Well, unlike most of the stories that appear on your site, my Elan experience was rather fun. Of course, I was neither a resident nor a full time staff member.
In the spring of 1979 I was finishing up my junior year at Bowdoin. I wanted a summer job that would not be too demanding of my time or my brain. Figuring that I'd be working my ass off for the next 40 years or more, I felt I deserved one fairly laid back summer. Scanning the want ads in the Lewiston paper I saw an advertisement for a 3 day a week position mowing lawns. It was at Elan in Poland Springs, not a long drive from Auburn, my hometown. I applied and was accepted. The job proved to be not too difficult. I mowed lawns all day, unless I was pulled off to do something else. As the summer progressed this became more common. I usually worked for one of the two full time maintenance men. One was Art, the other a big fat man named Herb. Art and Herb didn't particularly like each other. Whenever I worked with one, I'd hear about all the faults of the other. Art was a pretty good plumber; Herb was an OK carpenter. Between them they'd do the jobs that Joe didn't want to hire outside help to do. Art was a born again Christian and an altogether pretty nice guy. I used to pay him a dollar a day to drive me back and forth from my parents home in Auburn to Poland. Herb was a hellraiser. He cursed and yelled at the slightest provocation. He'd also brag at the beginning of the week about just how much booze he'd polished off the weekend before. I remember that one Friday evening he and a bunch of Elan staff had gone down to Joe Ricci's race track in Scarborough. Seems that Herb won a large amount of money betting on the horses. On the way home he bought a case of Gordon's gin. He claimed that by Monday morning he'd finished five of the dozen bottles in the case. Herb must be dead by now. As it was, his constitution must have been heroic to have withstood all the abuse he subjected it to. Once, Art and I stopped by Herb's house on our way home. He proudly showed us his marijuana patch. Herb also had a whore he visited regularly in Grey, Maine. When I'd get home, I'd tell Herb stories to my brother, who would laugh so hard, it'd hurt. The high point of the whole Herb thing was when Joe Ricci decided to use Herb in television ads for Scarborough Downs. They weren't very good ads, but at least they gave my brother some idea of how Herb looked and acted.
My impression of Elan was that everything was run on a very ad hoc basis. To be sure, there was structure, but the structure was always changing. It must have been hard on the residents sometimes. Everything seemed to be either in a state of construction, just constructed, or desperately in need of reconstruction. None of the buildings had a solid, institutional feel to them. Actually, they were mostly either house trailers, or else they were all summer camp buildings that had been winterized. I remember crawling under the main building with Art to deal with some plumbing issue. None of the houses had basements. Everything seemed cheaply made and run up at the last minute. Not that there wasn't plenty of money being spent. It just wasn't being spent very wisely. I wonder now if Joe Ricci had any conception of planning.
For instance, in the late summer of 1979, Joe decided that he really wanted to push Elan's football team to heights of glory. A coach was hired and a lot of money was spent on football equipment. I had to stop mowing the athletic field because... well, I don't know, but I did. Anyway, my new job in the afternoons, at least, was to go to a convenience store a couple miles away and buy vast quantities of soda pop. I would then deliver said soda pop to the field so that the players could indulge after their workout. It probably wasn't the ideal thing for these kids to be drinking under the circumstances, but Joe had decreed that if be so, so it was done. Of course, it probably would have been vastly cheaper to have had the stuff delivered in wholesale quantities, but that wasn't the way things were done. The only problem was that the folks who ran the store seemed to figure I was a resident, and wouldn't talk to me. This was humiliating to a degree, though I can laugh about it now.
Several times that summer I was driven by Art down to Joe's house in Falmouth to help the regular maintenance man. Joe wasn't actually living there at the time since he and his wife were estranged, but she lived there along with their kids. It was a big horse farm up on Blackstrap Hill Road, a very nice neighborhood. The house was huge and from the little I saw of the inside, richly appointed, though in a rather nouveau riche manner. Joe's wife seemed nice enough, and I have been told by others that have known her that she is a decent enough person. Now that Joe is dead, his son's have inherited all that land in Scarborough, which is worth a pretty penny by all accounts. Clearly Joe had the bucks coming in from somewhere.
About once a week, I'd been pulled away from my lawnmower and given charge of a working party of shotdowns. Actually, one of the more senior residents would do the actual supervision. I'd just sit around and do... nothing. It sounds like a cushy position but I often got rather bored. Most of the work the kids would be doing under my, ahem, supervision, consisted of digging holes for some reason or enough. For instance, Joe had a few loads of fill delivered. Unfortunately, it was dumped on top of the outlet to the drainage system for the center of the "campus". After the next big rain storm (it rained a lot that summer) there was a flood. I was put in charge of a small team of shotdowns whose job it was to find the damned drainage pipe and to dig it out to get rid of the water. It was all a little surreal.
I realize now that what they should have done was to have hired a single experienced individual to ran the maintenance dept. and to plan things out, make work assignments and figure out what was the best way to use budgeted funds. Of couse, that would have been too logical. So things continued on in the half-assed way that Joe was accustomed to.
Meanwhile, the summer ended, my last year of college was about to begin, so I left, never to return. Occasionally, when I'm in the area, which is not uncommon, I'll get the urge to look in on Elan, but I've never done so to this day. Things must have changed, or at least one would hope so.