Organ Grinder Festival set to play in Olmsted Falls
By Charles Cassady
Insights
Published June 6, 2007

Every once in a while some trendy, decadent dance club in Cleveland announces an “Organ Grinder’s Ball.” This translates as an adults-only thing featuring lots of black leather, body piercings, gothic-industrial music and unspeakable rock-and-roll deviance. You should really feel sorry for any innocent soul with a genuine hand-cranked organ grinder and a monkey who shows up at one of those things expecting to find fellowship - only to be surrounded by creepy types who look like the cast from “Hellraiser.”

But this weekend in Grand Pacific Junction in Olmsted Falls, the tables are turned (or hand-cranked) with the third annual Organ Grinder Festival. Free to the public and family-friendly, this Friday and Saturday event fills the picturesque plaza with sights and sounds of automatic mechanical music-making devices that were in production long before MP3 players and beatboxes.

“Lots of kids have never seen anything like his before,” said Carolyn Carson, of North Olmsted, one of the founders of the Organ Grinder Festival. “It just opens up a new generation to a love of music.”

Organ grinding grew out of the invention of crank organs, which grew widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries among strolling musicians and troubadours. Organ grinding really hit its stride in the mid-1800s, when the manufacturers discovered how to change the tunes the machines could play by substituting different hole-punched cards.

Now, if you go to Grand Pacific Junction, a Victorian-era style assembly of classic buildings, boutiques, parlors and places to eat and sit, you’ll get to enjoy about a dozen collectors coming from in and out of Ohio, bringing everything from small, music-box-like units that one traditionally wears slung around the neck to the cart-pulled and desktop models. Some are antiques, others are new. Crank organs continue to be manufactured and serviced, principally in Europe (especially Germany) and by specialty craftsmen in the US, such as Flora & Co. of New Mexico. Some modern units utilize batteries and specialty plug-in cartridges of digital music programs. Others still rely on perforated piano-roll type paper.

“There’s one gentleman, still in his 90s, still making them,” said Carson.

Of course, the question you’re all asking yourselves (beside what to do with the leather-clad, body-pierced music punks who show up at Grand Pacific Junction looking puzzled) is, will there be any live monkeys with tin cups, famously trained by old-fashioned organ grinders to collect contributions?

No, said Carson. “Apparently it’s prohibitive, cost-prohibitive, because of the insurance. Because they bite.” Instead, modern organ grinders use prop toy monkeys. You also won’t see any of the extra-large horse-drawn steam calliopes of circus and carnival fame. “We don’t have the space for that, for the big instruments” Carson said. “Because they drown each other out. They are big!”

Carson said her interest in the instruments began three decades ago. “I met my husband-to-be at the time through the Theater Organ Society. He maintained an organ that used to be in Olmsted Falls, and one thing led to another…We’ll be married now 30 years.”

She began the Organ Grinder Festival with her friend Jan Kast of Euclid, who, with her own husband, is affiliated with groups such as the Music Box Association Incorporated (MBAI) and the Carnival Organ Association of America (COAA). They take their own organs – hers a German-made Raffin that can play “Blue Suede Shoes,” his an electric programmable unit – to “rallies” across the country attended by fellow enthusiasts. They also avidly patronize German-themed fairs, parades and special events devoted to clockwork music and celebrations.

“On my case in my husband’s car we’ve got it printed: ‘The Happiest Music On Earth,’” said Kast.

Kast emphasized that the Grand Pacific Junction event is entirely free and immensely appealing to small children, who are often allowed to work the machines themselves. “The kids just love it because they’re aware they’re making music,” she said. “This is what their great grand-parents did for music. They didn’t have Walkmen. They didn’t have iPods. They didn’t have electricity!”

The Organ Grinder Festival at Grand Pacific Junction happens on Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., weather permitting. For more information, call (440) 427-0094 or (440) 235-9277 or log on to www.grandpacificjunction.com. Grand Pacific Junction is located at the intersection of Mill Street and Columbia Road in Olmsted Falls.