Insight: A Rock n’ Roll Friendship

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

I’ve made plenty of friends throughout my lifetime, some from school, some from my time in the U.S. Air Force, and some from work. But I find it hard to fathom that I met one of my best friends through a complaint.

Bruce Martin is the creator and driving force behind a 
nonprofit organization which raises money for the
Ronald McDonald House of Portland through
hosting rock n 'roll dances twice a year.
PHOTO BY ED PIERCE    

A few years ago, I was the Executive Editor of a daily newspaper, and I was arriving back at work one morning when I heard a loud discussion taking place at the receptionist’s front desk. A gentleman was asking to speak to someone in charge to file a complaint.

With many newspaper staffers not yet having arrived for their shift in the newsroom, it fell upon me to deal with the situation. I walked over to the receptionist and asked if I could be of some sort of help.

She told me this man’s name was Bruce Martin and he wanted to know why Elvis Presley’s name was not included in a photo caption published in the newspaper.

To calm the situation, I asked Bruce to follow me back to my desk and to talk with me to resolve the issue. He did and I was able to find out more about what he was complaining about.

Bruce had founded a nonprofit organization that staged dances featuring rock n’ roll music and raised money for the Ronald McDonald House. Through ticket sales to the dances, donations from the community and other types of raffles and silent auctions, the organization had been able to raise thousands and was Ronald McDonald House’s primary community fundraiser for the entire state.

He told me that having an article in the newspaper was beneficial to promoting these dances but that in a recent article, a photo accompanying the article omitted an important name. He reached into his pocket and retrieved the article to show me what he was talking about.

I examined the article and looked closely at the photo caption. It described an event where members of the nonprofit organization presented a representative from Ronald McDonald House with a check for more than $9,000 from a recent dance.

The photograph’s caption listed the names of those who participated. But Bruce pointed out to me that the name of a person in the back row was not listed in the photo caption.

Several years prior to that, a committee member of the nonprofit had donated a cardboard cutout of Elvis Presley to display at the dances. It was used frequently for taking selfie photos with the display and according to Bruce had become synonymous with the nonprofit.

The cutout’s continued popularity meant that organization volunteers would take it with them to events and fundraising activities. Bruce told me that several years before this most recently published article, our own newspaper had included the name of Elvis in the photo caption.

By this point in our discussion, I remained somewhat skeptical about including a cutout in the listing of names in the caption, so to put Bruce more at ease, I began to ask about how he came to found the organization.

While on a visit to Walmart, Bruce had noticed a young boy with his mother. The child was seriously ill, and Bruce asked the mother if there was anything he could do to help. She told him that the boy had cancer, and they were there to go shopping for items he could take with him to the hospital as he was going to be admitted for treatment.

I learned that Bruce was a former police officer and state game warden. He had served in the U.S. Army and was a huge fan of 1960s Motown music. He was semi-retired and had worked trapping and relocating nuisance animals in the area. He also would occasionally serve as a DJ for parties and school reunion gatherings nearby.

He had a heart of gold and after meeting the boy with cancer and his mother, Bruce took the bold step of staging a rock n’ roll dance and donating all proceeds from the event to Ronald McDonald House which assists families of children undergoing treatment at local hospitals by offering them shelter and meals at no cost and at a most critical time.

Hearing his story, I couldn’t help but be moved by it and I told Bruce that when a similar sort of photo including the Elvis cutout is used in future editions of the newspaper, we would include his name in the caption.

We shook hands and he left the newspaper office, and I thought my involvement with him was finished. That evening over dinner, I shared with my wife that I had met Bruce that day, and how I had resolved the issue.

She told me that going to the dances sounded like fun. We called Bruce and he was able to obtain tickets for us for the next dance. The organization has two dances every year and we haven’t missed one since.

Bruce and I have become great friends. My wife Nancy and I serve on his committee of dance volunteers and believe it or not, we each have taken selfie photos with the cutout.

And our journey to friendship started with a complaint about Elvis. <