Bob Klein’s Shorewood home holds about 60 hand-carved wooden warships, a collection made by his father, Robert Klein Sr., in the early 1940s before he went to war. Klein has kept the miniature fleet together for decades.
The ships represent several vessel classes. In an account by TMJ4 News, Klein identified aircraft carriers, battleships, heavy cruisers and destroyers among the models. His father carved them before enlisting in the Army.
The collection and its maker
Robert Klein Sr. later served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Pacific Theater during World War II, repairing damaged planes and serving as a gunner, according to his obituary posted by Voi E Funeral Home. The wooden ships were made before that service; they now remain in the family with his son.
Bob Klein says he maintains the ships in good condition as a way to say thank you to veterans across the country, not just to his own father. “The effort that he put into it, the care that he put into it, and obviously the patriotism, quite frankly, it all deserved to be respected,” Klein said, per the same TMJ4 account.
Service across generations
The Kleins' connection to military service runs beyond Robert Klein Sr. Bob Klein has an aunt who received a Bronze Star during World War II, and a grandfather who fought in Europe during World War I, the station reports. Those threads give the wooden fleet added weight as a stand-in for a broader family history of service.
For Klein, the ships preserve a piece of his father’s work and family history. Keeping the models together has allowed him to hold on to that connection.
Researching and caring for military-era objects
A separate U.S. wartime project involved aircraft, not Klein’s ships: according to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, in December 1941 the Navy asked the U.S. Commissioner of Education for schools to make 500,000 scale model airplanes. That record does not establish how ship-recognition models were used or provide criteria for distinguishing official training models from privately carved replicas. For general care—not an assessment of Klein’s collection—the National Park Service Museum Handbook recommends keeping relative humidity for wooden objects ideally between 45% and 55%.
Families seeking to document a Wisconsin relative’s service can consult the Wisconsin Veterans Museum. Its collections database includes photographs, artifacts and documents related to Wisconsin service members, while its Oral History Collection contains more than 2,900 interviews about veterans’ personal stories and military experiences. These resources do not establish additional facts about Robert Klein Sr.
Researching and caring for military-era objects
Klein plans to pass the ships on to his children one day. For now, the collection remains on the dining table in Shorewood.
