Who is Franklin Delano Ray from Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and what is their importance?

Franklin Delano Ray's mother named her son after FDR to show her support for and hope that the president could turn the suffering US economy of the 1930s around. Perhaps that spirit inspired Frank who had a tenacious and can-do attitude about anything he attempted to do. He ran a salvage business out of his family home's backyard. Frank was the perfect person to run a junkyard as he rarely threw anything away—he felt everything had value and that he, with his remarkable mechanical ability, could fix anything and he often did.