CARIBOU, Maine — Two years after they were married, Ken and Elsie Doody opened the doors of Melody Roller Rink on Dec. 4, 1964. They anticipated staying in Ken Doody’s hometown for a couple of years before moving elsewhere.
But 50 years later, the couple’s smiling faces are still behind the counter.
“To run a place like this, you’ve got to be a father, a mother, a friend and a helper, a councilor and a psychiatrist and a doctor — sometimes a cop,” Doody said. “I can’t find a guy like that to run the rink for us.”
“He’s one of a kind,” Elsie Doody said with a laugh about her husband.
The couple saw three generations of families grow up on skates, and returning customers make Doody’s day.
“My favorite part of it is seeing former skaters come back with their kids, or sometimes their grandkids,” she said.
Often, a youngster will skate over to Ken Doody and say “my parents met here.”
The Doodys didn’t anticipate leaving such a deep footprint on the community by opening the rink in the 1960s — they just wanted to share their love of skating with Caribou.
“We didn’t think we’d be alive at this point,” Elsie Doody joked.
But a few years ago, the couple went over to the Woodland School for a community lunch; the Woodland School Department has incorporated a skating field trip to Melody for its students once per month for the past 40 years, and one of the luncheon attendees asked Ken and Elsie Doody if she could take their picture. The couple agreed and didn’t think much of it.
“The next thing we knew, our son Brian said, ‘You have to come over to my house,’” Elsie Doody recalled.
The woman had posted the picture on Facebook, and comments were pouring in.
Ken and Elsie Doody sat in front of the computer and read each one, Elsie Doody reading out loud to Ken Doody because the print was so small. Each comment was a little piece of how the Doodys and their rink had touched the lives of each skater — who’d long since grown into adulthood. The original poster herself had met her husband while skating at Melody.
Doody said his wife kept crying as she read the complimentary posts.
“I think there’s a lot of nostalgia involved here,” she said, defending her tears.
The community continues responding positively to the roller rink, but the couple recalled one instance when patrons weren’t shy about vocalizing their discontent: it involved organ music.
“Back until the Beatles came out, it was all organ music,” Doody said. “Every rink had an organ in the corner that played waltzes, tangos, polkas and marches.”
Being competitive dance skaters, as the Doodys were, organ music ensured that each song was played at a specific tempo to coincide with the different dances.
“They let us know right off the bat that if we played organ music, they weren’t going to skate,” Elsie Doody recalled.
Though their taste in music didn’t jive with patrons, Ken and Elsie Doody’s love of roller skating spread through the area, and they’ve taught scores of children to skate over the years. The two have had plenty of rink time themselves as well.
Elsie Doody would run back and forth between skating on the floor and running the lunch counter, and her husband would squeeze in some skating between managing the program and the ticket office. They don’t skate nearly as much as they used to, but the couple still takes pride in what’s taking place at the rink.
“Right now, one of the most important things going on at the rink is we make the kids behave,” Ken Doody said — with his wife commenting on his heels that he sounds like an ogre when he’s really not.
Doody likes working with the youngsters, and he likes that the rink keeps them off the streets.
“We are making them behave in there, and we’re teaching them manners,” he said. “Elsie won’t wait on them at the lunch counter unless they say please and thank you, and I think we’re teaching them some things that they don’t get anywhere else.”
Elsie Doody’s even been known to conduct a math lesson or two while the children are trying to figure out how many snacks they can buy with the money they have.
Every once in a while, at the lunch counter or ticket booth, one of the skaters will come up short; Ken and Elsie Doody just ask them to bring the difference when they come to the rink in the future.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, the children pay the Doodys back — even if the couple have forgotten about the debt.
“I get along great with the kids,” Ken Doody said. “I trust them, and they trust me.”
The couple’s own children — Gary, David, Kevin and Brian — all grew up at the rink themselves, spending time in a playpen near their parents until they were old enough to chip in.
“When they got big enough to skate and big enough to help out Mom and Dad, they learned to hand out skates, hand out tickets and help at the snack bar — all the little jobs that we did,” Elsie Doody said. “It was a family-run business.”
Facebook comments aside, the community has formally and consistently shown its thanks for the Doodys through certificates of appreciation and awards — whether it was Loring Air Force Base personnel, the Loring Job Corps Center, the Girl Scouts or the Boy Scouts.
“I think the best thing that’s happened is that the rink provided an outlet for everybody. It’s something to do and it keeps them busy,” Ken Doody said, adding that parents trust the couple so much that they’ll often leave their children at the rink for a few hours.
“It’s not uncommon to see three cars outside and there are 60 kids inside skating, so that makes us feel good,” Doody said.
Good, and busy.
Doody loves working at the rink and has no plans to retire; his wife loves the rink, too, but she said with a laugh that she’s old enough that she wants to retire.
As much as Melody has affected the community, the community’s influence on the rink can be seen right in its name. When the rink first opened, the Doodys hosted a rink-naming contest.
“The people named it ‘Melody’” Doody said.