YORK BEACH, Maine — Anne DiSarcina was looking through the belongings her late husband, Anthony, had collected over the years, when she opened up a box she had moved before, but never fully inspected.
Inside the box, she found a treasure of arcade tickets taped neatly together in bundles of 100, each ticket bearing the name “Fun-O-Rama.”
DiSarcina knew her husband had frequented the seasonal entertainment venue when they stayed at their home in York Beach, which they owned for the better part of two decades. But she didn’t realize just how often he had popped in to play a few games.
“My husband used to tell me he was going for a walk every day we were up there,” DiSarcina said.
Many of those walks must have entailed a pit stop at the arcade, where Anthony was known to play Skee-Ball. He would occasionally return home with a few tickets at a time, but Anne didn’t think much of it. “I didn’t know how many he had,” she said.
So when she opened that box last fall and found her husband’s stockpile of 16,000 tickets, she was shocked.
Then she decided to cash them in.
DiSarcina, who lives in a Boston suburb, traveled back to York Beach last October to trade in her husband’s tickets for a prize. But she arrived to find Fun-O-Rama had closed for the season, so she had to wait several months longer and then a few months more, due to the pandemic.
When she finally approached the Fun-O-Rama prize counter this summer — where players can claim an individually wrapped Twizzler for 15 tickets, an inflatable shark for 700, or a wooden foosball table for 6,000 — an employee weighed her tickets and said, “You can have anything you want.”
DiSarcina said she saw a little pink bike in the corner and decided her husband’s ticket trove should be used to make children happy, so she told the Fun-O-Rama manager she wished to donate her husband’s winnings to St. Elizabeth’s Child Development Center, a program operated in Portland by Catholic Charities.
DiSarcina said she worried the manager might laugh at her peculiar request, but she was pleasantly surprised when he rounded her tally up from 16,000 to 25,000 tickets and agreed to let the nonprofit select the prizes best-suited to the organization’s mission.
Fun-O-Rama owner Bob Lago said he fully supports the manager’s decision to help spread some cheer. “That’s what we’re here for,” he said.
Judy Katzel, chief communication and development officer for Catholic Charities Maine, said the nonprofit plans to work with Fun-O-Rama to select and accept age-appropriate items that will help kids learn and grow.
“Toys in a child care center get a lot of use, so we are always looking for fresh and new items that are appropriate for the kids,” she said.
Katzel said the St. Elizabeth’s team is grateful to be selected by DiSarcina.
“It’s a most unusual gift, and we feel very lucky to be able to take advantage of it,” Katzel said. “What a wonderful way to honor her husband and his legacy.”
Anthony DiSarcina died May 5, 2015, just a few months shy of his 50th wedding anniversary. He was a civil engineer known for his work on Boston’s “Big Dig,” a decades-long project that rerouted Interstate 93 and built multiple tunnels. And he won a technical excellence award for his Big Dig contributions, according to records maintained by the Northeastern University Library.
Whenever people came to visit him in York Beach, Anthony would take them to Fun-O-Rama, where Skee-Ball was probably his favorite game, Anne said. “He probably even had a favorite machine,” she said.
One of the guests who occasionally went toe-to-toe with him was long-time friend Fred Salvucci, who knew Anthony since 1964 and worked with him for several years. Salvucci, a former Massachusetts transportation secretary who also worked on the Big Dig, said he played Skee-Ball with Anthony but never beat him. “He was too good.”
As he stood inside Fun-O-Rama last Thursday, Salvucci said he suspects his friend appreciated the stark contrast between the long-range planning and goals of his professional work and the immediate gratification of his arcade pastime.
“Here, you come, you put your money in, the game begins, you get a score, it’s over. You play again. It’s nice and short-range and very satisfying,” Salvucci said.
Salvucci came to York Harbor with Anne DiSarcina to finish cashing in her husband’s tickets.
Anne said completing the transaction — all while kids played noisy games with flashing lights, just as they had when her husband used to stop by — brought her a mix of emotions.
“It was a combination of both joy and sadness,” she said. “The joy because only Anthony would have accomplished something of this significance and given me the idea of giving it to a charity. And the sad part was he wasn’t here to help me do it.”