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Common Tread

National Motorcycle Museum in Iowa to close its doors in September

Jan 29, 2023

The National Motorcycle Museum in Anamosa, Iowa, one of a handful of non-profit motorcycle museums in the United States, announced this weekend that it will close for good, tentatively on September 5 this year.

J&P Cycles co-founders John and Jill Parham were instrumental in the creation of the museum and its move to Anamosa 22 years ago. (J&P Cycles is part of the Comoto family of brands, like RevZilla). John Parham, who died in 2017, served in a leadership role on the museum's board of directors for many years and Jill Parham is the current chair of the board. She said the financial pressures of keeping a non-profit museum afloat finally pushed the board to decide to close the museum.

"We have struggled for several years to cover wages and utilities partly due to low visitation," she said in the statement.

exhibits inside the National Motorcycle Museum
A board track exhibit and other displays at the National Motorcycle Museum. National Motorcycle Museum photo.

The museum's collection included hundreds of motorcycles as well as bicycles and thousands of pieces of memorabilia. Many of those motorcycles and artifacts were personally collected by John Parham and the museum, like the Wheels Through Time museum created by Parham's fellow AMA Hall of Fame member Dale Walksler, was one man's vision. It was more of a highly impressive and eclectic collection than a stuffy, educational institution.

That perspective comes in part from Mark Mederski, who has decades of experience with motorcycle museums as the former executive director of the AMA Hall of Fame Museum and having worked for years with the National Motorcycle Museum as special projects director.

"It was, in a sense, a kind of everyman's museum," Mederski said, and it was also a reflection of John Parham. "John Parham was really a common guy. He did not talk a whole lot. He didn't have a college degree. But the guy got shit done."

While all museums, especially non-profit ones, must have an educational component, the National Motorcycle Museum was still mostly the kind of place where you went to look at cool, old bikes and more memorabilia, from posters to leathers to more, than you might find anywhere else. "Not at all a stuffy place," said Mederski. "Very approachable. Nothing behind ropes. Nobody yelling at you for getting too close."

The museum's plans call for the motorcycles on loan to the museum to be returned to their owners and the ones owned by the museum will be auctioned off. Some motorcycles from John Parham's personal collection will also be sold. As his son, J&P Cycles CEO Zach Parham noted in this interview, John Parham's own collection numbered in the hundreds.

Mederski is hopeful, however, that instead of the collection being auctioned off and scattered entirely, there could be another chapter for the museum, by taking over the name and at least some of the collection.

"I'm hoping someone will pick up the phone and say, 'Hey, I want to take that over.' It's a valuable name, there's an inventory, and somebody could do that," Mederski said. "That's my hope. My fingers are crossed."

If you would like to be informed about developments as the museum plans to liquidate the collection, you can sign up for e-mail alerts at the museum's website. The statement from the museum's board said that by staying open through the summer, they hoped to give motorcyclists one more chance to visit before the doors close for the last time.