See Relics of Bygone Theme Parks at the Amusement Preservation Museum

Troy Parsh was 7 years old when Geauga Lake closed, and he was there on its last day of operation. The memory has stuck with him and is one that has fueled his quest to become a caretaker of artifacts tied to some of our most cherished bygone amusement parks. 

“We didn’t know it at the time, but I noticed something was wrong,” Parsh recalls of that last visit to Geauga Lake in September 2007. “We rode the Double Loop, and half the people on the train with me were employees. It’s like, ‘Something ain’t quite right here.’ ”

The 26-year-old missed the heyday of Ohio amusement parks, but you wouldn’t know it from the collection assembled at his home in the rural Lorain County village of Grafton. He opens his Amusement Preservation Museum to the public each June, and if you’re headed out to see it, keep an eye out for the 15-foot Swingin’ Gyms ride out back. You can’t miss it. 

The flying-cage-style ride, which was housed at Sauezer’s Kiddieland in Shererville, Indiana, for decades is the largest piece in a collection that is focused largely on preserving parts of beloved amusement rides. Parsh estimates he has cars from 61 different rides, including 36 roller coaster cars, that once operated across the United States. 

Many are from amusement parks in Ohio, such as the long-lost Euclid Beach Park in Cleveland and Chippewa Lake Park in Medina County. He also has several items from Aurora’s Geauga Lake, which is, understandably, Parsh’s sentimental favorite. 

The collection was inspired by Parsh’s formative experiences visiting amusement parks with his family as a child, although he freely admits it’s a bit of an unwieldy hobby.

“Sometimes I wish I’d have picked up collecting baseball cards instead,” he jokes. “It’d be much, much easier.” 

But Parsh understands the importance of the work he’s doing. Judging from the popularity of the open house he has hosted during the first weekend of June since 2018, others do too. Parsh provides a window into the past for his visitors and a second life for objects that would have otherwise ended up in the scrap heap of history. 

“A lot of people are very nostalgic for their childhood, and we hear a lot of childhood stories,” Parsh says, before adding that people also frequently comment on the enormity of the task he’s taken on. “It’s very quickly followed up by, ‘I think you guys are crazy.’ ”

Parsh estimates he was 5 or 6 years old when he went to his first amusement park: Cedar Point in Sandusky. But the amusement park that’s really stuck with him has been Geauga Lake, and he’s just old enough to have vivid memories of it. 

About a decade after the Aurora amusement park’s closure, Parsh bid on some old roller coaster parts on eBay. 

“I ended up losing the auction, but I reached out to the guy to see if he had any more parts,” Parsh recalls. “He said, ‘I don’t, but I have a friend who has parts from [Geauga Lake’s] Raging Wolf Bobs.’ ”

The collector told Parsh he had enough spare parts to rebuild two of the coaster’s cars, so he gave the project a try. 

When it opened in 1988, Raging Wolf  Bobs was a relatively modern wooden roller coaster at Geauga Lake. During the 2007 season, the coaster train derailed, causing it to get stuck on one of the turns. The ride closed for the remainder of the season, which turned out to be the amusement park’s last.

Parsh’s collection now includes three cars from Raging Wolf Bobs. Two are fully restored, while one was left in the condition it was received in. 

“The first two cars we got, the owner that had gotten them, brought them out to Chicago, dismantled them and left them outside,” he says. “They fell off their stands and rotted.”

It’s a common problem for amusement park rides, few of which even get salvaged when a ride or park closes. 

“When a lot of amusement parks close, the ride cars get put in dumpsters or taken to a scrapyard,” he says. “Not many get out of the park, especially roller coasters. They’ll pull the parts they can use and then scrap the frames.”

The ones that do get out often end up in varying states of disrepair. Parsh has encountered many rides that ended up in a collector’s hands only to be left outside to deteriorate. 

“We have a pair of racing coasters from Euclid Beach, and they had been outside and just rotted into the ground,” he says. “They’re termites holding hands. It was frozen when we got them, and as it thawed out, it was bowing and just snapped in half. We don’t put them out on display for the open house. We have them in a safe spot until we can do something with them.” 

Given such a wealth of items to prioritize repairs for, how does Parsh decide what to focus on? He has a simple standard for whether a ride gets renovated. 

“Can I recognize the ride car?” he asks. “Yes? Then it can stay. No? Then it has to be restored. Another consideration is if the car’s been modified since it’s left the park. … Some modifications are simple: Someone painted it and added a sign. But if it doesn’t look original, it gets redone.”

When Parsh held his first public open house at his Amusement Preservation Museum in 2018, he quickly heard from people who were looking to find a good home for some items in their own collections. 

“When we announced [the dates] we were doing it, we had a couple people who had things say, ‘Here take this,’ ” Parsh recalls. 

New for the 2026 open house (set for June 6 and 7 this year) will be cars from Cedar Point’s old Pirate Ride, as well as some boats from the Motoworld attraction at New Jersey’s infamous Action Park. The park was so dangerous that it was nicknamed “Class Action Park” for the sheer number of lawsuits. (An HBO Max documentary of the same name details the madness that transpired there.) 

“Every part of me wishes I could have gone,” Parsh says of Action Park. “There wasn’t a person I could find who wouldn’t go back in a heartbeat. They loved that place.”

As his collection has grown, Parsh has met fellow amusement-park aficionados who are also holding onto artifacts and memorabilia of places that have been gone for decades. 

“The only park that I grew up going to in this area that’s now gone is Geauga Lake,” Parsh says. “Euclid Beach and a lot of those old parks have been passed down to me. One of my big mentors was John Frato from the Euclid Beach Boys.”

Frato and his partner at a Cleveland towing company, Joe Tomaro, bought a car from the Thriller, one of Euclid Beach’s roller coasters, and turned it into a street-legal vehicle. They then did the same with one of the park’s famous silver rocket cars. 

As the president of Euclid Beach Park Now, Frato collected oral histories of the park and helped organize the annual Remembering the Sights and Sounds of Euclid Beach Park event, the last of which was held in 2025, a year after Frato’s death. 

Kevin Smith, vice president of Euclid Beach Park Now and administrator of Kevin’s Northeast Ohio Amusement Memories, set up a display at the Amusement Preservation Museum’s open house in 2025 and plans to do the same this year. 

Smith said he first met Parsh when they both had displays at a Cleveland History Center event. His own collection, with memorabilia from 20 different amusement parks, is significantly smaller than Parsh’s — both in number of items and size of items. Smith’s collection mostly spans signs and some artifacts, many of which were found at vintage shops and estate sales. He says he believes that the work Parsh is doing is important.

“A lot of those rides — especially roller coasters — bring back a lot of nostalgia,” Smith says, “and I’m grateful he’s doing it.” 

Parsh has even made it possible for visitors to take a small part of those lost amusement parks home, after 3D printing a small roller coaster train replica for himself in 2024. 

“I wanted a roller coaster toy for my desk,” he says. “I made them and thought, ‘I guess other people are interested in them, and it does fund the museum.’ ”

He now has two 3D printers working almost around the clock and a third one for backup. His online store includes roller coaster cars, sections of track and welcome signs from places like Idora Park in Youngstown, West View Park outside of Pittsburgh, Puritas Springs Park in Cleveland and, of course, Euclid Beach Park’s iconic arch. 

Much like how Parsh still has vivid and warm memories of Geauga Lake, he understands how his collection — regardless of the current state an object may be in — can inspire powerful memories for his open-house visitors. 

“Some people will show up, see something from Euclid Beach and just start bawling their eyes out,” Parsh says. “If it wasn’t for us, a lot of the things would have been lost. That makes it worth it.”  

For more information about the Amusement Preservation Museum and Parsh’s annual open house each June, visit
amusementpreservationmuseum.com.

For more Ohio inspiration, sign up for our Ohio Magazine newsletters.

Ohio Magazine is available in a beautifully designed print issue that is published 7 times a year, along with Spring-Summer and Fall-Winter editions of LongWeekends magazine. Subscribe to Ohio Magazine and stay connected to beauty, adventure and fun across our state.