Today, I met with a charming person who a lot of people might remember from the Organ Grinder’s heyday.
This person was in possession of a trove of documents and memorabilia, including multiple scrapbooks kept by Paul Forchuk, one of the Organ Grinder’s co-founders.
These scrapbooks were previously thought to be lost. (Obviously, the person who had them didn’t think they were lost!)
An sad and insurmountable problem for documentary producers is that, before a certain time, there was no home video – Only still photos, or if you’re very lucky, 8mm home movies. Wait, what? There’s FILM? Somebody shot professional 16mm film of the Organ Grinder in the 1970s? Why didn’t you say so!
Photo of Vicki Bock (colloquially known as the Organ Grinder’s “Monkey Lady”) with two good friends.
It’s important for a documentary to reveal the the truth about its subject. Sometimes, that truth involves subterfuge – such as when the Organ Grinder was featured on a nationwide TV game show! Will the real “World’s Only” female Organ Grinder please stand up? Frame from a 1970’s episode of “To Tell the Truth” featuring…
Yesterday, we returned to the Architectural Heritage Center in Portland, Oregon. The AHC had just unearthed a set of slides from the architecture firm Martin, Soderstrom and Matteson (now Soderstrom Architects), originally co-founded by Will Martin, the architect who designed the Organ Grinder building. The slides feature the Organ Grinder building in 1973 around the…
Early in the planning stages for the first Organ Grinder, the founders used an architecture firm which specialized in restaurants and hotels. The design was very conventional – a rectangular building, with the entrance and kitchen at the front, and the organ at the back. No towering windows showing off the pipes to the street,…
There is a connection between the Organ Grinder restaurants and the legendary Earthquake Ethel’s Roadhouse nightclub in Beaverton. Several of the same people were involved, and Ethel’s will have a chapter in the documentary. And here, we are happy to present to you, an original painting of the mythical Ethel herself, loaned to the production…