President Carter's
First Purchase from
Highland Hardware
In 1981 when our company was not quite three years old, we received a call from the U.S. Secret Service. They wanted to coordinate with us a visit to our store by the now-former President, whose Presidential Library and the Carter Center were being developed just a mile down Highland Avenue from our store. Soon after the phone call, agents with ear pieces arrived to inspect our premises to make sure it was safe, (for example making sure our hardwood lumber was stacked securely enough that it would be unlikely to fall on someone).
Then on Friday afternoon, March 6, 1981, President Carter arrived at Highland Hardware with a dozen Secret Service agents to purchase some woodworking hand tools. While here he also bought a copy of David Pye's seminal book, “The Nature and Art of Workmanship.”
Click here for a closer look
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Letter to a Young Girl
Over the next few decades, President Carter continued stopping in person in the store a few times a year for routine purchases of tools and supplies. Occasionally he phoned in his order and a Secret Service agent came to pick up the items he needed.
A couple of years after President Carter's first visit to the store, our then 7-year-old daughter Kelley was sticking address labels on the new woodworking catalog we were mailing out to our customer list. When she came to Jimmy Carter’s address label, she penned her own short little note to the former President and slipped it into the catalog. A few days later she was thrilled to receive in the mail a kind personal note thanking her, handwritten by President Carter.
Click here to read the letter
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President Carter Attends Tage Frid's Seminar
at Highland Hardware
As I was giving President Carter his first tour of our store and showing him the classroom in our basement where we taught woodworking classes, he asked if we had ever had Tage Frid (the highly respected Danish dean of American woodworking teachers) here to teach a seminar. I told him we had not. President Carter responded that if Tage Frid came here to teach a woodworking class, he would make it a point to attend.
After I sent a letter to Tage Frid telling him this news, he replied that he would be delighted to come.
When the class took place a year or so later, sure enough, President Carter came and participated the entire weekend. Thus began a tradition of Mr. Frid coming to Atlanta to teach a weekend woodworking class each spring for the next 11 years.
Click here to read more about the class President Carter attended
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As we celebrate our 45th Anniversary throughout the month of May 2023, we would also like to
celebrate the life of a fellow woodworker and longtime customer, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who at 98 years of age is resting in hospice care as this is being
written.
