an end, maybe two, three or even four years from now, the economists and government will fall back on their charts, graphs and data to analyze what we've endured.

My database resides in the reporter's notebooks stashed under my desk, each detailing lives upended in ways a chart or a graph couldn't begin to describe.

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Select quotes of the week from the JobWatch column in Friday's business section. 

"If I were to make an artwork expressing this period of unemployment, I would make stacks and stacks of little box-shaped rooms wallpapered with résumés. Each room would have one little person inside and one window. This is what I felt like. Boundless possibilities, but hemmed in by the walls of an apartment where I spent every day looking for a way to afford all the things I wanted to do." — Jennifer Williams, unemployed illustrator, The New York Times

"I wish my office had an evacuation slide." — A reader reaction to the story of Steven Slater, the former Jet Blue flight attendant who unleashed a string of expletives at an unruly passenger, concluding the tirade by departing, two beers from the beverage cart in hand, down the commuter jet's emergency chute.

"What is most striking when you talk to employers today is how many of them have used the pressure of the recession to become even more productive by deploying more automation technologies, software, outsourcing, robotics — anything they can use to make better products with reduced head count and health care and pension liabilities. That is not going to change." — Thomas Friedman, The New York Times

"Many of the jobs that existed before the recession (in home building, for example) are gone for good, and the people who held those jobs don't have the skills needed to work in other fields. A big chunk of current unemployment, the argument goes, is therefore structural, not cyclical; resurgent demand won't make it go away." — James Surowiecki, The New Yorker

"...The Federal Reserve projected yesterday that a stubbornly high unemployment rate is going to stick around long after overstaying its welcome, like Bristol Palin on 'Dancing With the Stars,' although the Fed didn't explicitly make that comparison." — Dan Amira, New York magazine