As we face the economic crisis, it may be time to ask those who lived through one of their own what it was like.

Notre Dame's Father Theodore Hesburgh was just a boy during the Great Depression, and remembers it well.

"I was a youngster in high school, I graduated in 1934, and I can remember my dad coming home and saying, 'I got another cut in salary.'"

Father Theodore Hesburgh recalls what life was like for his family during the Great Depression.

His father was manager of a plate glass company in Syracuse. He and his wife Ann were raising five kids.

"He was trying to pay for a house we had built, a new house, and he was trying to keep the family together," Hesburgh recalls. "And it seemed to me about every other month he came home and said, 'I got another cut in salary.'"

Father Hesburgh worked in high school to help make ends meet.

"Working at the gas station eight hours a day after school was out, in the afternoon, and everybody was really down low. It was not a happy time in America."

Not happy times, but times he would not compare to today.

"Not as bad as then. My God, my dad was manager of a big paint company," Hesburgh says. "He had to literally borrow a car from one of his salesmen to get me out here [Notre Dame]."

Calling himself a product of the Catholic ghetto, coming up through the Catholic schools, Theodore Hesburgh would go to college at Notre Dame.

"I had literally $130 in my pocket, which I'd earned," Hesburgh explains.

Knowing since he was a little boy that he wanted to be a priest, his Notre Dame education would be paid for by the Congregation of the Holy Cross.

While our economy and job losses today are real, Father Hesburgh believes our country will persevere as it always has.

"We have had wonderful years in this nation. Today we have a nation that freely elected a black president."

"And now I think we have to, as a nation get behind President Obama and see what we can really do. I think today we have to live in hope," Hesburgh urges.

For all of his accomplishments, Father Hesburgh says the one that means the most to him is becoming a priest.

He says he felt the call to the priesthood when he was six years old.