And while Lee and Larry never viewed themselves as any more eccentric than most teenagers, they did manage to draw the wrath of teachers about actual dress code violations. Walking the halls wearing Chuck Taylor high-tops without socks, a Tiki necklace, and a surf t-shirt underneath a tattered army jacket, they were easy targets. But as the rebels they tried to be, as soon as they got out of view they were strutting and untucking.
One wardrobe item that got Larry hauled to the principal’s office was the surfer’s cross around his neck. Worn as a talisman to bring good waves to surfers, the cross was also an antiestablishment symbol that distinguished them from the rest of society. Based on the German Iron Cross, it featured a surfer riding a board in the middle of the cross’s front side. After being yanked out of class and accused of being a Nazi sympathizer, Larry was left to explain himself or receive a punishment. Pulling out the most recent issue of Surfer Magazine from his back pocket, he opened to an advertisement. “Ya see? Right there. That’s a surfer’s cross. What I’m wearing is a surfer’s cross. I’m a surfer, not a kraut-sucking Nazi.”
Academics quickly became secondary to the boys as the Great Lakes Surf Club’s first official order of business was to raise money to buy some jackets, patches, and surfboards—all items needed to legitimize their organization in the eyes of others. Despite not having their driver’s licenses yet, they were able to organize a car wash in a local grocery store parking lot. While a lot of the cars didn’t quite get the thorough washings as advertised, they certainly did get a lot of driving miles on them. The kids eagerly hopped into people’s cars and drove around the parking lot a few extra times before getting in line for the washing. The fundraiser was a big success, and by the end of the day, the Great Lakes Surf Club had accumulated over one hundred and fifty dollars in seed money.
With the funds in hand, the boys didn’t have to look far for inspiration on the design for their orange Great Lakes Surf Club jackets. The local car club in town, the Sandmen, sported Nehru jackets with a palm tree and sunset embroidered on the back. Since they were driving some of the sweetest hot rods around and all dated good-looking women, the Sandmen were the perfect model. So for a handful of teenage boys, the choice was obvious—Nehru jackets with the simple letters GLSC on the back and a Great Lakes Surf Club patch sewn on the left breast. Now the group was not only an excuse to hang out together and party, but also an excuse to wear a really cool club jacket around town.
With their remaining car wash funds, the Great Lakes Surf Club decided to rent their own garage. Thanks to a friend of the family, Lee and Larry found a place where the group could hang out and house their growing collection of skimboards. For five bucks a month they enjoyed the perfect place for a bunch of teenagers on the verge of high school to experience the joys and sorrows of adolescence in Sheboygan. Many nights found a dozen guys on the garage floor covered in sleeping bags, planning to get a jump on the morning surf. Each boy would tell his parents he was sleeping at somebody else’s house, and then they’d secretly gather in the garage. The boys’ late night conversations often focused on how they could get longboards, the novelty of skimboarding having faded.
Lee and Larry decided it was time to take part-time jobs. Although Lee, as the fiscally responsible brother, had built up quite a war chest from months of saving his dollar-a-week allowance, Larry chewed through cash as if it were coated in bubble gum. With disposable income scarce around the Williams house, only the anticipation of owning their own surfboards kept the boys focused on their new jobs—Lee delivering afternoon newspapers and Larry raking leaves in the autumn before clearing away neighborhood sidewalks with a snow shovel in the winter for a buck per house.
After several blizzards, numerous days of sub-zero wind chills, and endless cloudy skies, the Williamses were stoked when Sheboygan’s surf season kicked into full gear around the year-end holidays.
One afternoon on his daily paper route, Lee saw a surfboard parked against a garage—a California-style board wedged into a Sheboygan snow bank was a bizarre sight, and he needed to check it out. He approached the front door with a gleam in his eye. A young, fit, and tanned surfer answered the door wearing floral-patterned board-shorts and a University of Southern California sweatshirt. Looking for an icebreaker, Lee said he had knocked in order to thank the household for being such loyal customers of the Sheboygan Press newspaper, but he soon led the conversation into surfing, especially the differences between Santa Monica and Sheboygan wave riding. Lee quickly gained the college student’s trust by showing his knowledge of the sport went well beyond casual. Once he felt comfortable, Lee asked the guy, who was home for the holidays, “In the spirit of the season, can I rent your surfboard?”
“Sure,” the student said. “And in the spirit of the season, it’ll only cost you twenty-five cents an hour.” A square deal if Lee had ever heard one. “When you’re done,” the student added, “put it back in the garage and leave the money by the board.”
Every day for the next two weeks, Lee made that house the last stop on his route, picking up the board and heading for the beach with his brother. For a kid making fourteen dollars a week on his route, dropping two bits an hour to rent a board was the best deal in town.
Although Lee and Larry had surfed on a few longboards before, this one was different. Maybe it was because they didn’t have to immediately hand it off to someone else after each run. Maybe it was because they were renting it, as opposed to borrowing. Or since they had all day to surf without worrying about only having one chance to get in a good run, they enjoyed a sense of ownership. The slush-topped Lake Michigan waves did little to keep them from improving their surfing skills.
Dressed in blue jeans, sweatshirts, and cotton gloves, they took a couple of practice runs on the sand before paddling out a quarter-mile to the first favorable break, where they took turns riding the board on their knees back to shore. When they tried to stand up, the first wave’s momentum sucked the board toward shore, leaving them to practice their retrieval skills since the board was without a leash.
Knowing their task would’ve been easier if the board had been resting on a solid surface, they kept trying to make their leap from a prone position in the water coincide with the board as it constantly shifted above the lurching surge of swirling water. When they actually got their feet planted on the board firmly enough to stand, they then battled gravity’s unforgiving forces while weighting and unweighting left, right, front, and back—whatever it took to keep from plunging into the watery abyss below. All too often it resulted in a losing combination.
It has been said that learning how to surf is like learning to ride a bicycle. Fighting the urge to walk away after several faceplant dismounts, one must try again and again while listening to no end of advice from people who have done it. And then, just when failure has almost convinced ambition that there is no way someone can stand upright on a surfboard for more than a few seconds, “it” clicks.
And that’s how it was for Lee and Larry. The trick of landing the board suddenly came together, and soon they were standing atop two-foot waves, gracefully gliding toward the Sheboygan shoreline. Although they had spent endless hours swimming, bodysurfing, and skimboarding Lake Michigan’s waves, the euphoria of “Oh my God, I can do this” shone in their faces from atop their first wave. It was a threshold they’d crossed, knowing what was once an adolescent curiosity had turned into a life’s passion.
For the rest of their holiday break, Lee and Larry spent every spare minute at the beach on their rented surfboard, mostly by themselves, though sometimes Kevin Groh and other hearty Great Lakes Surf Club members tried to get in a couple of rides with Sheboygan’s newest surfing sensations. By the end of the two-week vacation, Lee and Larry had racked up nearly ten dollars in rental fees at a quarter an hour.
For a couple months after the owner of the surfboard returned to USC, Lee and Larry suffered from the shakes like a couple of dried-out alcoholics. They needed to buy a board of their ow
n. And so they searched the local classified ads for a used surfboard with no success until one glorious day when they read, “Ten foot wooden hollow surfboard, spar varnished with marine shellac—$25.”
The tiny ad in the Sunday classifieds seemed to melt the snow piled on the kitchen windowsills and make the sun shine brighter through the frost-covered windows. Before Larry had even finished reading the ad, Lee had begun dialing the phone number to arrange a time to pick up the board. The next twenty-four hours were some of the most anxiety-filled moments of their lives. They would soon be owners of their very own longboard.
The next day, Lee completed his paper route in record time. He had gotten a head start after meeting the Sheboygan Press delivery truck outside his house, dropping the stack of newspapers directly into his bicycle basket, and not once letting up on his pedaling. When he tossed his last paper onto the neighbor’s lawn he raced back to the house to pick up Larry. It was time to meet their new board.
They pedaled their bikes as quickly as possible through the labyrinth of Sheboygan sidewalks and alleyways inland to the address listed in the classified ad. Escorted into the garage by the board’s owner, they couldn’t see a thing until the guy turned on an overhead utility light that shone upon a cluttered maze of boxes, worn-out lawn equipment, and broken bicycles. Tucked away in the garage’s dusty shadows, behind a rusted pickup truck on sawbucks, stood the shellacked piece of marine plywood. It resembled an ancient Hawaiian board the boys had read about but never actually seen in person. As advertised, the ten-foot-long wooden hollow surfboard was varnished with industrial shellac, was five inches thick, and had a rubber plug in the nose with a big wooden rudder on the bottom. It wasn’t one of those sleek, airplane-winged boards, but rather what Hawaiian surf historians often called a cigar box or kook box. It was similar to the boards the biggest names in the history of surfing started out with—big old wooden planks that needed two or three neighborhood kids to carry to the beach.
Forking over the money, Lee and Larry were head-over-heels in love, though they had no idea how they would get it home on their bikes. They headed directly to the beach, holding their new purchase as they pedaled their bikes in tandem without losing their balance or dropping the board onto the pavement.
It wasn’t until they placed the board into the water that they discovered why it was so reasonably priced. As soon as the first wave washed over the board, it began taking on water like a sieve and proceeded to sink. Full of water, it easily weighed more than one hundred pounds. Only pride in their new purchase kept them from abandoning their sinking log on the spot.
Dressed in denim jeans and sweatshirts, they endured the twenty-degree air temperatures while wading in forty-degree waters, ignoring the early signs of hypothermia setting in as their lips turned purple and extremities began to swell. After a couple of hours of trying to stand on the board, the two realized their clothes did nothing but exacerbate the numbing cold and prevent them from balancing themselves.
Upon returning home and thawing out in front of the fireplace, Lee and Larry decided to make an even stronger commitment toward their love of surfing. For twenty-five dollars apiece, they purchased wetsuits. The modified SCUBA suits were bulky, awkward, and nearly three-quarters of an inch thick with the interior velour liner. Manufactured for warm weather excursions in places like the Caribbean, the suits had short sleeves and short pants, leaving arms and legs exposed to Lake Michigan’s unforgiving elements. That posed a serious problem for Lee and Larry since they found it nearly impossible to stay balanced on a surfboard, especially without the ability to feel their knees and ankles.
When the wetsuits arrived, everything seemed to leak. Since the pants came up to their chests and the jacket came down almost past their hips, they taped the seams of their gloves and boots in hopes of making a seal. To combat the accumulating water around their feet, they wore socks, which only weighed them down like cement blocks tied to their ankles. Even when they thought they had created a perfect seal, the suit’s big beavertail—basically a crotch flap with turnbuckles—would always fail during a big wipeout. If a wave jettisoned them at the right angle, the wetsuit would unhinge, roll up to their chest, and practically straightjacket them. It was quite the visual metaphor for the brothers’ efforts since they were crazy enough to even consider surfing in Lake Michigan’s frigid winter waters in the first place.
Larry stays ahead of the breaking surf in 1970, despite the dragging beavertail on his wetsuit.
They’d wear hoods to cover their shoulders and necks, with a small hole from the top of the eyebrows down to the bottom of their lips to minimize exposure, but this presented another problem. They needed to be able to turn their heads to cut and swing around the faces of waves.
Riding the waves with their own board became almost as frustrating as it was fun.
Lee and Larry took out their frustrations on their board by abandoning it on the beach each night when they were finished surfing. Why go through the trouble of lugging it back and forth from home? Who would try to take it? The board was too heavy to steal and a lot of people didn’t even know exactly what it was. Those who did know weren’t stupid enough to try riding it because any sane person knew the water was too damn cold.
As proof that their obsession with the beach had become a year-round affair, Lee and Larry transitioned from sporting summer sunburns to wicked winter windburns. Often, it seemed as if they were making up for lost time; it had only been four years since they were allowed to visit the water unsupervised for the first time.
Though the Williams family lived only three blocks from the water on Ninth Street, their parents forbade them from crossing Eighth Street. One of the busiest and most treacherous streets to cross in Sheboygan, especially for an unsupervised child, Eighth Street presented an imposing obstacle and made visiting the beach on their own as unlikely as a trip to the moon. But after years of persistent nagging, they wore down their parents.
“When you turn ten, you’ll be old enough and responsible enough to cross the street on your own,” their mom had said.
When dawn broke on November 5, 1963, Larry leaped out of bed before the first ray of sunshine hit his pillow. With an extra jump in his step, he put a leash on the family’s little Pomeranian dog and was out the door within five minutes. The two strutted along the sidewalk, heading straight down Georgia Avenue toward the beach. Nothing would keep him from crossing Eighth Street that morning because he had just turned ten. As if destiny were playing in his favor, Larry walked up to the crosswalk right as the light turned green, not even having to break stride to venture across Eighth Street for the first time all on his own.
He spent the entire morning wandering the Lake Michigan shoreline with a new sense of empowerment and discovery. From countless hours of reading surf magazines, he realized for the first time that Sheboygan was in the best location for surfing anywhere on the Great Lakes. Understanding that surfers are only restricted by geographical necessity (a coastline that generates sizeable waves), he no longer saw a series of river mouths, rocky outcroppings, piers, jetties, sandbars, and a reef one mile offshore, but rather twenty-two different breaks over a five-mile stretch that with a surfboard could be conquered like never before.
Lake Michigan waves don’t have thousands of miles to build up like ocean waves do, and so wind speed and fetch—the area of surface where the wind generates the waves’ swell—are two key elements that contribute to surfable waves. Because Sheboygan County juts out five miles into Lake Michigan, winds from most directions cause water to swell. The third factor concerns where the wave meets the shore in a fated climax known as a break. Between Sheboygan’s mile-long pier and a natural reef less than a mile offshore, waves have been constructively redirected toward shore, often forming bigger and consistently better quality breakers to surf.
When the Sheboygan surfers decided to create an identification system, they began naming all of the various breaks based on their location. With an eye toward fi
nding those ideal surf breaks on his own, Larry first came upon three or four near the C. Reiss Coal Company on Sheboygan’s south side. Since the 1880s, the site served as a storage and distribution facility for coal, rock salt, and petroleum products that skirted out toward the water’s edge. Because the company prohibited pedestrians on that portion of the beach, it created the ideal surfing sanctuary for anyone seeking privacy on his board. As the little Pomeranian dog and Larry scampered along the Northside Pier, they came upon one of the biggest and best breaks on the Great Lakes, the bend in the pier known as the Elbow. Over the next few years, all of the breaks would receive nicknames, usually based on their location among the city-installed ladders and jetties along the pier. Beyond the first jetty, second jetty, and third jetty was the fourth, or “broken” jetty, a heap of concrete rubble twisted by Lake Michigan’s harsh winter waves. Then there was a large limestone outcropping known as the Niagara Escarpment, which some consider the Mount Everest of freshwater surfing because of its three distinctive breaks. If the waves got really big, the surfers would go out to the seventeenth ladder.
MAP CREATED BY CLERISY PRESS
Around the corner from the pier was North Point, a cove that wrapped calm waters around the leeward side, majestically peeling off into the cove. Under the right conditions, which occurred only once or twice a year, the waves climbed the city’s retaining wall, resurging the same size wave going out. When that wave met an oncoming wave, a five- or six-foot plume of water would burst just about anybody off his board, sending even the best surfer ten feet in the air. It was all part of the excitement and unpredictability of surfing North Point.
Some Like It Cold Page 4