Good times keep rolling at Melody’s 50th anniversary

CARIBOU, Maine — Two years after they were married, Ken and Elsie Doody opened the doors of Melody Roller Rink; they anticipated staying in Ken’s hometown for a couple of years before moving elsewhere.
Melody opened in Caribou on Dec. 4, 1964, 50 years ago, and the Doody’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,” Ken described. “I can’t find a guy like that to run the rink for us.”
“He’s one of a kind,” Elsie laughed about her husband.
The couple saw three generations of families grow up on skates, and returning customers make Elsie’s day.
“My favorite part of it is seeing former skaters come back with their kids, or sometimes their grandkids,” she said.
Melody’s solidified its place in Caribou’s history books over the last 50 years and often enough, a kid will skate over to Ken and say “my parents met here.”
Ken, a life-long jokester, will reply “Well, then, I guess you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me.”
The Doodys didn’t anticipate leaving such a deep footprint on the community by opening the rink in the ‘60s — they just wanted to share their love of skating with Caribou.
“We didn’t think we’d be alive at this point,” Elsie 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 their students once a month for the past 40 years, and one of the luncheon attendees asked Ken and Elsie 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 recalled.
The woman had posted the picture on Facebook, and comments were pouring in.
Ken and Elsie sat in front of the computer and read each one, Elsie reading out loud to Ken 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.
Ken chided that his wife kept crying as she read the complimentary the posts.
“I think there’s a lot of nostalgia involved here,” she defended.
The community continues responding positively to the roller rink, but there was one instance where they weren’t shy about vocalizing their opposition: it involved organ music.
“Back until the Beatles came out, it was all organ music,” Ken explained. “Every rink had an organ in the corner that played waltzes, tangos, polkas and marches.”
Being competitive dance skaters, as Ken and Elsie 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 recalled.
Though their tastes in music didn’t jive, Ken and Elsie’s love of roller skating spread through the area and they’ve taught scores of children to skate over the years — and they’ve had plenty of rink time themselves.
Elsie would run back and forth between skating on the floor and running the lunch counter, and Ken would squeeze in some skating himself between managing the program and the ticket office. They don’t skate nearly as much as they used to, but the Doodys still take 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 stated — with Elsie commenting on his heels that he sounds like an ogre when he’s really not.
Ken likes working with the kids, 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 explained. “Elise 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’s even been known to conduct a math lesson or two while the kids are trying to figure out how many snacks they can buy with the money they have.
Every once and a while, at the lunch counter or ticket booth, one of the skaters will come up short; Ken and Elsie just ask them to bring it when they come to the rink in the future.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, kids pay the Doodys back — even if Ken and Elsie have forgotten about the debt.
“I get along great with the kids,” Ken commented. “I trust them, and they trust me.”
Ken and Elsie’s own children — Gary, David, Kevin and Brian — all grew up at the rink themselves, spending time in a play pen 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 commented. “It was a family-run business.”
Facebook comments aside, the community has formally and consistently shown their appreciation 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 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,” Ken commented.
Good, and busy.
Ken loves working at the rink and has no plans to retire; Elsie loves the rink too, but “I’m old enough that I want to retire,” she laughed.
As much as Melody has impacted 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’” Ken said.