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 eulogy 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" aquar/www/us/ca/palo-alto/aquaria/misc/people/k/Klee
