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Mascots at the Organ Grinder restaurant in Portland, Oregon, dressed in red-white-and-blue garb for the 1976 United States Bicentennial celebration.
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Will the real “World’s Only” female Organ Grinder please stand up? Frame from a 1970’s episode of “To Tell the Truth” featuring the Organ Grinder’s “Monkey Lady”- can you guess which person is the genuine article? It’s important for a documentary to reveal the the truth about its subject. Sometimes, that truth involves subterfuge –…
Let’s go celebrity spotting… The Organ Grinder was a unique and popular place that drew visitors from all over, including Hollywood celebrities. (And local celebrities, too!) Pictured above is comedian Rip Taylor (center) at Organ Grinder Denver, along with Organ Grinder co-founder Jerry Forchuk (left) and Al Fike, “The modern minstrel man”. After talking with…
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…
On April 8, Toby Washburn stopped by Carma Labs in Franklin, Wisconsin to demonstrate the unusual pipe organ constructed in the warehouse. As part of our Midwest Tour, The Organ Grinder Documentary project visited Carma Labs (which you may recognize as the manufacturers of Carmex lip balm) to explore the wild and over-the-top things people…
As part of the documentary project, Don Feely demonstrated some of the rhythm unit percussions and sound effects (“traps”) that he purchased after the Organ Grinder’s Portland location closed and the organ was being parted out. The Organ Grinder was innovative in many ways, one such way being that co-founder Dennis Hedberg upgraded the traditional…
(Post updated 2025-07-13 with technical info.) In this newly-acquired footage from the 1970s, organist Jonas Nordwall performs a full set at the Organ Grinder restaurant in Portland, Oregon. This compilation is from vintage video tapes which were recently provided to the documentary project. Sometime around 1977, representatives from Sony visited the Organ Grinder to test…
