According to Newsweek, the current crop of high school and college graduates aren’t asking their parents for vocational and financial advice. Instead, they’re turning to their Depression-era grandparents. Unemployment today is nearly 10 percent, but during the Depression it was 25 percent. People who lived through that era know what they are talking about.

Beth Kobliner, the Takeaway’s work contributor and author of “Get a Financial Life,” joined us with her father, a grandfather of six who taught her pretty much everything she knows. Dr. Harold Kobliner was born in 1929, just months before the stock market crash, and he has plenty of wisdom to offer. Read his five tips, in his own words.

1. Men can’t allow a job loss to make them feel like failures.  I was born just a few months before the stock market crash. My father had a grocery store, but he lost it in 1932, and from that time on he was unemployed throughout the Depression. There were four children in my family, and we lived in a small, cramped apartment in the East Bronx. We only survived because my mother was a seamstress; it was really rough on my father not being the breadwinner. Today, most of the jobs being lost in this recession are being lost by men. They have to set aside their pride and take any job to get an income. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about—you can’t put your head in the sand. And the whole family must get involved, even kids.
2. Do what you have to do, not what you want to do. My kids tease me because this was always my motto. Sometimes you have to do the hard thing—even if it’s not what you had hoped or imagined for yourself. Nowadays, you may have to take a job that you never thought you would have, but it gives you money to put food on the table. Even as a kid I worked. I was a messenger at the candy store and delivery boy at the grocery store. I was a messenger at the candy store, I sold the Saturday Evening Post, and I babysat.
3. Pick a career that offers stability and security. Eventually I went to college and became a teacher and then a principal, jobs that offered a wonderful pension and a great tax-deferred annuity program (like a 401k) that we contributed to, no matter what my salary was. It also allowed me to spend time with my children. I had summers off but instead of taking vacation, my wife and I and our three children went to sleep-away camps for about 20 summers. I was the head counselor and that allowed me to provide my children with free camp, free room and board for all of us—and I got paid. Plus, since we didn’t have expenses in the city, I was able to “bank” my teacher salary from June and save.  There is still a lot of opportunity in the teaching field today—there are more than two million jobs expected to open up in teaching over the next decade, so it’s a wonderful field to consider.
4. You need to have a good work ethic—particularly in tough times. When I was in college, I had a job working part-time at the department store, Gimbel’s. I worked very hard and that paid off because my manager told me that whenever I had free time after school or on weekends, I could simply stop by the store at my convenience and he’d give me work. That flexibility was great since I was in school. Also, as a young principal in training, my superiors offered me plum assignments because they knew that I would get the job done. The point is that good work gets noticed and rewarded.
5. Make your hard-earned dollars stretch further. It’s important to delay gratification when it comes to spending. It’s not that you can’t have fun. We had plenty. I’ve been married to a wonderful woman for 58 years and it’s been terrific. But you know, it’s important to be able to save for the future. I started this very young. At age 8, I used to work in the candy store, and it was hard not to spend those nickels and dimes on candy or on the pinball machines. But I gave it to my mother. When kids were smoking, I said to myself, “How much do cigarettes cost?” I wouldn't buy them because I didn't want to spend the money. Later, my wife Shirley and I used that delayed gratification when we made choices about what to purchase. Necessities won over luxuries. We waited 11 years to purchase a home.  We waited nine years to purchase a car. (And we had that same car for 12 years—that’s frugality!) We waited 15 years to purchase fine furniture; before that, we lived with second-hand. Now I’ve been retired very comfortably for 20 years, and it’s all because I worked so hard for 40.