My Day at Frager’s: An Interview with Owner John Weintraub

Uploaded to flickr by M.V. Jantzen

When a Frager’s employee approached me and asked me to follow him upstairs I felt as though I was being asked to meet the wizard behind the curtain. This would be the last stop on my tour: a meeting with John Weintraub, one of two owners of Capitol Hill’s Frager’s Hardware.

I walked into the office Weintraub shares with partner Ed Coppenhaver, and felt as though I was walking into a sacred space. The office space is home to computers, files and all of the things needed to run a business, but it also holds the store’s history, which Weintraub was happy to share. And what an interesting history it is.

“A young Fritz Frager, a carpenter at the Washington Navy Yard, found himself out of work when the first World War ended, so he decided to open a hardware store on Capitol Hill,” says Weintraub. “The store flourished in the decades that followed, as did the Frager family, which grew to include two children and multiple grandchildren.”

The eldest Frager left the store to his sons George and Julius, who were ready to pass on the store to a new generation just as two former college roommates decided to go into business together. In August 1975, 55 years after first opening its doors, Coppenhaver and Weintraub bought Frager’s Hardware from George and Julius Frager.

“Ed and I met at the University of Virginia. Then after the service and a number of years,” says Weintraub, “we ran into each other at GW. That’s when we decided to go into business together.”

After 10 years in the store, Coppenhaver and Weintraub set out to expand Frager’s Hardware.

“We were growing with the neighborhood. We bought the property and the building next door to expand our rental and paint business,” said Weintraub.

The number of employees grew as well, with a total of 62 full and part time employees currently on the payroll at Frager’s.

Weintraub notes that employees come to Frager’s because of the reputation. “They are fleeing an office job or are let go from a position,” says Weintraub. And Frager’s owners and employees welcome the new comers into the family. “We especially like to hire people from our neighborhood.”

With Coppenhaver and Weintraub at the helm, the store’s sales have gone up 25 fold, due in part to memorable events like 2010’s Snowmageddon, which saw the store sell over 4,000 shovels with a total retail value of $85,000, as well as the store’s regular customers who choose to shop at Frager’s because of the knowledgable staff and the well-stocked, albeit tighly-packed, shelves.

For employees, shop patrons and the 43rd President of the United States, who visited the store as part of a press event in 2006, Frager’s is the perfect small business, which happens to be located right here on our Hill.