#Funtown log flume ride full#

By 1967 Ken quit his full time job and Violet’s brother, Andre Dallaire, who had already built a miniature golf course adjacent to the drive-in, joined them in expanding their blossoming Family Entertainment Centre (FEC) with a 15-lane giant slide, skeet shooting and an archery range, complete with a mechanical running deer.

Go figure!”īy 1963 Ken, with his ever-supportive Violet, felt augmenting the Marvel Drive-In with family amusements would increase attendance, so they opened batting cages and go-karts behind the stand. “She worked in hardware, I worked in lingerie. During the winter, when the stand was closed, he supplemented his full time job with a part time job at the Mammoth Mart in Saco, where Violet also worked full time. Our location on US Highway 1 in Saco was a good one, but still, we lost money our first three years.”īut as a man who knows no alternative to perseverance, Ken managed to keep the stand open, working at it evenings and weekends, while he maintained his full time job as treasurer at the University of New England. We served hamburgers, hot dogs, lobster rolls, fried clam dinners and ice cream. “This was before McDonald’s,” he reminded me, “when independent drive-ins were all there was. After receiving his BA in accounting, Ken worked as an accountant and controller, but his entrepreneurship overcame him, and in 1960 he and Violet bought a summertime fast-food drive-in, which they named the Marvel Drive-In. Ken worked and studied at the University of New England, Violet worked full time, and together they raised six children. “I learned a lot of lessons growing up like I did,” he says, “but the most valuable one was from a co-worker at the laundromat, an older and wiser friend, who advised me to stay in school, graduate, then find a way to go to college.”Īfter high school graduation in 1950, Ken married his high school sweetheart, Violet, a young woman who matched his energy and drive. Having discovered his natural tendency for entrepreneurship, he considered leaving high school. During school he worked 60 hours a week at a laundromat. At 15 he was thumbing rides to Old Orchard Beach during the summers to take advantage of whatever opportunities he could find, including shining shoes, selling hot dogs and scouring under the wooden rollercoaster structure for loose change. “But by the 1940s and ‘50s the hotels and piers had burned down and, if they were rebuilt at all, it wasn’t to their previous elegance.” Eventually motels, bars, food stands and amusements crowded the once-fashionable Old Orchard Beach, along with the resultant motorcycle gangs.īut Cormier was able to make that work for him. “In the early part of the century, Old Orchard Beach was all about fancy hotels and piers,” he recalls. Instead he took advantage of Maine’s Old Orchard Beach, a beachfront Mecca of the East Coast from the early 1900s. Ken basically raised himself – through high school he lived in a boarding house – and was able to avoid the bad choices which can come to a child in that situation. His parents divorced when he was five, he rarely saw his mother and he lived with his father, a lumberjack who was often away working the Maine forests. Not despite, but because of a difficult childhood, he has succeeded. The owner of Funtown Splashtown USA in Saco, Maine, followed that credo with another: “You’ll never get to second base with your foot on first.”Ĭormier has been hitting home runs in Maine all of his life. “In the amusement industry, if you can make it in Maine, you can make it anywhere,” Ken Cormier told me. Gary Kyriazi meets the man that keeps the family at the heart of everything he does. The awesomely energetic 75-year-old Ken Cormier (pictured) turned a drive-in into an FEC, then an amusement park. It all started with a fast food restaurant.