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Information:
Hadwiger was born into woodworking, both his father and grandfather created in the medium. At age five, Hadwiger contracted scarlet fever, which left him 40 percent in both ears and eventually forced him to leave school. As a youth, he spent his spare time at home working on mechanical projects. As a young adult, he taught woodworking classes for two years, and he was a founder of the Pueblo [Colorado] Junior College, a training school for war workers. Hadwiger, however, worked most of his life by himself at a machine shop and foundry, making such things as stairs and patterns for cast iron casting. He also had an interest in inventions. Among other creations, he invented the bearing puller for the Untied States Air Command in 1942, and he credited himself with the invention of the hearing aid one year later. It is unknown when he started to create the inlaid wood pieces by which he is best known today, but by the 1950s and 1960s Hadwiger was selling this type of work at a roadside stand.
"Flying Free: Twentieth-Century Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Ellin and Baron Gordon" by Ellin Gordon, Barbara L. Luck and Tom Patterson, exhibit catalog for The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, 1997.
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