Author; Godfather of the US aquarium hobby; AKA founder. I met Al late in the 2010's and it was an honour to talk with him, which I did a lot.
Upon Klee's passing, nobody wrote a better effigy then Bobby Ellerman.
To the majority of aquarium hobbyists today, unless they are interested in the hobby's history, the name Al Klee probably means nothing. To hobbyists active from the early 1950's until the early 1970's, the name Al Klee is unforgettable. In so many ways, Klee and a few others like him are responsible for the most important developments in the post-1960's tropical fish hobby. I say this because of the American Killifish Association of which Klee was a co-founder and architect of its organizational structure. His format for how the AKA could operate as a truly national association would later, directly or indirectly form the foundation for all national US tropical fish associations - the ACA (which Klee helped organize), ALA, IBC, IFGA, etc. Before the work of Klee, all attempts at national tropical fish associations had failed - goldfish, guppies, mollies, etc. Even a well supported effort for an earlier version of a killifish association, the American Panchax Association, had collapsed almost instantly. Klee's vision would essentially give rise to the modern national hobby scene of elected regional representatives, yearly conventions, specialty auctions, monthly publications devoted to one group of fishes and all the rest. It's "Golden Age" was no doubt the 1970's and 1980's but it survives till this day.
But laying the foundation for the organized hobby on a national scale is actually only a tiny part of Al Klee's contribution. First and foremost, there are the publications. As an individual, his output of articles, monthly columns and books is frankly unparalleled. Even if others have by now surpassed him in quantity, no one comes close in quality or in equaling the scope and depth of his literary heritage. The enormous range of subject matter he covered month after month, year after year is awe-inspiring. He often had material appearing in the 3 finest tropical fish magazines of his era - The Aquarium Journal, The Aquarium and Tropicals - at the same time. He had monthly columns for years in The Aquarium Journal and Tropicals. His writings ranged from covering the basics of aquarium keeping to delving into the intricacies of the most arcane ichthyological debates. He was never shy about expressing his opinions and often aroused the anger of his targets - Herbert R. Axelrod being one. He and his good friend Bob Goldstein engaged in heated debates within the pages of The Aquarium. Klee's contributions to these wonderful arguments sparkled with his gift for razor shape phrase making. His writing also benefited immensely from his knowledge of different languages, particularly Dutch and German. This allowed him to bring important new information to the US tropical fish hobby that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.
Klee's writings would also be responsible for one of his greatest contributions to the hobby and the one for which he will be most likely remembered - the creation of an interest in the history of the aquarium hobby in the US. Klee's interest in the subject began when he worked at the New York Public Library in the 1940's. There he read the many early aquarium magazines the library possessed. For years he worked on this material until he published its first serial incarnation as "A History of the Aquarium Hobby in America" in a magazine that he founded and edited in the mid- 1960's - Aquarium Illustrated. A few years later, after he assumed the editorship of The Aquarium, Klee would expand the series in the pages of that magazine. In 2003, he would expand it again, this time into book form and with his friend Lee Findley publish it as The Toy Fish: A History of the Aquarium Hobby in America - The First One-Hundred Years. The title is based on the early 20th century commercial name for the then new "tropical" aquarium fish craze. (William T. Innes preferred "exotic" aquarium fish since not all species kept in the aquarium were truly "tropical".) That edition would receive an even greater expansion in a verson published in 2009. Klee's texts are now the basis of US aquarium hobby history studies today.
Everyone makes a few mistakes through the years and Klee is no exception but the mistakes mentioned here are innocent ones. Years after the fact, he told me he should have asked Gene Wolfsheimer to be on the founding committee of the AKA and not Chicago's Charles Glut. The committee already had George Maier of Chicago but no West Coast representation. Wolfsheimer was in California and Wolfsheimer, a national and international hobbyist figure in his own right, was a long time, premier killifish breeder. Also regarding Wolfsheimer, Klee left him off a list of "the greatest aquarium hobbyists" that Klee personally chose and published in the early 1960's in The Aquarium Journal. Making such a list was pointless and simply asking for trouble on Klee's part. He chose Jorgen Scheel, Arend van den Nieuwenhuizen and Rosario LaCorte. At that point in time, none of these men had yet equaled the range of Gene Wolfsheimer's contributions to the hobby but Klee failed to include him. Wolfsheimer's pioneering work with discus alone set him apart. Scheel was only beginning his killifish studies, Nieuwenhuizen was indeed the premier tropical fish photographer at that time and a fine breeder of difficult species but not much else and Rosario was only at the start of his rising national fame and growing influence. Wolfsheimer expressed his hurt at being ignored by Klee in a letter to his friend LaCorte. For some reason the East Coast hobby has always ignored the West Coast and acted as if it was the center of everything, even though Los Angeles was filled with extraordinary aquarists and LA and San Francisco arguably contained the finest aquarium societies of the era - especially the San Francisco society with its enormous international brine shrimp egg business and its publishing of the nationally distributed The Aquarium Journal, the premier tropical fish magazine of the 1950's and early 1960's. When the famed and excellent Pet Library series of aquarium booklets were introduced in 1966, a large portion of the authors were from these West Coast clubs.
One of the greatest disappointments of Klee's career was the loss of the editorship of The Aquarium Journal. In the early 1960's, the federal government told the not-for-profit San Francisco Aquarium Society that it could no longer own its for-profit brine shrimp egg business. It had to sell. This meant that the society could no longer fund the publication of The Aquarium Journal. It was offered to its long time contributor, Al Klee, and he was all set to assume ownership when Herbert Axelrod convinced the board of directors of the San Francisco society to sell it to him. Klee was out and Axelrod was in. Under Klee, this fantastic publication might have survived. Under Axelrod, it was relatively quickly terminated. A sad outcome for a great legacy dating back to 1929.
For years I asked Al Klee to continue his history of the US aquarium hobby past his original cut off date of the start of WWII and tell its story into the 1940's-1970's. He alone could have told the story of those years but he always refused. He said since he was a player by then he could not be truly objective. I could never convince him his subjectivity was part of the value of the project. Unfortunately, unless Klee left a posthumous text, that history is now all but lost.
If memory serves, Al Klee often closed his essays with this quote:
"Knowing that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her."
It was certainly true of Al.
