For nearly four decades, Richard "Dick" Knoebel led his family's amusement park into a new era, growing Knoebels Amusement Resort into the largest free-admission park in the U.S. A third-generation steward of the resort his grandparents founded in Elysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1926, he is responsible for landmark additions such as the Phoenix and Flying Turns roller coasters. Today, he serves as chairman of the board and president emeritus as Knoebels mark its 100th anniversary.
Decades of growth have shaped Knoebel's legacy in the industry
ELYSBURG, Pa. — Ask Dick Knoebel what has made running his family's amusement park difficult over a hundred years, and his answer skips past what you might expect. Water supply, sewage disposal, the road network and forces of nature. It is a telling response from a man whose name is inseparable from and helped guests enjoy their days at one of the world's most celebrated amusement parks.
Knoebel was born in 1939, 13 years after his grandparents, Henry and Hattie Knoebel, opened a picnic grove and swimming hole along a creek in Elysburg. He grew up immersed in it. He earned his Eagle Scout badge in 1953 and graduated from Lehigh University in 1961 with a degree in engineering geophysics. That same year, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps, training as an aircraft maintenance officer and serving in both the United States and Japan before returning home. He brought that engineering discipline with him and applied it straight to the family business.
That discipline shaped nearly four decades at the helm of Knoebels Amusement Resort. Sewage was one of the first problems he solved personally, building an on-site treatment facility that, as attendance grew to more than one million annual guests, eventually required a deal to route wastewater to the local township's system. Parking tested his patience longer. For decades, Knoebel leased the park's main lot from a neighboring farm, periodically offering to buy the land from the owners. The answer was always no, until this year, when the family's matriarch and patriarch had passed, and their children were ready to sell. Knoebels purchased the land in 2026, just ahead of the resort's centennial.
One of his signature achievements remains the Phoenix, a wooden roller coaster he and legacy team member and longtime friend John Fetterman brought to Knoebels in 1985. They had wanted to bring a wooden coaster to the park for some time. Unable to afford the cost of a new ride, the pair turned to relocating an existing coaster. Built in 1947 as the Rocket at Playland Park in San Antonio, Texas, the ride sat dormant for years after that park closed in 1980. Knoebel negotiated its purchase, dismantled it, and reconstructed it in Pennsylvania for roughly a quarter of what it would have cost to build a brand-new coaster. When asked, Knoebel said that it was "one of the best things we ever did." We were in the big leagues after that." The Phoenix has since won Amusement Today's Golden Ticket Award for best wooden coaster in seven consecutive years, the longest streak in the award's history.
His son Brian, who was 12 when the coaster arrived, remembers the move less for the negotiations than for what it did to the park's popularity. "My dad flattened my kickball because it just got busy," Brian said, recalling the games he, his cousins and friends used to play in front of the park office before Phoenix turned Knoebels into a destination.
Knoebel applied that same stubbornness to Flying Turns, a wooden bobsled-style coaster he spent seven years reviving after the ride design had largely disappeared following the 1930s. Skeptics called it impossible. Impossible, however, is not a word that Dick Knoebel understands, and in 2013, Flying Turns opened to the public. He has also personally overseen the restoration of antique attractions, including the Flyer, the Looper, and the Haunted Mansion, each one a small act of refusing to let something he loved to disappear. "Old rides are simpler to operate," he said. "We grew up with them. When people ride those older rides, it brings them back to their youth."
That instinct extended beyond his own park. Knoebel helped shape Pennsylvania's Ride Inspection Act in the mid-1980s, a framework that other states later modeled their own safety laws on and built a reputation industry-wide to be inducted into the IAAPA Hall of Fame in 2014 and named a Golden Ticket Legend in 2022.
Asked what advice he'd give the next generation of park operators, Knoebel didn't hesitate: work the job before you manage it. "You don't know what you're managing otherwise," he said. This is a rule he has applied to his own family as much as to his employees.
Even after stepping down as park president and handing the reins to his son, Knoebel is still doing everything he can to ensure Knoebels is the greatest amusement park it can be. Brian remarked that he just doesn't know how to quit, and that there is absolutely nothing else that his father would rather be doing. When Knoebel visits the park, he has someone take him around on a golf cart to observe the property, and then he gives Brian and the team a to-do list.
“The man doesn’t miss a thing. In one lap, he notices a company picnic’s sign is missing, that we need more napkins at an ice cream stand, the merry-go-round is not being operated as efficiently as it should be, or a light bulb needs replaced. How he notices all that is beyond me. He wants to do everything in his power to make Knoebels the greatest destination on the planet.”
Asked why any of it still matters to him, Dick Knoebel needed only four words: "It's in my blood."
Near the end of a long conversation about all of it, Brian asked his father one more thing: how many rides were at Knoebels when he came home from the Marine Corps in 1964? "16," Dick said. "And there's now 63," Brian said.
"Yep," Dick said. "There's your story."
—Jack Lathrop
