By Katy Savage, Standard Staff
Recently, Woodstock Home and Hardware staff fielded angry phone calls from people across the country about its sign.
“Most of them fairly abusive,” said store owner Larry Perry of the calls.
Many of callers said they wished they lived closer just to boycott the store. One said they’d never shop at the store again.
The one-liner on the sign — “Trump’s Wives Were Immigrants — Proving Again They’ll Do Jobs Americans Won’t” — was photographed and shared on Facebook. It was picked up by a Fox News affiliate, Perry said.
“I found that Trump supporters are a passionate group,” said Perry, who has supported Bernie Sanders since Sanders was mayor of Burlington. “It seemed to me Mr. Trump’s position on Mexicans and Muslims and immigrants was a little bit ironic considering two of his three wives were immigrants.”
Trump earned 24.3 percent of the votes in the Iowa caucus on Monday losing to Ted Cruz’s 27.6 percent.
Perry’s staff forwarded complainers to his voicemail when they got tired of answering them. All but one of the 12 on his machine was negative.
“I did not intend to insult anybody by it,” Perry said.
The sign changed the days following: “Anyone without a sense of humor is at the mercy of anybody else.”
And: “Then one day for no particular reason we became offended by everything.”
“Ninety-nine percent of what I put up there is done with tongue firmly in cheek, hoping that people have a sense of humor,” Perry said.
Perry has been condensing whatever happens in the world to 80 characters since 2004 when his store changed from the Paint Shop to Woodstock Home and Hardware.
The first sign read, “Now under old management.”
Then Perry started pulling one-liners from a Steven Wright comedy show at the Lebanon Opera House around that time.
“That got a lot of attention,” Perry said.
A hardware publication wrote about it and it got national attention.
A recent sign: “Misuses of literally makes me figuratively insane” was posted and reposted thousands of times on social media, Perry said.
The 80 characters he can fit on the sign are fewer characters than the 140 on Twitter.
“There’s a fair amount of editing,” Perry said.
William Hoyt of Hartland goes to the store everyday. The sign is entertainment to him.
“I love it,” he said.
Hoyt’s favorite was: “I used to be addicted to the hokey pokey but I turned myself around.”
Hoyt called Perry “brave” for the one-liner about Trump because Hoyt, a business owner, is so concerned with offending customers that he refrains from controversial bumper stickers.
Perry is certain that his sign impacts his business.
“I am certain that there’s a certain number of people that don’t want to do business in my store because of something they’ve seen up there,” Perry said. “I hope it’s a small number.”
The well-known and ever-changing Woodstock Home and Hardware sign on Route 4 has had controversial comments in the past.
“It flabbergasts me sometimes as to how something that’s put up there is misconstrued,” Perry said. “I try not to put anything up there that’s going to offend anybody but the reality is that people read into things, whatever is going on in their heads.”
The sign promotes nonprofits and sometimes it promotes deals inside the store. Nothing is off-limits except the promotion of other businesses. Planning and Zoning Officer Michael Brands said in June 2014 that Perry’s signs violated Woodstock’s outdoor sign regulation, which prohibits businesses from advertising other off-premise organizations on their property.
This wasn’t the first time Perry’s had angry phone calls because of the sign.
“If I were going to put anything up there we think might be controversial it usually gets passed around to other members of the staff,” Perry said.
Perry made another political statement last month: “Make America Great Again, Deport Donald Trump.”
At the end of the day, Perry tries to put “something humorous, something that will put a smile on somebody’s face that will make them think positive about us” on the sign, he said.
This article first appeared in the February 4, 2016 edition of the Vermont Standard.