EUGENE — Nothing about the past five months has been easy for Thomas Henderson.

An assembly line worker at Monaco Coach Corp. in Coburg, the 39-year-old divorced father of three was among the temporary layoffs in June, leaving the family with no steady source of income to pay bills or the mortgage on their five-bedroom home in north Eugene.

Henderson held a garage sale, took in a boarder and accepted any job he could get including one as a caller for a collection agency — one of the few booming businesses these days.

Gone were family movie nights, the occasional toy purchase at Wal-Mart and even trips to Salem to visit grandma.

The sacrifices weren’t enough and they slipped further behind. Putting his pride on a shelf, Henderson called St. Vincent de Paul of Lane County for help making his $1,300 monthly payment on the house he bought more than seven years ago.

Last month, the agency handed him a food box, an opportunity to get clothes for the kids and $500 toward his mortgage to catch him up.

He’s back to work, but only part time, at Monaco, readying undercarriages of the large motor homes for further assembly.

Still, the family is hovering on the brink. Even with the boost from St. Vincent’s, catching up on his mortgage and paying a few other bills left his bank account overdrawn by $13 at the end of the month.

“You work hard, you do the best, you do the ultimate American dream. You’re supposed to have the white picket fence, but it’s threatened every month when you live paycheck to paycheck,” he said.

The story is the same across Oregon.

The state’s seasonally adjusted jobless rate jumped from 6.4 percent in September to 7.3 percent last month, the highest jobless rate since August 2004 and well above the national average of 6.5 percent.

The economic slump is forcing more and more self-described “normal people” such as Henderson to go wherever they can to help avoid foreclosure or eviction, draining the few programs that exist to help them stay in their homes.

As of the end of Oct, 20, 402 Lane County households were enrolled in various emergency basic needs and family stabilization programs — a 19 percent increase over two years, according to county data.

And the constant jangling of phones reminds harried nonprofit workers that at the end of every line there’s yet another person who can’t make their mortgage or rent payment this month. Many don’t have enough for their electric bill.

Across the board, county agencies are reporting that demand is up by at least a third, but some, particularly in the housing services, are seeing more.

Calls to ShelterCare’s Homelessness Prevention Line have doubled in six months, while St. Vincent de Paul has had more than 700 calls for its $10,000 in available rent, utility and other assistance at the beginning of every month.

Before, if St. Vincent’s was unable to give a family financial aid, they would at least get a food box or other in-kind help, St. Vincent de Paul Director Terry McDonald said.

Now, even those resources are running dry.

“Every month, we’re holding our breath to see what the demand is going to be,” McDonald said. “The chasm is opening up so great it’s starting to melt the system.”

At least 60 people a month are calling ShelterCare’s Homelessness Prevention Line, a program that can only support about 80 families a year, said Assistant Executive Director for Operations Erin Bonner.

The small program’s staff are overwhelmed to the point where they can’t handle any more calls from those in crisis, she said.

Contributing to the boom in calls for help are a demographic group nonprofits say they rarely see during good times — middle-class, two-parent households.

Among them are Derrick Bloomstrom and Adina Collier.

Hoping to remain in the duplex they rent off River Road in Eugene, the parents of three children did something they had never done before, or ever thought they would have to — they placed a call to the Homelessness Prevention Line.

From October 2007 to April 2008, 37 percent of those on ShelterCare’s waiting list were two-parent households. In the past six months, two-parent homes have come to comprise half the list.

Hearing that Eugene was a great opportunity for young families, Bloomstrom and Collier fell on hard times when they spent their savings moving to the area from Olympia in March, after it took Bloomstrom, a chef, more than three weeks to nail down a kitchen job in the struggling restaurant sector.

The job was only part time and for $2 an hour less than he was making in Washington.

“We didn’t know what we were going to do,” Bloomstrom said, sitting with his family in the ShelterCare lobby as Derrick Jr., a rambunctious toddler, zoomed in circles around him. “The economy was pretty rough when we got down here.”

The Lane County unemployment rate jumped to 6.7 percent or 12,220 people out of work in September, the month for which the most recent data are available, said Brian Rooney, a labor economist with the state Employment Department. In September last year, the unemployment rate stood at 4.9 percent, with about 3,500 fewer people unemployed, he said.

Fueling unemployment is the loss of about 1,000 jobs when Eugene’s Hynix Semiconductor plant closed its doors in July; the loss of about 700 jobs during the past year in transportation and equipment manufacturing, which includes RV makers; and layoffs at restaurants and other manufacturing firms.

With the cost of child care so high, it was cheaper for Collier to stay home and care for Austin, 9, Derrick, 3, and 10-month-old Curtis.

Not long after that, Bloomstrom, 28, was able to cobble together a second part-time position, but by then the family’s finances had become tenuous. The final blow came when Bloomstrom suffered an acute medical problem, leaving the family once again without a reliable paycheck.

Twenty percent of families enter poverty when the head of house loses a job, said county Human Services Commission Manager Steven Manela.

“I haven’t seen a surge in need like this since the recession in the early 1980s,” said Manela.

With an infusion of $500 from ShelterCare to help make the $750 Bloomstrom and Collier owed in April for the two-bedroom home, and with regular meetings with an agency counselor, they kept the family together under one roof. Collier quickly found full-time work as an in-home caregiver for an elderly client in Junction City. The family said they’re back on track.

“We wouldn’t have made it without them,” said Collier, 26.

For Henderson, the call for help was gut-wrenching. He’s the type of guy who likes to stand on his own two feet and who comes home with dirt of a hard day’s work on his hands.

“I did struggle with (asking for help),” he said. “When you’re taught by your parents to be prideful, be a man, to stand up for yourself, you work for a living, you don’t want to be one of those welfare families.”

Looking at his kids, however, he realized that he didn’t have a choice as far as keeping heat in his house, or lights over their heads.

“I just strive to fight everyday, put one foot in front of the other,” Henderson said.

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On the Net:

Hynix Semiconductor, Inc: http://www.hynix.com/gl/index.jsp

Monaco Coach Corp.: http://www.monaco-online.com/

ShelterCare: http://www.sheltercare.org/donate.html