By James Heinz
In a previous blog post I recounted my Great Lakes shipwreck diving adventures, which began in my youth in the 1970s. It was the time of the beginning of shipwreck sport diving. As is the case with most human endeavor, this kind of diving was advanced by a handful of brave pioneers. I met some of them and thought that I had heard of all the rest: John Steele, Kent Bellrichard, Kimm Stabelfeldt, and Jerry Guyer. But it turns out that I had never heard of the man who may have been the greatest of them all, a man whose life paralleled my own in many ways.
He was the man with the 12 foot tall rudder and an 8 foot tall anchor in his front yard and a cannon from a Spanish galleon in his back yard.
On the morning of December 12, 2022, I found myself standing outside a small house at 302 South Division Street in Port Washington, Wisconsin. If you look up the house on Google Street View, you will notice that the house has some unique yard decorations. You will see a black iron ship’s capstan on the left side of the photo. Directly in front of the house is a black iron ship’s windlass draped in anchor chain. Just to the left of the driveway is an eight-foot iron anchor with wooden stock, and to the right of the driveway is a 12-foot high wooden ship’s rudder assembly. This house must have been the home of someone extraordinary.
It was the house of Allen James “Butch” Klopp.
Butch (nobody ever referred to him by any other name) Klopp was born in 1944 in this house and lived most of his life in it. His son Jason Klopp told me that Butch made his first dive in the fall of 1965 on the 1856 wreck of the TOLEDO off Port Washington, which he reached by swimming from shore.
Jason said that his father found a gold chain on the wreck of the TOLEDO and “got bit pretty bad” by the shipwreck diving bug. If I had found a gold chain on the wreck of the TOLEDO I would have caught the shipwreck bug too. If I had found the TOLEDO at all, I would have been happy. The TOLEDO was one of my first wreck dives and I once spent an hour swimming around the bottom without finding it.
This began Butch Klopp’s avocation of shipwreck diving. According to his son Jason, Butch would go on to dive somewhere between 60 and 100 shipwrecks in a career that lasted 22 years. About 60% of these wrecks were in southeastern Wisconsin although Butch dove in other lakes and parts of the US.
Jason said, “It was a passion” to be the first to see something no one else had ever seen. In the words of a popular TV show of the period: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” Butch would make 2-3 dives a day. He often went out diving in the winter, when the visibility was better. And the water colder. Much colder.
Butch found shipwrecks the same way the pioneer wreck hunters found them. They spent hundreds of hours going through archives and libraries to find clues as to where the ships had gone down. And then they consulted the era’s greatest experts on shipwrecks, even though they did not dive themselves:
Fishermen.
All of the pioneer era divers owed much of their success to the phenomenal memories of commercial fishermen. They know their patch of lake like the bottom of their hand and never forget where they lost a net or a charter fishing rig on a large object on the bottom, like a shipwreck.
Butch bought his own boat, a converted 36-foot steel fishing tug named FLYING CLOUD, which Butch renamed HALLELUIA. Butch did not have a LORAN or GPS unit to help him find his way back. All he had to fix his position was to cross reference compass bearings from landmarks visible on shore with the known depth of the wreck. Later he bought sonar gear or worked with divers who had it.
Butch did not just find and dive on many shipwrecks. He removed and conserved about 11,000 artifacts from these ships until State and Federal law made that illegal in 1987, when Butch quit diving. But in 1968 Butch did something that would make his collection of shipwreck artifacts uniquely valuable.
He joined the Port Washington Police Department.
Before “The Abandoned Shipwreck Act” was signed into law on April 28, 1988, many divers built up collections of artifacts they removed from shipwrecks. The rule among the pioneer divers was that the man who found the wreck could remove what he wanted before telling other divers about the wreck.
But according to the Wisconsin Maritime Museum’s Chief Curator Kevin Cullen, what made Butch’s collection so valuable was his police training. As police officers Butch and I were trained to collect evidence. We were trained to tag every item, record its exact location, and make a detailed record of what we found. And that is what Butch did with most of the artifacts that he collected. Jason Klopp said that even he did not know how “meticulous” his father’s record keeping was.
Butch was a man ahead of his time in treating a shipwreck like a crime scene. Had he done that today he could have gotten his own TV show. Something like “Law and Order: SVU (Shipwrecks Visually Uncovered” or “CSI: Lake Michigan (Comprehensive Shipwreck Investigation) or maybe “Port Washington Five-O”. I can hear the dialogue now: “Book him, Butch.”
Kevin Cullen said that Butch’s recording of where he found the artifacts is extremely valuable to archeologists like himself. It enables archeologists to reconstruct what the shipwreck looked like. Butch’s records enable today’s archeologists to establish what Kevin calls “provenience.”
Although Butch’s collecting of artifacts may seem unethical to some today, and today’s archeologists would object to the practice, at the time there were no regulations against it.
Jason Klopp points out that due to changes in the Great Lakes ecosystem that began about the time that Butch began diving, his father did archeologists of the future a favor. The introduction of zebra and quagga mussels into the Great Lakes starting in the 1970s meant that many Great Lakes shipwrecks would be covered with thick coatings of mussels which would destroy the shipwrecks and their artifacts.
How could organisms the size of my thumb nail destroy anything? It turns out that mussels and humans have something in common. We both urinate. And in both cases our urine is acidic. So, a shipwreck covered with layer upon layer of hundreds of thousands of mussels is in fact sitting not in the fresh water of the Lakes but rather in a continuous bath of acid. In Jason’s opinion if his father had left the artifacts he collected on the bottom many of them would have been slowly destroyed by mussel urine.
Butch did not just hoard all his artifacts to himself. Besides displaying some of them in front of his house, he put them in museums. Since there were no museums that featured Great Lakes shipwreck artifacts at that time, Butch built his own museums.
He built one in Port Washington on the south side of the power plant inlet in an old Smith Brothers fishing shack. I visited it several times and was impressed not only by the artifacts but by the high quality of the dioramas and displays. The Port Washington museum was open from 1974 to 1983. Butch also built another museum in St. Ignace, Michigan in the same building as the Star Line ferry boat company, as well as another museum in Algoma.
Both museums lost their leases when the building owners saw how much traffic the museums were generating and tried to replace the museums with shops. The building owners failed to realize that it was the museums that were generating the foot traffic and when the museums went away so did the foot traffic.
There were some artifacts that Butch brought up that did not make it into his collection, for a rather unusual reason: He ate them.
Jason Klopp told me that his father once brought up a container of pickles from the 1865 wreck of PEWABIC in Thunder Bay, Lake Huron. Jason said that the pickles “looked like they had just been picked”. Butch reported that the pickles “weren’t that bad.” Butch also once brought up crocks of cheese which also proved to be edible although not exactly tasty. But the greatest artifacts that Butch found were the ones he didn’t bring back:
The gold plated automobiles owned by the Shah of Iran.
The LAKELAND was an 1887 steel bulk freighter that had been converted to an automobile carrier. On December 5, 1924, she sprang a suspicious leak fifteen miles east of the entrance to the Sturgeon Bay canal. No one died in the sinking. The “leak” was later determined to be caused by someone opening the seacocks to let water into the hold. This was determined by the first practical use of mixed gas diving equipment, pioneered by insurance companies who were suspicious of the suspicious leak.
At the time of the sinking, the LAKELAND was known to be carrying a number of Nash, Kissel, and Rollin automobiles. Nash cars were made in Kenosha and Nash was a predecessor of American Motors.
The LAKELAND was discovered in 1960 and rests in 205 feet of water. Wisconsinshipwrecks.org states: “The top of the bow railing is in 155 feet of water, rising fifty feet off the lakebed. The bow section of the wreck contains several cracks in the cabin deck that allow access to the main deck and cargo hold. There are at least twenty-one Nash and Kissel vehicles still on the wreck site.”
As Jason tells it, his father entered the wreck through a “crack in the hull” of the LAKELAND. As Butch swam through the hold, he grabbed a headlight of one of the cars and unlike the rusty surfaces of the other autos, the headlight “shone like the sun” in the beam of Butch’s underwater light.
Jason said that his father did research and discovered that the car was gold plated and one of three gold plated autos that had been built for the Shah by the Kissel Motor Car Company of Hartford, Wisconsin, and were referred to as “Gold Bugs”.
Although “Gold Bug” would seem an appropriate name for a car plated with gold, the nickname “Gold Bug” was actually applied to a two seat “Speedster” sports car made in the 1920s by Kissel. These cars were extremely popular with celebrities of the time, such as Amelia Earhart and Douglas Fairbanks. Gold Bugs were the Ferraris of their day. Amelia’s Gold Bug still exists.
If you doubt that the Shah of Iran ever ordered a gold plated automobile, middle-east-online.com, in reporting on the autos currently on display at the Iran Historical Car Museum reports:
“The jewel of the museum is a 1930 Pierce-Arrow “Model A”. At that time it was the most expensive car built in the United States — and was bought by Reza Shah, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. Its price tag was an eye-watering $30,000, equivalent to one eighth of Iran’s state budget at the time, and came complete with a gold-plated bumper and headlights,” as well as other gold plated trim.
If you don’t believe that source, the November 12, 2010, issue of the New York Times says of the collection: “Other notable cars include…. a one-off Pierce-Arrow with gold-plated trim used by the shah’s father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, for state occasions.”
And finally, if you don’t believe the New York Times, you may see the auto in question on You Tube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biDH3kzMC0s . As a man with a history of ordering gold plated automobiles, it is entirely possible that the Shah of Iran ordered three gold Gold Bugs for his own use and that they still rest in the hold of the LAKELAND today.
Kissel made cars until 1931. They also made trucks and according to Jason, three buses, one of which still lies inside the wreck of the LAKELAND. Butch always wanted to go back and raise the Gold Bugs but never got a chance to do so.
Read Part 2 to find out what car Butch was involved with.
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James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.
Photo at top of page: Anchor with Paula and Butch Klopp dated 2000, provided by the family.
Other Photos: Photos by James Heinz unless otherwise noted.
