(FORTUNE Magazine) – WHAT HAPPENED to the Rust Belt workers whose jobs were swept away? Some never recovered. But those FORTUNE interviewed across the region, along with union officials and job training counselors, agree that most succeeded in weathering the hard times and rebuilding productive lives. How? Five survivors tell their stories to writer Myron Magnet:

Bob McCollim, 55, Economy, Pennsylvania, Damascus Steel. I worked at Armco Steel for 34 years. They make oil well tubing. I was a low supervisory guy. I was up to $2,300 a month. But the market wasn't there, so they closed the whole plant down in November of '85. They didn't give us much warning. We were working Friday. At 12 o'clock I got a call from somebody who said that they'd called them in the hot mill and said to turn back any deliveries coming in that day. At one o'clock they announced they were going to close down. They told the guards to turn back the three o'clock shift. In January I took early retirement. I was worried a lot. We were living on savings and, like, a severance pay that we got. I made too much money from my retirement -- $852 a month -- to qualify for any unemployment compensation. You can't make more than $800. I was pretty down in the summer. My wife was upset. She was thinking about going to work, but her health isn't that great. I didn't get a job until September of '86, and that was just driving a school bus. I kept looking, and last May I got a job as a truck driver for a plant that got paper from banks and recycled it. But that, still, was just a little over minimum wage. They had an ad in the paper here last January, and I answered it. They called me in April. It's a foundry kind of operation. I started out at $11.18 an hour ((or around $1,800 a month)). They have good health care, dental care, insurance. My two sons were in another steel mill that closed down. One of them is back in a mill, as a computer operator. The other boy is manager of a pizza shop. It doesn't pay that awfully much. My youngest boy is in college. One thing I've pounded into his head is to get a college education. I blame the government. They are more worried about people overseas than they are about their own people here. Democrats or Republicans, one is as bad as the other. Still, the future looks pretty decent here. The only problem is, we've lost a lot of good young people.

Willie Smith, 36, Cleveland, Cleveland Track Material. I was a welder at Vandorn Rubber & Plastics from '78 to '80. We made injection molding machines. I welded the frames. Japan was making them for about half of what ours cost. The union would say, ''Let's take X hours to do a specific job,'' and the company gave us 16 for the frames. I could weld one of those things up in about four hours. But the union started clamping down on my back about doing the job too fast. I don't want to blame them, but they didn't have to say a job would take extra hours and drive the cost of our products up. You're killing the job, and you're killing the company. So many of us where I work now have seen it happen. I was laid off about three times. I did odd jobs. I was out of work from about 1981 until 1984. During that time I had my unemployment, and I had to go on welfare for about six months. My wife got a little job part time at Higbee's department store. Really, you just couldn't make ends meet. Then I got a little job washing bus shelters for minimum wage, $3.35 an hour. At Vandorn's I was paid about $10.50 an hour. They were tough times, believe me. While I was laid off I looked for jobs, but there just weren't any. Even minimum-wage jobs were hard to find. People were going out to California and places like that. But you know, if you don't have the money, you can't just up and go somewhere with your family if it's not on a sure thing. For a while there, I thought it was all over. The area is coming back. Welding jobs are opening up. But there are still a lot of people in trouble. I know these three guys who were machinists -- trained workers, good. Now they're drunks, living on the street. Things were so tight that some people just gave up. Some guys today would never work ) for the minimum wage, but I was willing. A little money beats no money at all. I had seen too many buddies of mine that are out of work get to where they're depending on welfare. When Cleveland Track opened, I went in and applied. Two weeks later, I got a call. I didn't even have a phone -- they called my cousin. I'm a welding supervisor now, making over $30,000 a year. This is the best job I've ever had. All the guys -- black, white -- we're like a family. Everyone is important.

Les Kuzdas, 43, La Porte, Indiana, Les' Sharpening Service. I was general foreman and acting superintendent on third shift at Allis-Chalmers in La Porte, Indiana. I was doing fairly well, something like $21 an hour. I got laid off in August 1982. I was off a little bit more than a year. You get the feeling you aren't even a statistic anymore, because they say the unemployment rate is dropping. I figured it was dropping because my unemployment ran out, so in other words I'm off the rolls. I got a job at American Motors in September of '83, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I had to leave my home life and take an apartment there. I was making more money, but we had double bills. Our marriage almost split. I vow I'll never do it again. Never. They were talking about closing that Kenosha plant also, the same predicament I was in at Chalmers. You don't know the next day whether you've got a job or you don't. I was released in January of '85. We had kicked around the idea of starting my own business for, oh, a year and a half after I got laid off. I noticed that there's an awful lot of machine shops, and I kind of looked into where people get this stuff sharpened, because I have a tool-and-die-industry background. I finally decided, well, somebody's got to do this. I went through a retraining program for people that wanted to start their own jobs. I got a $20,000 bank loan in June of '87 to buy, mainly, grinding machines. I started at the end of the year. I'm doing a lot of circular saws and stuff like that for wood companies. I've been paying all the bills. I would say I'm just coming even. I think it is going to work great. Everything is starting to pick up again, and, when I see construction, I see dull blades.

Norma Vasquez, 33, Valparaiso, Indiana, Purdue University. I started at Bethlehem Steel's Burns Harbor mill in 1977 and lost my job in 1984. I worked in the human resources department as a secretary. A computer took my place. I had been making about $11 an hour. I was looking for what I could get into that somebody could not take away from me. The Kankakee Valley Job Training Program was willing to pay for two years of any type of training I selected. I got accepted at the nursing program at Purdue. My husband had been working at Burger King as a branch manager when I got laid off, but there was a switch in top management and he had the choice of quitting or being fired. So he went to Taco Bell. The following April, he was badly hurt by an electrical shock at work. During the year he was out we received his disability pay, which wasn't much, but it paid for some things. We decided that the best thing to do with his experience was to buy our own business. It was called the Premier Pizza & Deli and the Sore Elbow Saloon, and we opened it in July of '87. We had second-mortgaged the house and borrowed some money. When we took it over, we didn't have any business at all. We tried to offer specials and things, but that didn't work. We folded nine months later, and when the creditors tried to take our house away we declared bankruptcy. During the toughest times, we would eat lots of rice, and we would pick up some government cheese and butter. On Christmas our church brought a turkey and a ham and some groceries. We made that last about a month. For a while I was working nights as a ward clerk in a psychiatric hospital, and my husband was working at the restaurant during the day. There were times where my husband and I wouldn't get along. But I would come to my senses and realize that we were a team. There were a lot of breakups. The wife would have had to get a small-paying, part-time job and would all of a sudden feel like she was pulling the weight, and she would say, ''Well, I don't need you, buddy.'' I mean you would go to McDonald's, and you would see a couple splitting up right before your face. You know, take the kids out for a 30-cent cone and, oops, there it is, right in the restaurant! At the moment, my husband is a youth coordinator at Kankakee Valley. He would make about $13,000 a year, without benefits, but it's only a summer job. At Burger King he was making almost $25,000. The experience was hard on my kids. Considering everything I've been through, I think I've done okay. I just learned that nothing stays the same. I learned that they can take everything away from you except your education.

Ron Campbell, 38, Cleveland, Cleveland Track Material. I got laid off from U.S. Steel in 1978. About a year and a half later I went to Hoffman Brown -- it made golf clubs. When I got laid off there, it took me about 2 1/2 years, because I had run out of places in Cleveland. I had my unemployment. I had to go on welfare. I was looking every day for a job, but what I could have got hired for, they were paying at the minimum wage, and I wasn't going to take no job at no minimum wage. What can you do with $3.35 an hour? Some people make more than that begging. On welfare I was getting $148 and $80 worth of food stamps. And I was out on the street, hustling. Numbers. I made out pretty good. A lot of my neighbors, they broke up marriage-wise. Half of the guys I used to work with went on to be junkies and alcoholics. They looked, but they just gave up after about a year. It is hard when you make $18 or $19 an hour and then somebody offers you $3. I don't fool with them no more. I'm not going to let nobody bring me down to their category. I'm a grinder at Cleveland Track. I make $8.25 an hour. How'd I get that job? Because I used to go up there every day and say, ''These people are going to hire me.'' Like I say, you can't hold me down. No way.