While stories about tourists disappearing, only to be found again during Sheboygan’s spring thaw of 1969, were rife in Sun Belt newspapers, Lake Michigan’s uninspiring surfing conditions didn’t attract even a drop of ink. Unable to appreciate the flowers blossoming, grass turning green, or robins nesting in nearby trees, Lee and Larry were left frustrated and bored. Since school was always an afterthought behind surfing and their part-time jobs, they struggled to find legitimate activities to keep themselves occupied.
Lake Michigan was inhospitable to surfers, leaving the Williams twins with no outlet for their rambunctious instincts. Their boredom soon found relief at the Pool Tavern, a local watering hole at the corner of downtown Sheboygan’s Indiana Avenue and Ninth Street, just six snowdrift-covered blocks from their home. Thanks to the kindness of its owner, Joe Udovich, the kids were invited to hang out in the bar’s basement. As a strong Christian, Joe wanted to provide the neighborhood youngsters with a safe place to socialize by offering inexpensive sodas, lunch items, and games such as pool and darts. Little did Joe realize he would be hosting such a collection of hellions!
Larry surfing North Point
The teenagers spent their first days in the basement playing eight ball, pinball, and cricket. When that got boring, they started roughhousing, which led to a few broken drink glasses and cracked pool balls. The forgiving owner looked at it as nothing more than anticipated collateral damage from a group of teenagers. However, when the boys continued their destruction, Joe reluctantly installed a security camera in the basement, allowing the bartender upstairs to monitor their actions at all times.
As expected, the eye in the sky only prompted the boys to figure out which corners of the room were and weren’t monitored upstairs. At first they tested the peripheral vision of the camera by making faces into the lens. When that didn’t elicit a response from the aloof bartenders upstairs—most of whom weren’t interested in becoming a babysitting service, at least to sober teenagers who were too cheap to tip—the entire group of boys unleashed Lord of the Flies-style testosterone-driven dares.
At first the dares were innocent. Jeff Schultz stacked whisky tumblers into elaborate three-dimensional pyramids. Rich Kuitert shot spitballs from across the room towards the camera. Then, Kevin and Rocky Groh broke cue sticks over each other’s heads when dueling with them as if they were medieval swords. When Larry brought down his BB gun, everybody thought he was going to show it off by shooting at some paper, cardboard, or tin can targets. Ignoring the warning on the box to “be sure to provide adult supervision until you’ve instilled good gun safety rules in the child,” Larry loaded hatpins into it and started firing them at the dartboard. Thinking the gun was empty, he aimed it across the room at Lee, who was ignoring his brother’s antics in hopes of hitting his next pool shot.
Thweet! The punctured hatpin stuck all the way into Lee’s leg, with only the blue ball on the end exposed outside the skin.
“I didn’t think it was loaded,” Larry said, apologizing profusely.
Realizing Lee was furious, Larry dropped the gun and fled for the door.
Without breaking eye contact with his brother, not even to blink, Lee picked up the cue ball, hurling it at him with the velocity of a Nolan Ryan fastball. Larry ducked, and the sound of the ball striking him in the back of the skull delivered a wallop to the guts of every boy in the room. Larry lay motionless as the ricocheted cue ball bounced back onto his groin.
The room fell dead silent. They could hear the chatter of the bar patrons above them, the rattling of glasses, the thump of footsteps. But downstairs—nothing. Not a sound. Coming to his senses, Larry rubbed the orange-sized lump on the back of his skull.
“Are we even now?” he asked.
“Sure,” Lee said, relieved that he’d not killed his brother, even as he pried the hatpin from his calf.
A few weeks later, Lee walked into the wood-paneled basement with what looked like a stick of dynamite in hand, exclaiming, “It’s Fourth of July in February!”
“Are you nuts?” Larry said. “You’re going to burn the place down.”
“It’s just a railroad flare. They’re harmless.”
After making sure he was out of range of the camera, Lee ignited it.
“Let’s light this party up,” he said. Once the flare was lit, smoke poured out of it.
“Blow it out! They’re going to see it on the camera,” Rich said. “We can’t afford to get busted,” Jeff said. “We have nowhere else to go.”
“Throw it in the toilet,” Larry told his brother. He ran toward the bathroom door.
Since teenage boys don’t often think through potential consequences before taking action, Lee followed his brother completely on instinct. He figured that water extinguishes fire so putting the burning wick of a flare into a bowl of water should take care of this smoke problem.
Racing into the bathroom holding the flare high and proud like the Olympic torch, Lee stepped up to the bowl of cool water with the plume of thick smoke trailing him. His group of apostles behind him watched every move. He tossed the stick into the toilet water, awaiting the soothing hiss of an extinguished wick.
He didn’t hear it.
“What the hell,” he said. “Why’s it still burning?”
The wick continued to burn towards the flare’s shaft as a fury of bubbles frothed over the edges of the porcelain bowl. The group of curious onlookers wrestled one another for a prime viewing position to the impending train wreck. “Let me see,” they bickered. “Why’s it still burning underwater?” one inquired.
With the wick burned down almost to the shaft’s nub, the reality of the impending outcome set in. “We gotta get out of here!” Rocky warned as the boys tumbled out of the bathroom. “That’s gonna explode like a bomb!”
Just as the last hooligan fled the bathroom, a muffled implosion rocketed a plume of water out of the stall, splashing water on the musty, grouted tile floor. Curious to see the results of their mischief, Lee and a handful of followers raced back into the bathroom, only to be met by a gushing wall of water.
“The toilet cracked! We broke the bowl,” Lee yelled as toilet water rushed across the basement floor.
They all stood in horror, wondering what to do.
“We have to act natural so nobody knows we messed up down here,” Rocky offered. With the water level threatening to rise above the soles of their Chuck Taylor high-tops, the boys headed up the stairs as nonchalantly as possible to avoid bringing attention to their toilet-soaked shenanigans. If only the bartender on shift cared enough to question why the boys’ shoes made that squishing sound as they walked out the door, Pool Tavern owner Joe Udovich would have had a lead in solving “The Case of the Cracked Toilet.” Instead, he was left without a clue.
For Lee and Larry, practical jokes were a way of life. At an early age, they witnessed their mother enforcing family rules through what might kindly be called practical jokes—none more memorable than when their father came home drunk one night from the local bar, Benjie’s. Toasted from a night of heavy drinking, Jack Williams plopped himself down at the kitchen table hoping the room would stop spinning. When he sneezed, his dentures flew straight across the room. Oblivious that he had lost his teeth, Jack proceeded to wipe his nose before sauntering upstairs for the night. Thoroughly frustrated with his behavior, Mary walked to the corner of the kitchen and picked up the dentures. Wrapping them in a handkerchief, she stored them away.
The next morning when Jack woke up, he immediately realized he was without his chompers but was too afraid to admit he didn’t know their whereabouts. How can a guy misplace his teeth?
Appearing at the breakfast table with a modest grin, he quietly gummed his coffee, often getting up to wander around aimlessly.
“What’cha looking for, honey?” Mary inquired.
“Just wandering,” he replied.
“You look like you’re missing something.”
“Nope.”
“Maybe we can h
elp,” she offered as Jack wandered out the back door and into the alley. Mary sat smugly at the kitchen table along with Lee and Larry for nearly a half-hour before Jack ventured back into the house, his head hung in shame.
“Did you find what you were looking for at Benjie’s?” she asked without even breaking a smile. She had played out the torture game to her advantage.
“No,” he said in a hopeless tone.
She handed him a wrapped handkerchief. “The next time you’re too toasted to keep track of your teeth, you can fish them out of the lake.”
By that summer, the Great Lakes Surf Club had all but disbanded due to lack of interest. Everybody was getting older, getting their driver’s licenses, and getting more interested in the opposite sex. Outside of the core group of passionate surfers, most of the guys found more interest in cars, hunting, and team sports. With male memberships dwindling, the girls, who were the cornerstone of the group’s appeal, drifted to cheerleading, dance, and theater. All that remained of the original Great Lakes Surf Club were its founding members, Lee and Larry, along with a handful of dedicated friends including Jeff Schultz, Rich Kuitert, and Kevin Groh. Deciding the monthly rent on the garage wasn’t worth the hassle, the group went nomadic, often congregating inside the Williams family garage on weekends. Without the inherent structure of being part of a club, the boys looked to each other to fill the down time between ideal surfing conditions. Kevin was looked upon to entertain the group at any cost—even if it meant jeopardizing his personal safety.
For a bunch of kids without any money, trying to kill each other for fun seemed like legitimate entertainment. If Kevin injured himself but didn’t die—like when he rode the cardboard boxes down the hill at a breakneck speed—it was a cool stunt. Since he hadn’t killed himself in the line of entertainment yet, nobody gave much thought as to what to do in the event that he maimed or annihilated himself. Everybody just kept pushing the limits of human mortality.
As the boys got older, games of touch football in the backyard were no longer exhilarating enough on their own. An amalgamation of tackle football and rugby had intensified into a “kill the guy with the ball” mob mentality with everybody jumping on whoever wasn’t fast enough to run away. When trapped underneath the bottom of one of those mounds of humanity, Kevin actually broke his shoulder but didn’t die. For the next eight weeks while Kevin’s arm was in a sling, the playground ran amuck with “kill the guy with the ball.”
While waiting for surfing conditions to improve, the boys discovered a towering willow tree that hung over the Sheboygan beach. The tree was ideal for climbing, and since it featured a branch nearly twelve feet long with another branch forking off from it (known as the “killer branch”), it was perfect for swinging. At first, the boys took turns launching themselves off the killer branch, often accompanied by their best Tarzan yell.
As they grew more daring, two of them would sit on the mature branch while the third grabbed the end of the weaker willow branch. The two boys not hanging on would aggressively swing the branch back and forth as hard as they could, turning it into a bucking bronco with the rider swinging nearly twenty feet in either direction. Letting go at the wrong time could result in a gruesome death since the rider would be thrown nearly fifteen yards into jagged rocks, prickly shrubbery, or ice-covered, frozen sand.
So when Kevin was holding on and shrieking, “Stop, stop, I can’t hang on!” Lee and Larry just kept swinging him to and fro. When Kevin launched off the branch thirty feet in the air and crashed awkwardly into the killer branch that ricocheted him into a five-rotation somersault before settling into a sand dune, the Williams twins thought they had sliced him in half. Rushing to where his body lay motionless, the foursome of Lee, Larry, Rich, and Jeff looked hoping for any indications of life.
Just as the boys were about to begin preparing funeral arrangements, a weak groan emanated from Kevin. “That really hurt, guys.”
All four boys began celebrating. “That was awesome!”
Even Kevin, convulsed in pain, couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah, that was pretty awesome.”
“Okay, who’s next?” Larry joked as he assisted Kevin to his feet.
While helping their ailing compatriot walk home that afternoon, the boys felt immortal. Despite all the crazy, dangerous things they’d done in their short lives, they always survived. Luck, they felt sure, was always on their side.
Which might explain their decision to sneak into the C. Reiss Coal Company, a local manufacturer that shipped coal, wood, salt, and building materials along Sheboygan’s southern shoreline. For a bunch of bored teenage boys, the facility represented a “forbidden playground.” On Sundays, the facility was closed and empty, its employees enjoying their weekly day off. Lee and Larry, along with Kevin, Jeff, and Rich, peered longingly over the front gate. In those days before surveillance cameras and private security patrols, the compound was accessible to anybody willing to jump the fence onto the property.
Discovering that the company’s loading dock was outfitted with a conveyor belt that led to the second floor, Lee determined that by hitting the “up” button, they could ride right into the building. Once inside, they climbed up and down a maze of stainless steel ladders and stairways through the labyrinth of catwalks hanging nearly five stories above the factory floor.
When the fire extinguishers were discovered, it was every man for himself as the boys blasted each other with baking soda. Nearly one hundred feet above the fleet of trucks, pickups, steamrollers, and forklifts as well as the huge contraptions used to unload them, the boys’ hand-to-hand combat resulted in everyone getting covered in white sodium bicarbonate foam.
Having run the extinguishers dry, the trespassers focused on figuring out a way to ride the parked vehicles below. Much to their delight, keys were left in all the ashtrays. Commanding the wheel of a seven-foot-tall, heavy-lift forklift, Larry chased Lee and Kevin in their much smaller four-foot-high steamroller. The game of forklift tag soon led to races across the factory floor before venturing outside into the shipyard along the Lake Michigan shoreline. For hours, the boys raced through a makeshift obstacle course of coal mounds, conveyor belts, and parked trucks.
With Lee at the wheel and Kevin trailing, the two exited the storage structure in hot pursuit of one another, heading for the courtyard area. With only a chain-link fence separating them from the city street that ran parallel to the company’s frontage road, both of them spotted the police car driving in the same direction and at the same slow speed on the other side of the fence. The cop looked at them in disbelief. Lee and Kevin stared dumbfounded back at him. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion.
The immediate thought of being busted crossed Lee’s mind. Kevin’s too. As with most teenaged boys faced with the prospect of getting arrested, they maximized their lack of judgment by jumping off their forklifts and racing back toward the loading dock. Abandoned by their drivers, the forklifts continued rolling forward, crashing straight into the concrete retaining wall ahead.
The boys raced up to the second floor, sprawled onto the conveyor belt, and hit the “down” button. “Head to the beach,” Lee yelled. With what seemed like a suspension of real time, the belt methodically lowered the boys toward the far side of the shipyard. Fearing it would be Tuesday before they reached the bottom, the boys jumped off the belt, like a fleeing school of tuna out of a boater’s net, onto the concrete below. Reaching the fence that divided the coal company’s private property from the publicly accessed Lake Michigan shoreline, the boys began to hear sirens in the distance.
“Can you believe we just drove a couple of forklifts through a wall?” Kevin asked in mid-stride.
“Where’s a camera when you really need one?” Lee answered with a chuckle.
Still perplexed over what had just happened, the cop failed to notice, from the corner of his eye, the boys fleeing toward the fence, leaving him with nothing more than his frustrations while waiting for backup to arrive.
&nbs
p; Lee and Larry jumped the fence, followed by Kevin and the rest of the gang. “Once your feet hit the sand, walk, don’t run,” Larry barked at them. “If we run, we’re busted. Only the guilty run.”
With heartbeats practically pounding through their shirts, the boys speed-walked along the Lake Michigan shoreline south. Once they cleared the C. Reiss Coal Company fence line, they headed toward town, hoping like heck to make it back to the comfort and safety of the Williams family garage.
They all knew the immediate area very well. Over the past few years, they often walked along the little utility road that ran next to the coal company’s fence line as a route to and from one of their favorite Lake Michigan surf breaks. In fact, not so long ago they had enjoyed quite a bit of fun on this road, which was a favorite spot for teens looking for a quiet place to make out.
The five of them had spent an entire day with shovels digging a hole nearly twenty feet long, ten feet wide, and three and a half feet deep. When the sun was about to set, they covered their hole with broken branches and handfuls of grass and leaves. As the moon rose, spreading a soft glow on their trap, they sat off to the side in the overgrown foliage, eagerly waiting for their first victim. Knowing the earlier the arrival the more gullible the target, they couldn’t help but snicker under their collective breath when the first car pulled up only a half-hour past dusk.
“Quiet, quiet,” Kevin whispered from the lookout point. “It’s a ’55 Chevy Nomad.”
As the headlights beamed through the dust-filled clouds, Lee turned to Larry with a big grin. “We’ve got a live one on the line.”
Only the sound of the popping rocks and dirt spiraling off the Chevy’s whitewall tires drowned out the giggling from behind the bushes.
Vroom! The car bellowed as the tires lost traction but stayed suspended in midair for the briefest of moments. Breaking through the cover of broken branches and leaves, the car plopped into the hole with a loud metal-on-metal thump.
Some Like It Cold Page 7