John Hendron never thought he would be coming to a food pantry for help making it through the month.

A 56-year-old historian with a Ph.D. who has taught at the high school and college and university levels for 27 years, Hendron found out in early August that neither Moraine Valley Community College nor Governors State University would hire him back as an adjunct professor.

By fall, he was making monthly trips to Catholic Charities’ south suburban office in South Holland to get a box of groceries, including soup and other canned goods, macaroni and cheese and peanut butter and jelly.

He had an interview set up to get cash benefits, and renewed his license to be a substitute teacher. He was hoping to get called in to work by the Lincoln-Way school district within a couple of weeks.

Hendron isn’t starving; he is using whatever money he can get to hang onto the home in Steger where he has lived for the last 40 years. And he is helping his girlfriend and her mother while his girlfriend gets through her last year of school to get an accounting degree.

His story is familiar to Fred Shannon, director of Catholic Charities South Suburban Services.

While economists say the economic downturn the U.S. has been mired in since 2008 can no longer be called a recession, Shannon hasn’t seen any decrease in demand for emergency help.

Before the downturn, his office saw about 1,300 people a month looking for emergency food, clothing or other resources. That number has climbed to an average of about 1,600 a month — sometimes more than 2,000 — and Shannon has seen no sign that it’s going to drop any time soon.

Many of the new people are middle-aged, Shannon said, in what they probably expected would be their prime earning years.

“They’re people who just lost their jobs, or they have a job, but it’s just not enough to make it,” said Shannon.

Under the rules of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, from which the pantry purchases food at steep discounts, clients can only get one box of food a month. The amount of food varies by the size of the household.

Mothers of very young children and older people can qualify for a second box each month under another program, Shannon said, and he suspects that some clients shop around from pantry to pantry — which they are not supposed to do, “but you do whatever it takes,” he said. “More power to them.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there were 46.2 million Americans living in poverty in 2011. The poverty rate, at 15 percent was statistically unchanged from 2010. Median household income fell 1.7 percent from 2010 to 2011, and was 8.1 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession.

Hendron said he has seen the way the recession has dragged on — historically speaking, it’s more of a depression, he said — and knows of many people like him who were able to hang onto their jobs for years after the downturn started only to become unemployed in 2012.

In his case, he said, the timing was caused by three-year grant cycles, meaning college or university programs that received funding in early 2008 saw those grants dry up, and declining rates of college enrollment, as families cannot afford to send their children for higher education.

When there are fewer students, there are fewer classes, and colleges and universities fill schedules of their full-time teachers first, then distribute whatever is left among the part-time adjuncts.

Hendron said he was remaining upbeat. He’s learned a lot about living poor since losing his teaching jobs, he said, including that it really can happen to people who never expected it. He’s also been pleasantly surprised at how friendly the people at the food pantry are.

“The first thing that surprised me is that they let me in,” Hendron said of the food pantry. “I thought they’d say, ‘You’re not poor.’ But I do need the help now. Everyone here has been very nice.”