The Enchanted Forest theme park on Interstate 5 south of Salem celebrated 40 years of business this week.
The Enchanted Forest theme park on Interstate 5 south of Salem celebrated 40 years of business this week.
Owner Roger Tofte grew the park from three or four original workers to its current 180 employees.
“A lot of people made fun of him and didn’t believe in him,” recalled Susan Vaslev, 55, the eldest of Tofte’s four children and the park’s business manager. She was 15 when the park opened on Aug. 8, 1971, working as the cashier that day when about 75 people showed up. She was only 8 when her father bought the land in 1964, 20 acres for $4,000, and she remembers that, too.
“At that age, I totally believed he could do it,” Vaslev said. “I thought it was awesome.”
And he did do it. From the time he bought the land, with $500 down and the rest paid off in $50-a-month installments, Tofte built most of the nursery rhyme-themed creations along the park’s Storybook Lane by himself, buying one bag of cement at a time with the extra money he made repairing his co-workers’ wristwatches at the Highway Department.
Read more at The Register-Guard.
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