Then he clenched his fists and turned around again. He walked up to Mitch, took her by the hand, and looked past her eyes directly into her soul, and said, “Let’s go,” with the same confident determination he felt whenever riding atop Lake Michigan waves.
Without even acknowledging her date, Mitch got up and left with Lee, the two of them heading into the frigid Sheboygan night and the rest of their lives.
Over the next few months, friends and family rarely saw Lee. As soon as he graduated from high school in 1972, he began working at a locally owned family grocery store. Doing everything from stocking shelves to wrapping pork chops at the meat counter, he knew he had found a job that catered not only to his passion for surfing, but also to the love of his life. When not working, he spent the majority of his time with Mitch as their relationship continued to flourish.
Feeling snubbed, Larry avoided conversations about his brother.
When friends mentioned Lee—or when Jack and Mary brought up his name at the family dinner table (where Lee rarely was seen these days)—Larry said nothing, pretending not to hear. Distancing himself from Lee and Mitch, Larry spent his time with a handful of surfing buddies who had yet to leave for college. Avoiding questions about why his twin wasn’t on the beach with them, he ignored his feelings of abandonment, saying only, “He seems to have better things to do with his time.”
The summer of 1974 was filled with backyard barbecues and lakeside cookouts in the Bratwurst Capital of the World. Hardly a weekend passed, rain or shine, without the smell of charcoal smoke filling the air as every charitable, religious, and team fund-raising group in Sheboygan sponsored a brat fry, which had nothing to do with frying the meat and everything to do with grilling it. But none could compete with the pomp and circumstance surrounding the granddaddy of them all, Sheboygan’s Bratwurst Days.
Lee and Larry took great pride in their hometown’s most famous export, the homemade bratwurst. Usually called a brat—which rhymes with hot—the German sausage is made in a variety of flavors using beef, pork, or veal that is finely chopped and poured into a sausage casing along with spices. Sometimes milk or beer is added for flavoring. It was made popular in Sheboygan in the 1920s, where every butcher shop boasted its own special recipe. The brat’s popularity quickly spread throughout the region. It gained national attention in the early 1950s when it was served at Milwaukee Braves’ baseball games. By the end of the decade it had become a backyard favorite throughout the country.
In 1974, brats could still be found hanging in a handful of old-fashioned butcher shop windows around town. The Sheboygan Brat Days festival had outgrown its modest origins from over twenty years before, and overflow crowds could sample from nearly fifty beer and brat stands that lined the downtown district’s sidewalks. But for the first time since they were teenagers, the Williams twins wouldn’t be attending the festivities together. Larry decided to go with his friends after a morning surf session, and Lee wouldn’t arrive until later that afternoon when Mitch finished tending to her garden.
As a local band played a polka version of “Come Fry With Me” in front of the Sheboygan post office, Larry stepped away from the tent with a beer in one hand and his first brat of the day in the other. The brat’s buttery juices began dribbling out of the hard roll and down onto his shirt just as he was about to devour it. He couldn’t help but chuckle, “Looks like I just got my Brat Days souvenir.”
Instead of using a napkin to clean up the mess, Larry wiped his greasy face with a shirtsleeve. He took a long swig from his towering glass of amber-hued Huber beer and saw Lee and Mitch walking toward him. After they exchanged some awkward pleasantries, Lee announced to the group of mutual friends, “We’re getting married.” Holding Mitch’s hand, Lee asked Larry, “Will you be the best man?”
Without a pause, Larry said, “No. You’re too young to get married.”
Silence fell over the group as everyone felt embarrassed. Larry took a drink of beer and added, “And I won’t be standing up in your wedding either.”
“Why not?” Lee asked.
“Because I don’t like the bitch you’re marrying.”
Mitch burst out crying and hurried away into the sea of people at the festival.
Taking a deep breath, Lee extended his hand as if he were a politician still hoping to solicit a vote on the campaign trail. “I appreciate your honesty,” he said.
The brothers shook hands. Around them, their friends stood in stunned silence, waiting for the brothers to bust out laughing, admitting it was all a joke.
“That’s it,” Larry sneered. “Do I need to explain myself further?”
Larry’s behavior didn’t go over well with his friends, who all said, in their own way, “That ain’t cool, Larry.”
Refusing to admit he was out of line, Larry walked away, leaving Lee behind with their friends as the polka band started up “Roll Out the Barrel.”
For the next year, Larry and Mitch tried to be civil when forced to be together at family functions, but they always managed to find a reason to argue over the most mundane topics. So it was no surprise that on April 12, 1975, Lee and Mitch were married with Larry sitting amongst the guests rather than standing in the wedding party. Moving into a modest two-story house on the east side of town, the newlyweds were just three blocks from the beach. The life Lee Williams had dreamt about while courting Mitch during high school had become a reality. He was about to grow old with the woman of his dreams and couldn’t have been happier.
Larry had quite a different perspective on life after high school. Following his 1973 graduation, he spent little time focusing on the future and most of it living in the present. As a nineteen-year-old living at home rent-free, Larry had a lot of independence from his parents, who only required him to abide by two simple rules: “Go to work every day—no excuses. And when we get up in the morning, your car better be in the driveway, regardless of how late you were out the night before.”
His weekdays were spent behind the wheel of eighty-ton locomotives at the Kohler Company, transporting across the factory compound loads of vitreous china clay, which would be manufactured into various plumbing implements and toilets. He found himself with his pockets full of “adult money” and lots of free time to spend it, which he did, usually at bars and social clubs in the area. As one of Sheboygan’s more notoriously eligible bachelors, he measured relationships in weeks and months instead of years, riding the social cyclone of being a serial dater.
Larry didn’t fall head-over-heels in love until he met his feminine equivalent, a fellow serial dater with a temper and sarcastic wit to match his own. They met at a bar on Sheboygan’s Michigan Avenue. After he offended her with one of his typical boozeinduced comments, she slapped him as hard as she could across the face. He was impressed with her fiery attitude. She was impressed that after she hit him he didn’t let one ounce from the two beers he was holding hit the ground. From that moment forward, Larry and Barbara were attracted to one another.
Their relationship caught fire and grew quickly. They got engaged on her birthday, November 6, 1976. Less than a year later, on his birthday, November 5, 1977, they got married. “It’ll be neat having a wife whose birthday is the day after mine,” Larry joked at the wedding. “After celebrating my birthday, we can celebrate our hangover on hers.”
Larry made surfing less and less of a priority in his life. Barbara wanted to move inland, which meant Larry would be living away from the water for the first time, and he found surfing to be more of a hassle. He blamed the inconvenience of driving across town for his declining attendance at the beach. Following the birth of their son, Tanner, in 1980, Larry took a break from surfing altogether, concentrating his free time on being a father and husband at home when he wasn’t working ten hours a day at Kohler. Refocusing his passion toward earning a black belt, he found himself at martial arts class two or three times a day, seven days a week.
Larry drifted away from his friends at the beach. The sight of his lo
ngboard hanging from his garage rafters, covered in a thick layer of dust, would always spark a snarky remark from Lee, who would tell him, “Surfing is like the mob, bro. Once you’re in, you can’t get out.”
Brushing off the comment, Larry would claim he was focused on more important things in life. It’s been said that every surfer becomes a habitual wave watcher, and Larry realized the truth of that statement. Surfing was part of his identity. When dressed in Kohler Company-issued coveralls and steering one of the cranes or eighty-ton diesel locomotives, he found himself peering out the cab window toward the water. When heading home after a martial arts class, Larry would drive along Lake Shore Drive, inhaling the fresh mist. After an argument with Barb, he found his emotions cooled down quickest when he went to the beach, which had become his place of solitude, a haven for his most intimate thoughts and feelings.
While Larry tried to find peace among the waves, his brother was busy cutting them up. Lee had become a self-possessed competitive surfer in his early twenties. He surfed to win, placing in every surfing competition he entered. At first glance, his small physique, twenty-eight-inch waist, and exposed ribs didn’t evoke the image of a champion surfer, especially since he was competing against bigger kids with better gear. But as soon as he began riding a wave, his graceful, laid-back, classic style won over the judges every time. After earning his first-place trophy on the infamous day he first met Mitch, he began to enter more contests, saying, “I just want to make sure last year wasn’t a fluke.” In two years, he collected twelve trophies. After that success, he walked away on his own terms, believing he had nothing left to prove.
Lee’s next challenge was parenthood. He and Mitch welcomed their son, Trevor, into the world on March 18, 1979. Lee enjoyed being a father. When he wasn’t working at the grocery store, he spent most of his time at home—helping with diapers and midnight feedings, and often spending Friday nights alone with the baby so Mitch could complete her bachelor’s degree.
Trevor with Mitch after she received her master’s degree
He also became obsessed with his yard. He bathed the lawn with fertilizer and water the moment the spring thaw melted away the snow. He pampered it with an elaborate sprinkler system that ran twice daily. With the enthusiasm of a child, he edged and mowed on a weekly basis—twice a week during the height of summer. If his neighbors Ben and Rosie Goltry didn’t mow their lawn often enough, Lee would say, “You can borrow my lawnmower any time, Ben.”
Either from living next to a lawn-mowing overachiever or from a growing sense of competition, the neighbors began cutting their lawn more often. Ben and Lee were constantly trimming maverick blades of grass that became too long or were growing outside their respective boundaries. Summer after summer, the dueling masters of the mower kept pace with one another, creating a contest nobody could seem to win but could very easily lose.
For the next decade, their wives often sat together on one of the front porches with beers in hand, gawking at their husbands’ outfits. Ben often dressed in plaid Bermuda shorts and a t-shirt, covered in grass and oil stains. Lee sported a tank top and skintight white shorts, exposing his scrawny legs. When bending over, Lee provided quite the eye-candy for the ladies, revealing his pasty white underside. “Hey, Lee!” Mitch would heckle. “Those manly Daisy Dukes of yours sure can make an honest girl blush!”
It’s not surprising that he was working on the lawn when Larry stopped by one day in the middle of summer in need of some brotherly advice.
“Where’s Mitch?” Larry said.
“Inside with Trevor, baking Fourth of July cookies,” Lee replied.
“What’s up with you?”
Larry shrugged.
“And since when do you care where Mitch is?”
“Just need to talk,” Larry said.
Unsure what his brother needed to talk about, Lee said, “Okay.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever make Barbara happy,” Larry blurted out. “She still envisions us in some sort of perfect relationship model that is impossible to attain. I’m trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, but she’s always blaming me because she can’t have it all.”
“Doesn’t sound good,” Lee said.
“Then she just up and leaves us a couple of times a year for two or even six weeks at a time. She eventually comes back home, but that just isn’t right.”
Lee gave a low whistle. They stood in front of the house for another minute in silence. He was about to offer his brother a beer when Larry started up again. “I mean, marriages have problems—whose doesn’t? But I never filed them under divorce. I always thought we were just working through the mountains and valleys and that we’d eventually recover.”
Lee nodded, not quite sure what to do. He had rarely seen his brother so emotional.
Larry struggled to share his next thought, holding back a sob. “I don’t think she’s coming back this time. I could see it in her eyes.”
“Being home alone won’t do you any good,” Lee said. “You have two options. One, you and Tanner can hang out here at my house and watch the room temperature dip below freezing while you and Mitch try to carry on a civil conversation, or. … ”—he pulled a folded piece of paper from the back pocket of his grassstained shorts—“I got this flyer in the mail the other day and was wondering if you’d be interested in carpooling with me.”
Larry scanned the paper, which announced the 1987 Great Lakes Surfing Championships in Grand Haven, Michigan. “I don’t know,” he said, hesitating. “I’ve been out of the water for four years and don’t have any real intentions of going back. I’m in a different place now.”
“C’mon,” Lee coaxed. “I was there last year and it was a lot of fun. I think you could use some ‘me’ time! Tanner can stay here with Mitch and Trevor.”
Larry snickered and broke into a smile. “Only if you promise to buy all my beer.”
As soon as Lee and Larry pulled into the Grand Haven beach public parking lot, they had an unobstructed view of the area’s renowned surf breaks and sandy beaches. Catching their immediate attention was one of the largest collections of surfboards they had ever seen, lined up in the sand like a surfer’s homage to Easter Island.
“Now this is epic,” Larry exclaimed. “This view alone was worth the six hours of driving.”
For the next five minutes, the brothers stood alongside their car, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of Lake Michigan’s eastern shore until one of the locals noticed their out-of-state license plates.
“You wouldn’t happen to be from Sheboygan?” the guy asked.
“Actually, we are,” Larry said.
“How’s the surfing over there? Is it for real?”
Another eager teenager jumped on top of his friend’s question. “Tell us about how big the waves get over there. I bet they’re some real heavies.”
The conversation kicked off the weekend in which the brothers served as ambassadors for the Sheboygan surfing scene. When walking along Grand Haven’s renowned Rock Pile to watch some local surfers launching off the pier with boards in hand, they came upon an older gentleman dressed in a wetsuit, a longboard under his arm. The boys recognized his slicked-back, salt-and-pepper hair and thick, dripping-wet beard immediately.
“Are the waves working for you today?” Larry asked.
“Yeah, they’re curling,” the guy replied, looking toward the horizon. “Where you boys from?”
“Sheboygan,” they said in unison.
The guy extended his hand. “I’m Bob Beaton, but my friends call me Doc.”
Lee and Larry were very aware of Doc Beaton—a living legend among freshwater surfers. He was a lifelong surfer who caught his first Lake Michigan wave as a teenager back when his father was one of the original surfers on the Great Lakes. But his reputation as a wave rider was preceded by his decade-long dedication as an advocate for pier safety, which stemmed from his role in one of Grand Haven’s most horrific tragedies.
It occurred during the early
evening hours of Monday, November 10, 1975, when sixteen-year-old Dan Brown was washed off the south side of the pier by a breaking wave. His friend, Duane Middleton, jumped in after him, but a vicious riptide pulled both of them farther out into the lake. Because of poor visibility, Duane lost sight of Dan, leaving Duane to try to swim back to the pier alone, where his older brother Douglas was waiting.
Doug lay down flat on the pier and reached out toward Duane, but a wave knocked him into the churning waters below, leaving all three boys wave-tossed by the forces of a heavy north wind, gusting at times up to forty miles per hour.
After surfing the big ten-foot waves most of the day, Doc, along with his younger brother, Will, and their friends Bearle Eastling and Steve White, were carrying their surfboards down the Grand Haven pier when they saw the three boys flailing in the nearby waters. Knowing that the life expectancy of a person washed off a pier into six- to eight-foot waves was less than seven minutes, the surfers acted swiftly. Bearle dove into the water first, using his board to swim out to the Middleton brothers. Doc and Steve were right behind him as the raging fourteen-foot waves and treacherous rip currents wreaked havoc on their rescue efforts. Able to reach the two boys in less than a minute, the surfers kept them afloat by linking their surfboards. Together they paddled toward shore, fighting the current with each stroke.
As the sun dipped below the Grand Haven skyline, the temperature plummeted, bringing with it the early stages of hypothermia. The three rescuers kept trying to swim back to the pier with their victims in tow, only to be pulled away by another set of thundering waves. Will shouted encouragement from shore as Doc, Bearle, and Steve strained to bring the two boys within twenty yards of the pier. Each time they got close, an aggressive rip current along the pier’s south side sucked them back out into open waters, forcing them to circle back again and again.
Some Like It Cold Page 12