Ken Moir Pharmacy Sesame Street

In 1952 Arch Fussell opened a new pharmacy in Wodonga on the site occupied by Guardian Pharmacy today.  Ken Moir was on the original staff and he purchased the business in 1953. He sold the business to Graham Crapp, Harold Dennis and Robert Wood 30 years later.

Ken told us he was robbed in the pharmacy many times over the years.  “Two of them come to mind… on one occasion we arrived at work one morning to find a young man sound asleep on the pharmacy floor. He had got in through the high glass windows in the lane on northern side, and had found a vial of Apomorphine hypodermic tablets and had injected himself (too much as it turned out) and fell asleep. A policeman woke him up!

On another occasion, some young men broke in and took a cash register in the back of their station wagon. Constable Rick Johnson of Barnawartha (son of Rick Johnson from the Barny Pub) was driving the paddy wagon out near the Stump Hotel when he saw the boys’ car behaving strangely and gave chase. Somewhere near the saleyards, the lads panicked and pushed the cash register out onto the road where it rolled and bounced, spreading coin and notes and machinery everywhere on the road. Constable Johnson apprehended the lads and had them pick up everything on their hands and knees over the next hour or so! When I saw them later that evening at the police station, they did not look happy.”

Ken Moir said he had named the adjoining lane “Sesame Street” in about 1970, because of the popularity of the children’s television program of that name.

Mr Peter Skeen, a local artist, painted the main Sesame Street characters, which were screwed to the lane’s walls and fences to brighten it.

On the day Sesame Street opened, children were given free ice creams from Mr Hopper’s ice cream shop in the eastern end of the lane.

They came in their hundreds to see their favourite television characters and then sat on the lawn in High Street, where Joy Bawden’s dress shop was later built, to eat their ice cream.

Mr Moir said the Sesame Street characters, which were a popular drawcard to the lane’s shops, were all stolen one night and never recovered.