Klētnieks eventually fled Latvia for a displaced persons camp in Germany, where he remained for five years following the end of World War II.

In 1950, he settled with his wife and children as refugees in the United States, where he continued to write books in the Latvian language and joined the Boy Scouts of America national staff.

Klētnieks was born on December 4, 1905, in Vaive parish, a village in what was then the Cēsis District of Latvia, when that country was still part of Czarist Russia.

By October 1944, the Red Army had regained control of most of Latvia, including its capital, Riga, and Klētnieks was in a German displaced persons camp.

[17] Klētnieks and his family went to the United States as refugees in May 1950, sponsored and given shelter by a Boy Scouts of America (BSA) official, E. Urner Goodman, at his Bondville, Vermont, summer home, Innisfree.

While staying with the Goodmans, the Klētnieks family appeared at a Brattleboro, Vermont, church in December 1950, where they spoke of their wartime experiences as exiles and recalled Christmas in Latvia, singing the songs of their homeland to the delight of those who heard them.

[20] As an émigré to the U.S., Klētnieks continued writing about Latvian history, including a second, expanded edition of his 1947 book, Latviešu skautisma trīsdesmit gadi, 1917-1947, published in 1960.

[8] Later, he wrote Klintenieši: stāsts trimdas jauniešiem ("The Klintins: a story for young people in exile") in 1963, about those who used their Scouting skills to survive in the forests of Latvia during the Soviet occupation of 1940–1941.

[22] It was re-published posthumously in Riga in 1990, after Latvia regained its independence from the Soviet Union and the present-day Latvian Scout and Guide Organization, Latvijas Skautu un Gaidu Centrālā Organizācija, was formed.

[12][20] In the 1960s, they retired to Constantine, Michigan, where Klētnieks was a community leader at Garezers, a lake resort in nearby Three Rivers popular with Latvian-Americans.