I asked my uncle who was born in 1923 about the depression and he said he never knew about it as they had what they needed. There was also the family business that saw them thru and lasted 99 years to 2007 when the 3rd generation - my cousins sold out.
And your uncle didn’t have ABC, CBS, NBC and the rest of the alphabets shoving it down their throats. Oh wait, Roosevelt was a Democrat so if the alphabets existed, your uncle’s family would have never known. Nevermind.