About 50 years ago my family moved from Horsham, in NW Victoria to Croydon in the foothills of the Dandenongs after 10 happy satisfying and productive years. In Horsham my wife Marge had opened & operated a very successful ladieswear boutique from about 1947 which greatly benefitid from wartime shortages of fashionable stock., using one communal change room set up behind the clothing racks...she had lived in Horsham immediately she had immigrated from Poland and had many school-friends she knew when she opened which formed the nucleous of a thriving business very quickly after her few years in Melbourne as a teen-ager. She had "a thing" about small shops and she loved the buzz and excitement amongst the ladies when new stock arrived and after rapidly removing invoices etc. allowed them to remove them from the boxes and put them on the hangers amid choruses of admiration - "ooh`s and ah`s" etc. as some of them looked for their special orders etc. .. After we`d settled in Croydon she wanted to continue in the same way and in 1957 we opened Jolee Sports, named after our 2 daughters Jo & Lee, in a spacious shop - too large in fact, so we separated it by a unique ti-tree dividing wall and a covering of tan-bark covering the floor. Our elated enthusiasm overlooked the fact that, after a few weeks the tanbark had disastrously disentegrated into dust which was definitely not an advantage to resplendent racks of delicate, demure dresses and the tanbark was duly dispatched to the garden.
We had no allocation for advertising in our strictly limited budget, so Marge quietly opened and patiently waited for customers and it wasn`t too long before she happily advised of her first sale - a cardigan! She soon built it up into a thriving business and in the other half I operated a successful real-estate agency I sold after a while when it became evident there was scope for an art gallery we called Croydon Galleries - living near many artists then operating in and around the Dandenongs...it was Melbourne`s first art gallery outside the city`s CBD....after some solid searching in artists` studios I was most fortunate in persuading Arnold Shore, well-known painter and the Age art critic to do the honours and he agreed, after which I successfully approached Melbourne`s the city`s then 3 TV channels 2, 7 and 9 to film the opening.
One of the first painters I asked to exhibit was a certain John Brack - I think he was an art teacher at Melbourne Grammar then . He had not been painting long and at that time I was beginning to form an opinion in my own mind if the style of paintings I preferred and I loved the clean-cut in which he presented his human figures..........if only I`d that I`d been blessed with foresight and held on to a few of his paintings then! I reckon I lost about a million dollars because one of his paintings recently sold for 3.2 million dollars .....
After Croydon Galleries had served us well we closed it and opened the Jolee Coffee Shop with an entrance through to Jolee Sports on one side and Jolee Junior on the other - manned by myself. Prior to the opening of the coffee shop I had visited Pellegrinis at the top of Bourke St - not then long in business which was using Melbourne`s first expresso machines. I`d previously ensured I was armed with a pencil & tape measure so I could get approximate measurements of the bar - by standing up against it noting it was just a little below nipple height - we also used a black & white checked floor......it soon became well-known because of Marge`s cooking until it justified a paid fulltime staff member.
We also had prime publicity for Jolee Junior with it`s own play area with tiny fences, toy phones etc. (another "first" for Melbourne) so while the Mums shopped and/or enjoyed coffee, the kids were happy - not touching the clothing etc.....
Talking of children, Kingsley Amis (1922 - 1955) said "It`s no wonder people were so horrible when they started life as children.......
`till next time - about 7-10 days
