COLUMN ONE : Life After Wall St.--Rude Jolts : Thousands of lucrative financial careers came to an end with the ‘golden years’ of the ‘80s. Yet not all veterans of the boom are sorry it couldn’t last.

For nine years, Scott Discount lived the classic ‘80s success story of the young man who finds wealth and status above the restless gorges of Wall Street.

Now he’s living a story that’s more typical of the new decade.

Discount was thrown out of work last January when his employer, First American Bank, closed the trading desk where he supervised the buying and selling of yen, marks and other currencies. In the morning, when he used to wrestle with a heaving, $400-billion market, he now drives a circuit of New York food stores to drop off the cakes he bakes for his one-man enterprise, “Scotty Wotty’s Creamy Cheesecakes.”

“This has given me a whole new perspective,” said Discount, 32, whose high school classmates voted him “most likely to succeed” and who earned up to $150,000 a year as chief currency trader.

He is one of about 40,000 people thrown out of work at the end of a boom that showered wealth on Wall Street for seven golden years. Investment bankers, traders, brokers--and countless clerks and secretaries--have been cast from fabled prosperity into a difficult present with an uncertain future.

It’s a life of rude shocks: dwindling bank accounts, unemployment lines and interviews with prospective employers who confide that they always considered the Wall Street crowd overpaid and overbearing.

Some of the displaced lament that they will never again live in the comfort they enjoyed in the palmy ‘80s. Others are finding that swapping the big bucks for more free time and less pressure can be quite agreeable, thank you.

It’s all a result of the worst Wall Street downturn since the Great Depression, a recession that may leave employment in the industry 65,000 jobs off its peak of 262,000 in 1987. The convulsions began with the October, 1987, stock market crash and continued with the deterioration of the high-yield junk bond market last fall and a slowdown in the pace of corporate takeovers that long nourished investment banks with huge fees.

Giant financial concerns such as Merrill Lynch, Shearson Lehman Hutton and Prudential-Bache Securities lost money last year. The collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert, mortally wounded by weak markets and legal problems, dumped 5,300 people on the job market last month.

In the New York area, securities firms have laid off 17,000 employees and perhaps thousands of others have lost jobs at Wall Street-dependent businesses--law firms, financial printers, restaurants, limousine services and real estate firms. But Wall Street’s distress touches all corners of the economy, and thousands of jobs may also be lost in Southern California as the recession ripples through securities firms, pension funds, insurance companies, thrifts and other concerns.

In their enforced idleness, Wall Street’s displaced have had time to think about the golden age that is quickly passing into history. Again and again in conversation, they recall how people knew the good times had to end, yet they spent without hesitation on the restaurant meals, East Side co-op apartments, vacation homes and luxury cars.

They talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s reflections on a time of ease and excess seven decades ago. And they allude to places like Golconda, the jewel-studded city of Indian legend.

“I told the young people to enjoy their stroll through Golconda,” said one former Drexel executive. “And I told them it wouldn’t last.”

Scott Discount had a trying time at the unemployment office the other day, but it could have been worse. He found it reassuring to pull into a parking lot filled with expensive cars (including a Mercedes); it was a sign that former Wall Street peers were there ahead of him.

Sure enough, when he reached the line, one fellow ahead of him was from Drexel.

“When I heard I was being laid off, I was embarrassed, and at first I tried to hide it from people,” Discount recalled. “Then I decided, the hell with it--now it’s almost in vogue to be in this situation.”

It has been traumatic, he says, trying to adjust to the loss of a job that was so essential to his identity. “People would ask you who you were, and you would say, ‘trader,’ ” he said. “In this situation, you’ve got to start to think of yourself not as a job title but as a person who can solve all sorts of problems.”

The quick change of careers has left him with a few awkward minor problems, such as the $1,000 Ralph Lauren suit he sent in for alterations before the layoff and hasn’t yet retrieved. He doesn’t have much use for it now, since he makes his deliveries in jeans and tennis shoes and never wears anything dressier than khaki slacks.

Discount bakes his cheesecakes from his mother’s recipe. He is selling several dozen cakes a week to fancy Manhattan stores such as Dean & DeLuca and Bloomingdale’s. He thinks he can expand the business quickly, but if it doesn’t work out, he’s ready to reconsider his options.

He has had to abandon the idea of buying a house and he can’t travel as much as he used to. His new work also isn’t as intellectually stimulating as the old, he acknowledges.

On the other hand, he said: “There’s not the ulcer-creating pressure, and if I want to go to the zoo in the middle of the day, there’s nothing to stop me.”

He’s a former Drexel executive, now working as a stockbroker and looking back on the ‘80s as some of his happiest years. “There was no better place to work on Earth than on Wall Street in the ‘80s,” this veteran of two decades on the street says.

Yet he believes that the pay and spending habits of Wall Street professionals, and their opinions of their own worth, began to get out of line as the Dow Jones industrial average moved higher and higher.

“We were the Indians who discovered gushers of oil under our tepees,” said the executive, who requested anonymity. “What does that say about our talents? I’d say the money was a temporary demand aberration--maybe not a function of our particular operating skills. Anybody who assumed it would all continue was foolish.”

Once a colleague proposed that he hire a young man two years out of business school for a salary of several hundred thousand dollars. “Nobody just out of school should be making more than the President makes, I told him,” he said. “We didn’t hire the guy.”

The veteran doesn’t now face a personal financial crisis because he held down expenses and saved. He has owned the same house in suburban Westchester County for more than 10 years. His two children go to public schools and he drives a station wagon.

It isn’t the same for all of his peers. He knows several who are struggling with deep debts they took on to buy company stock, apartments and vacation homes. Now some of them are facing personal bankruptcy; others, older men, are trying to rebuild their careers at a time in their lives when they had planned to cut back their work schedules.

“People accumulated all these things as trophies of new wealth,” the veteran said, “but they didn’t earn them--they borrowed to take them home. Now their jobs are gone and their debts remain.”

He would not guess by how much his income might fall this year from its former high point, but, he said, he’s happy to “get back to the basics of the business.”

The moneymaking excesses of the ‘80s were “sort of like eating Big Macs,” he said. “You eat a few, they taste good; you eat a lot more. Only later do you find out about the calories and fat and cholesterol.”

It was Thanksgiving week last year when Doris Lederer learned that she had lost her job as sales-trader at Salomon Bros.’ equity options and futures desk.

“It was a real surprise, even though there were signs that layoffs were coming,” said Lederer, who is 38. She was taken aback because she was No. 2 in the department, had a good reputation and was supporting a husband who is still in law school.

But losing her job helped her make up her mind to move on to a career that would allow her more time with her family, if less compensation. Though she has since had other offers from Wall Street, she plans to move this summer to Phoenix and open, with her sister, a fashion accessories store they plan to call Notorious.

Lederer moved to Wall Street seven years ago after earning a Ph.D. in educational psychology. She doesn’t regret it. “It was a challenging career at an exciting time,” she said.

A typical trader on her desk earned between $250,000 and $400,000 a year before the slowdown, and some earned much more.

But her interest had been flagging. After the 1987 crash, trading was thinner and competition for the client’s dollar was tougher.

Lederer had grown tired of what she considered the “frat house atmosphere of the trading floor” and felt that the firm didn’t offer women the opportunities it held for men.

And the hours were long. Lederer left home in Hoboken, N.J., just across the Hudson River from the Manhattan financial district, at about 6:30 a.m., before her infant son awakened. By the time she returned at night, he was cranky and ready to go to sleep.

Often her job involved entertaining clients after hours, too.

Another Wall Street firm recently offered her a job that would have allowed her to stay home a little later in the morning--if she would promise to begin selling on the phone before she left.

She considers herself part of a group that some have called the “new traditionalists,” people who are adjusting their careers to give themselves more time for themselves and their families.

This year, Lederer said, she expects to live on half the amount she paid in taxes in 1989. “And I expect the quality of my life to improve dramatically,” she said.

The young investment banker acknowledges that he is pretty desperate for a job. But he wouldn’t think of working for the financial-services company executive who interviewed him the other day.

“The guy almost said straight out he was glad the people on Wall Street were finally getting theirs,” the banker said.

The financier, in his early 30s, was talking through a speaker phone from his Manhattan co-op apartment one recent afternoon. He has been spending a lot of time studying his walls and ceiling, he said.

He said he believes he can land a job but worries that his next salary won’t be enough to cover his debts. It’s a familiar plaint: He made several hundred thousand dollars a year but borrowed heavily to buy two vacation homes and the co-op, among other things.

He calls people who now criticize such borrowing habits “incredible second-guessers.”

“Some of us have gotten in jams by borrowing heavily, but others have made fortunes with smart leveraging,” he said. “Some people were saying in 1983 that the expansion couldn’t last, but it did--it went on and on.”

The banker concedes that the spending habits of his colleagues did influence him to buy more and spend heavily on entertaining. “To be taken seriously by these people, you had to live like them. That was business,” he says.

As the wind scatters a blizzard of Wall Street resumes, some employers are enjoying a buyer’s market.

Among them are a few profitable Wall Street investment banks, commercial banks, regional investment firms and foreign financial firms that are trying to expand their footholds in the United States--such as Nomura Securities of Japan and County NatWest Securities of Britain.

Some of the Drexel Burnham Lambert refugees are starting investment-banking boutiques. Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Co. has hired about 60 people from the defunct firm, including corporate restructuring experts, commodities specialists and money-managers. Another 40 of them have gone to work for County NatWest.

But when some get hired, others may get bumped. While Kidder, Peabody & Co. has hired 14 people from Drexel, it also has displaced some employees in its Boston office to make room for six bond salesmen from Drexel.

Executive recruiters say that the job hunters in the top tier--which includes proven moneymakers--seem to glide effortlessly to new roosts. There is also some demand for younger professionals, perhaps in part because of their lower salary expectations and presumed greater energy.

Life may be bitter for those in a middle group who have experience and have commanded higher salaries but are deal “processors” rather than deal makers. “These guys are turning right and left looking everywhere, until their necks are stiff,” said Robert S. Rollo, managing director of the Korn Ferry International search firm.

Wall Street’s new reality is reflected in the pay packages now offered investment bankers with the minimum experience.

Before, a junior banker might have gotten a $50,000 base salary and a guaranteed first-year bonus of between $50,000 and $150,000. Now the salary’s the same but the bonus may be $50,000 at the maximum, said Allan Stern, partner in the Haskell & Stern search firm.

The retrenchment has created some incongruous situations.

A recently dismissed trader found herself standing in line in a store with a “$1 off” coupon for Pampers--wearing the mink coat she had bought while employed. “My friend who pointed it out was hysterical,” the trader recalled.

She used to spend money without thinking. Now she’s starting to cook at home and goes to restaurants for the late afternoon cut-price dinner specials. No more Broadway shows and after-theater dinners; she and her husband go to the museums on Friday and Saturday nights, when the prices are low.

They’re thinking about selling their East Side apartment before New York co-op prices, which have fallen about 15% from their peak, fall further. Then they may buy a home in the suburbs.

But the financial worries aren’t as unbearable as the tension she and others endured while waiting to find out whether their jobs would be cut.

“It’s like they take you into this room, and a man comes in and says, ‘I’m going to shoot you,’ ” she said. “Maybe they do give you the bad news that day; or maybe they don’t and you have to suffer through it the next day.”

In California, Deborah Wall, 34, found out that her Drexel division was being closed the day after she made the first payment on a new house in Pasadena.

That was last May. She was shocked but not immediately frightened because she thought she had another job lined up at Citicorp. It was when that expected job fell through, in July, that “absolute and total panic set in.”

Wall, who had been chief West Coast credit officer for a Drexel division, tried to discipline herself to make 10 job-hunting calls a day and set up a number of interviews. “If I didn’t meet my goal, I’d feel like a failure,” she said.

Wall didn’t find a job last summer. She spent four months as a temporary secretary and only recently landed a job with a venture capital firm.

It didn’t bother her that she had to take a temporary step down in her career. “The important thing was working and hanging onto the house,” she says.

Her message for others considering careers with Wall Street firms: “If you’re looking for stability, you’re not going to find it.”

Financiers and traders get the attention on Wall Street, but more than two-thirds of those who work there--and most of those who have lost their jobs--are more modestly paid members of support staff, including an army of computer operators, clerks, accountants and secretaries.

Since she lost her position as a secretary at Drexel, Nettie Buonomo, 68, has worried about losing much of her hospitalization coverage. It was important to her because she had a mastectomy last year.

She can apply for Medicare but says has heard stories about how inferior the care may be. “I’m scared to death,” she said.

Buonomo, who lives with her poodle, Rags, in her seven-room house in Avenel, N.J., says she could use some extra money but hasn’t decided whether to try to find work again. “I should think about looking for another job, but I’ve been too befuddled by what happened.”

Buonomo, one of 11 children, describes herself as “one of those old-time Italians who really know the value of a dollar.” She wants to make it clear that she’s not crying poverty.

“I’m just sorry for those young kids who were used to making the megabucks,” she said. “What are they going to do?”

Staff writer Lance Ignon, in New York, contributed to this story.