Furniture dealer Franco Cozzo died recently, at age 87. He is famous for the ads he used to run back in the 1980s on Channel Ten on Sunday mornings, when Ten would run such awful shows as Grecian Scene and Variety Italian Style.
In a combination of Italian and deliberately broken English, Franco Cozzo would exhort viewers to buy furniture from his shops, initially in ‘Nord Melbourne and Footiscray’ and later on ‘Brunswick and Footscray’.
The stores are closed now, although so recently that the Brunswick store still had a lot of the furniture in the windows this week when I was in Sydney Road, and the ‘Footscray’ store has only recently put paper over the windows in preparation for its transformation into a craft beer hall.
There were not too many other famous businesses or organisations based in Footscray. Jim Wong (my favourite Chinese restaurant) closed over 4 years ago, and the Footscray Football Club has traded as the Western Bulldogs for the past 27 years (a decision I understand and respect, but which I still do not love).
Travel guidebook company Lonely Planet had its world headquarters in Footscray for a long time, based somewhere in the original village, in an office building near the river. It gave me a bit of parochial pride as a local that Lonely Planet was based there.
That knowledge that Lonely Planet was, sort of, a local Footscray business did greatly influence my choice to purchase the most recent edition of the Lonely Planet guide to Italy before each of the three journeys I have made there in the past 8 years.
Sadly, Lonely Planet is not based in Footscray anymore. I discovered recently, to my great disappointment, that its current owners have moved the world headquarters to the USA. It has hence lost what made it unique and special to me.
As a result, when I next travel overseas, I will probably take a closer look at other travel guides before deciding which I will buy, and Lonely Planet has definitely lost what was it’s competitive edge as far as I am concerned.
Lost For Words! 