Ed Copenhaver & John Weintraub · 2002 Honorees

Like Eastern Market, Frager’s Hardware Store is a place where you can count on seeing your Capitol Hill friends and neighbors. We all shop there, not just for the ever-expanding range of products it sells—everything from nails to rose bushes—but for the service which is efficient and unfailingly friendly. The shop reflects its owners, Ed Copenhaver and John Weintraub.

Ed, from Charlottesville, and John, a Baltimore native, met at the University of Virginia, where they were roommates and fraternity brothers. After college, they went their separate ways, each serving tours of duty in Vietnam—Ed in the Navy and John as part of the Coast Guard. They reconnected at George Washington University, where John was in the business school and Ed was studying engineering, and they began to talk about going into business together. John was living on Capitol Hill and knew that George and Julius Frager were always trying to sell the hardware store their father had started in the 1920s. Initially unimpressed with the place, Ed and John gave it a second look at the suggestion of John’s wife, Fran, and in 1975 they bought it “as is” which meant with dusty floors and little idea exactly what inventory they had but with George Frager who stayed with them for ten years. He told them “If you're good to the people in the neighborhood, they’ll be good to you.”

And that has been Ed and John’s approach. They have continuously expanded their business which now has, besides all the usual paraphernalia of home maintenance and improvement, a rental department for tools and party equipment (where else would you get a bubble machine?), a huge garden section and a recently opened paint shop. Ten years ago they finally got rid of the old shelving George Frager had built and they managed the “slow, painful” transition to computerized inventory. At the same time, they have supported fundraising drives at local schools, sponsored a baseball team and generously donated to the garden project at Watkins Elementary School, not to mention employing dozens of Capitol Hill young people.

John and his wife, Fran, media specialist at the Field School, live on the Hill and raised their daughters Emily and Jeanne here; Ed lives here too, sharing a home with his companion, lobbyist Sharon McIlrath. John says that Frager’s “mirrors the comunity” in its growth and success over the last twenty-five years. It mirrors also two owners who know that a neighborhood is more than just a place to live.