The mention of Zenith's distribution through the hardware company rang a bell with me. On my first paper route in the early 60s, there was a friendly family with the last name of Hay. They lived on Midlawn Drive. One Saturday morning, when I was collecting, they were out in the back yard so I went around the house to talk to them and collect my $2.52 for the month. Like many houses in the south, they had no basement so the washer was in a utility room that opened into the back yard. I noticed with a subtle glance that the automatic washer was a Zenith. I knew that Mr. Hay worked for Beck and Gregg Hardware, a large wholesale distributor of hardware that started in Atlanta in the late 1800s and then in 1969 was bought by another Atlanta firm, Genuine Parts, a name familiar to those who deal with automobile parts. I do not know what store(s) sold Zenith appliances in Atlanta. I only know of two Zenith washers from my time there, so they were far from common, but this was another wholesale hardware connection to Zenith. There were independent hardware stores in our part of the area and a few small chains like King Hardware which over the years sold Speed Queen, Maytag and Frigidaire so I imagine that a hardware dealer who dealt with B&G could have ordered the Zenith machines without having to carry the line.
The Smithsonian has some of Beck & Gregg's old catalogs as does the library at Georgia State University, but they don't give the years. Decades ago, I remember looking through some old wholesale hardware catalogs in our collections, but I was looking for early Pyrex Flameware and glass coffee makers, not appliances. We might have some other old hardware catalogs I could search. They are sort of like Sweet's catalogs in that they are generally compilations of manufacturers' spec sheets like a few pages of the products from Cory, Silex, Revere Copper and Brass and other brands showing current products and repair parts like gaskets, filters, gauges and sealing rings for pressure cookers, knobs and handles, etc.
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