Photo of Vicki Bock (colloquially known as the Organ Grinder’s “Monkey Lady”) with two good friends.
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Dress for the Occasion
Mascots at the Organ Grinder restaurant in Portland, Oregon, dressed in red-white-and-blue garb for the 1976 United States Bicentennial celebration.
Vintage Organ Grinder TV Commercial – “Good Old Summertime” – Early 1980s – Portland Nostalgia
Here’s another newly-restored and upscaled vintage commercial from the famous Organ Grinder restaurant in Portland, Oregon. This ad was produced in the early 1980s. (Date determined by presence of Zaxxon arcade game, which was released in late December, 1981, and Donkey Kong, released in the summer of 1981, which means this commercial was likely produced…
Bonus Feature – The Eclectic Sounds of the Mary L. Collins Organ – Jonas Nordwall
As part of the documentary project, Jonas Nordwall sat for an extended interview. Jonas is the Organist and Artistic Director of Music at First United Methodist Church, Portland, Oregon. He was also very well known as a performer at the Organ Grinder restaurants. At the end, he gave us a demonstration of the Mary L….
Memorabilia Galore
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…
Paul Quarino performs Amazing Grace at the Organ Grinder
On Sundays at lunchtime, organist Paul Quarino would perform gospel tunes to appeal to the “after church” crowd, before the regular secular/pop program began later in the afternoon. This recording is from January 30, 1996, five days before the Portland Organ Grinder closed. Tuning Note:A sudden cold snap (part of a series of unusual weather…
“The Calm Before the Storm”
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…
