When rescue officials arrived on the scene, they tried attaching a line to Will, who attempted to reach the five boys still bobbing above the giant lake waves every few minutes. But when the undertow started dragging him beneath the waves, Will was forced to turn back, leaving the five boys to wrestle their way through the waves on their own. Even a forty-foot Coast Guard vessel couldn’t overcome the mountainous waves in the channel and it was forced to abandon its mission. As the rescue boat’s silhouette grew faint in the distance, the surfers realized their victims were on the verge of giving up. Frustrated and desperate, Doc, Bearle, and Steve decided to make a break for it.
Swimming in as far as the undertow would let them, the three surfers swam hard for the beach, angling away from the pier. As they got close to the beach, heavy waves kept breaking their linked surfboards and victims apart. After a wave hijacked Steve’s board, snapping his leash loose, he was without a flotation device, leaving him to flounder in the choppy surf along with his victim. When Bearle and Doc got the younger Middleton brother to shore, Bearle raced out toward Steve. Struggling to stay afloat, Steve tried to hold onto on Duane Middletown with the constant onslaught of waves thrashing over them. But by the time Bearle reached Steve, Duane had disappeared into the churning cauldron of Lake Michigan.
By the time Bearle and Steve met up with Doc and Doug Middleton on shore around seven o’clock, they had spent over ninety minutes treading for their lives in fifty-degree Lake Michigan water. As the sky darkened, police fired off flares to light up the lake’s surface, but the bodies of Duane Middleton and Dan Brown were not recovered that evening.
Because of that night’s horrors, Doc Beaton began a crusade for pier safety along the Great Lakes. Lee and Larry knew about the tragedy and about Doc’s efforts in increasing pier safety.
“You received a Gold Life-Saving Medal from the Coast Guard for that, didn’t you?” Lee asked.
Doc nodded. “I’m prouder of what I’ve accomplished since,” he said. His work in improving water safety had saved countless lives. Through his collaborations with local, state, and federal officials, including a series of movies he produced with the cooperation of the US Army Corps of Engineers, he was able to educate the public about the overwhelming power of the Great Lakes—a power that on November 10, 1975, not only washed two boys off the Grand Haven pier, but also, at that exact hour, sank the giant ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior.
While walking along the Grand Haven lakefront with Doc, Lee and Larry met Oscar “Moondoggie” Wolfbrandt, who was a member of the Eastern Surfing Association’s Great Lakes District. Always looking for creative ways to get more people involved in freshwater surfing, he was responsible for organizing the Grand Haven Surfing Championships that year. In an effort to increase ESA memberships, Oscar ran contests all over Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, often spreading news of the events through his colorful newsletters, long before the days of the World Wide Web.
Oscar was quite familiar with the surfing exploits of Lee and Larry Williams after years of attending ESA competitions as the district director. At a surf contest in Sheboygan, he and his fellow judges authorized thirty-minute heats, allowing surfers to take as many waves as they wanted and scoring the top three. It was a substantial deviation from the standard United States Surfing Federation’s rules, which stated a surfer got only ten waves during a twenty-minute heat, with the best three added together for the final score.
That afternoon in Grand Haven, Lee rode over twenty waves in his half-hour heat—an unheard-of accomplishment in competitive surfing circles. Paddling hard for each wave, he’d catch one, get himself atop the board, and do as many maneuvers as he could fit in. As soon as the wave started to lose power, he’d kick out over the top of the wave, paddle back out, and spin the board around to catch the next wave. By the time the heat ended, he was exhausted, dragging his surfboard across the sand like a coffin filled with cement.
Oscar Wolfbrandt laughed in amazement. “You surf like a waterflea,” he told Lee. “Somehow you keep riding your board without ever getting off.”
Although Larry wasn’t as active in competitive surfing as his brother, he was still well known around the Great Lakes contest circuit. His lack of interest in the shortboard revolution during the late sixties prevented him from competing against surfers with boards that were designed to be shorter, lighter, and more maneuverable. Raised on longboards, Larry lacked the interest necessary to learn how to surf atop what he often referred to as a potato chip. The very aggressive shortboard style of three-second rips and slashes never felt long enough for him. He preferred to stick with the classic longboard style of long sweeping turns, nose riding, and hot-dogging by lying on his back with his hands in a prayer position for a coffin ride or crouched in a deep squat with his head between his knees with both arms outstretched in a Quasimodo. Refusing to conform his style to a shortboard, Larry continued surfing longboards, much to the chagrin of his fellow Sheboygan surfers. When folks started calling him “Longboard Larry,” the alliterative name stuck.
So it was only fitting that Oscar approached Lee “The Waterflea” and “Longboard Larry” Williams to host their own surfing event on the Great Lakes. Initially, Lee was apprehensive about taking on such a time-consuming endeavor. He had retired from competitive surfing knowing the commitment that went into organizing and coordinating an event of that magnitude. Always the optimist, Larry was intrigued. Hosting a surfing event in Sheboygan would provide him an opportunity to reconnect with his old passion, not only as a participant but as an ambassador for the sport he loved. Larry couldn’t contain the possibilities racing through his fertile imagination.
“This is our opportunity to make a difference and give something back to the surfing community,” Larry told his brother.
After a short discussion, they agreed to hold a Sheboygan surfing event the next year on Labor Day weekend. “It’s the end of the summer and the beginning of a Midwesterner’s freshwater surf season,” Larry said in explaining the odd choice of dates to Oscar. “It’s the perfect weekend to host the biggest surf party on the Great Lakes.”
Back in Sheboygan, the boys’ wives offered a lukewarm reaction to the news about the Labor Day surfing extravaganza. Barbara used Larry’s re-emerging interest in surfing to spend more time with her barhopping friends. She refused to help him in any way with the event. Mitch was a little more supportive of Lee but feared that organizing an event of such magnitude with his brother would create further stress in all of their lives.
After putting together the plan for the event, Lee and Larry faced the enormous task of broadcasting news of it across the Great Lakes through word of mouth and surfing-organization newsletters. Word spread slowly, and they received minimal feedback. To jumpstart publicity, the brothers invited many of their surfing friends and colleagues to a midwinter party, where they talked about the upcoming event. From the beginning, the Sheboygan Labor Day surf party was to be a gathering of surfers from all five of the Great Lakes, a place to share stories and photos and celebrate their passion for freshwater surfing, a passion only surfers could truly understand.
When asked if Wisconsin’s unpredictable weather could turn the Labor Day weekend into a bust, Lee began to get anxious. What if there are no waves? What if people who don’t know how to surf showed up?
“Are you kidding?” Larry reassured his brother. “Who doesn’t love spending a day at the beach?”
Even for the most casual surfer, the “Surfers Only” party would be an inexpensive investment other than the cost of a basic board, leash, and wetsuit, all of which would be nearly five hundred dollars—and which many of them already had. The waves, of course, would be free. Feeling less confident about the event’s success than he acted, Larry went to bed that Friday night before the event’s first day in 1988 hoping someone other than him and his brother would be attending the inaugural Dairyland Surf Classic the next morning.
An early Dairyland Surf Classic logo
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As dawn broke across the glassy waters of Lake Michigan, a ray of sunlight peered directly into Larry’s bedroom, awakening him. Despite suffering from a splitting headache, he rolled out of bed and ventured downstairs. With the smell of bar smoke and stale beer still in his hair, he headed to the front door to get the morning edition of the Sheboygan Press. Opening the door, he saw two Volkswagen vans, a rusty red pickup truck, and a wood-paneled station wagon, all transporting surfboards, parked in front of his house. He didn’t recognize any of the people sitting inside the vehicles.
“Hey, is this the home of the Dairyland Surf Classic?” somebody asked.
“I guess,” Larry replied, trying to shake loose the cobwebs in his head. “Cool,” the driver of the pickup truck said. “Can I use your bathroom? I just drove in from Detroit.”
Still unsure what to think about the contingent of strangers at his door, Larry said, “Up the stairs and to your left.”
Then the phone rang, reverberating inside Larry’s head like a bag of dropped marbles. He answered the call with his typical greeting of “Aloha.” The voice on the other end wanted directions.
“To get to Sheboygan from Interstate 43, just take Highway 23 east until you get wet,” he told the caller. “We’ll be there in about an hour. You can’t miss us.”
In that groggy moment, the first Dairyland Surf Classic began. No pomp. No circumstance. Just a handful of guys waiting outside Larry’s doorstep at six o’clock on a Saturday morning looking to catch Lake Michigan’s first surfable Labor Day weekend wave. For the next three days, Lee and Larry, along with twenty of their newest surfing buddies, toured the Sheboygan breaks in search of waves that, unfortunately, never seemed to materialize. Little did they realize that it was the first of many wave-challenged Labor Day weekends—an annual tradition that was rivaled only by the Surf Classic itself. The lack of waves did little to discourage the newly assembled group of surfers as they bonded, sharing their various perspectives of what surfing on the Great Lakes meant to them.
At night, the surfers lined up their boards along Larry’s garage and grilled hamburgers and brats. As the beer flowed from the keg stashed in the corner of the backyard, the surfing stories grew more boastful and adventurous. With all the surfers staying at Larry’s house, the beds and couch were quickly claimed, leaving most of the guests curled up on the floor alongside the fireplace. Some brought tents and pitched them on the front lawn.
Mornings were spent recovering with a healthy cocktail of coffee, eggs, orange juice, more brats, and a handful of aspirin. The hardcore types washed it all down with beer. Lee’s daily “Dawn Patrol” included four cups of coffee and four eggs neatly wrapped around four hot dogs. Whenever a guest asked why he covered his breakfast in salt, Lee replied with annoyance, “Would you disrupt the washing machine if your clothes were getting cleaned every morning?”
Following another day of minimal waves on Lake Michigan, the Dairyland Surf Classic on Sunday night became an unofficial film festival as everyone gathered around the living room television to watch all the hippest surf movies. Classics such as Morning of the Earth, Storm Riders, and Blazing Boards never seemed to grow tiresome as the Great Lakes surfers relished the outlandish surfing exploits immortalized by many of their Hawaiian and Californian wave-riding icons such as Miki Dora, Greg Noll, David Nuuhiwa, George Greenough, and Daniel “Mr. Boogie” Kaimi.
While those films served as colorful conversation starters, the first highlight of the evening came from Oscar-nominated Bruce Brown, who had combined his two passions—surfing and filmmaking—into visual and narrative storytelling with his epic The Endless Summer. The film was originally screened on the beach city surf circuit in 1964, two years before it became a general release. As mentioned earlier, The Endless Summer chronicled Californian surfers Robert August and Mike Hynson as they traveled the world for three months in search of the perfect wave. Its theme—if someone had enough time and money, he could follow summer around the world, thus making it endless—reached both its core surfing audience and mainstream America. Playing against the traditionally stiff and formal documentaries of the era, The Endless Summer became widely recognized as both a cultural and commercial success, setting the bar that all surfing movies in the future would try to reach.
Another mandatory film at that first Dairyland Surf Classic was the coming-of-age movie Big Wednesday. Set within the romantic surf lifestyle in Malibu during the 1960s, the film was both a critical and box office disappointment. Pulled from theaters after grossing an underwhelming $4.5 million, the film starred William Katt, Gary Busey, and Jan-Michael Vincent as party-loving surf heroes who are forced to face the adult realities of friendship, love, marriage, war, and death between the summer of 1962 and the Great Swell of 1974. It wasn’t until the movie was released on home video that it became a cult favorite, reaching its niche audience of surfers—including Lee and Larry Williams—who related to the three main characters despite living over two thousand miles away from the movie’s Southern California setting.
To add authenticity to the movie, world champion surfers Jay Riddle, Peter Townend, Ian Cairns, Billy Hamilton, Bruce Raymond, and Jackie Dunn appeared as stunt performers to execute the black diamond runs. Captured by legendary surfing cinematographers, including Bud Browne, the surfing sequences had an exciting pace that had never been featured in a mainstream surfing movie before. The action scenes left Larry Williams’ living room abuzz with excitement.
When Gerry Lopez, who was considered the world’s best tube rider, made his cameo appearance in the film, the room fell silent. Although he was chosen by director John Milius to bring closure to the aging characters’ surfing life, Lopez had already been responsible for single-handedly ushering in the shortboard revolution after winning the prestigious Pipeline Masters competition in 1972 and 1973. Spending the better part of the next two decades designing boards that allowed surfers to survive the vertical drops and thick tubes of Pipeline, Lopez also became one of the first surfers to sponsor team riders with free boards, in part because they didn’t have the money to buy them. His legacy was not lost on any of those in attendance at the Dairyland Surf Classic that first year.
“He can sponsor me anytime,” Kevin Groh said. “I’ve always been a charity case on the waves.”
“Bro, could you even fathom what you’d say if you actually met him?” Larry asked.
“I can’t imagine what it would be like to be recognized, wherever you were in the world, by surfers wanting to shake your hand,” Lee said.
Appearing in the finale of Big Wednesday, Lopez rides with an elegance and style all his own. In the film, he represents the next generation of surfers who are taking the place of Katt, Busey, and Vincent’s characters as they prepare to go their separate ways. While watching Lopez’s relentless conquering of another wall of water, Vincent’s character comments, “Lopez. He’s as good as they always said he was.”
Busey’s character solemnly responds, “So were we.”
All the aging surfers in the room could relate to that sentiment. It was the perfect conclusion to the first Dairyland Surf Classic, and everyone in the room demanded that Lee and Larry promise to hold it again next year.
What began as an excuse to reunite a bunch of buddies to surf, swap stories, watch movies, and drink beer doubled in size the next year. As word spread outside of the Great Lakes surfing community, folks from California, Canada, and even Hawaii arrived in hopes of testing the big waves on the big lake. Recognizing the public’s growing interest in freshwater surfing, over the next few years Larry began doing interviews for local radio and newspaper reporters, promoting Sheboygan as “The Malibu of the Midwest.” He tried to dispel the stereotypes about hardcore surfers defending their turf against outsiders and newbies.
“In Sheboygan we’d sooner lend you our board and teach you how to surf,” he’d say, “since the odds are pretty good that within two minutes of meeting one of us, we’d be friends. And you’d be even more p
opular if you brought beer.”
Local media outlets, which originally covered the Dairyland Surf Classic as a curiosity, started to realize the attitude surrounding Sheboygan surfing was changing. As soon as the Sheboygan and Wisconsin boards of tourism started promoting the event with billboards, paid advertisements, and feature articles, the Sheboygan surf scene began earning respect.
The new popularity, however, seemed to taint the Dairyland Surf Classic’s innocence. Instead of Lee and Larry knowing everyone who came, they noticed dozens of surfers who didn’t smile or wave at them. More and more tourists visited, leaving their candy bar wrappers and empty cigarette packs behind as proof of their attendance. To see the surfers in action, groups of inlanders walked out onto Sheboygan’s mile-long pier. While wipeouts were still the big subject of post-surfing conversation, there was a deeper fear that the event’s exclusiveness was dying in the eyes of some of the wave riders.
The traditionalists grew frustrated. What had started out as a celebration of why they loved surfing in the first place—the opportunity to be individuals and avoid the status quo—was turning out to be the “in” thing to do. No longer interested in participating in the spectacle that the Dairyland Surf Classic had become, some traditionalists refused to attend. Although sympathetic to these concerns, Lee and Larry vowed to continue organizing Surf Classics as the ultimate showcase of freshwater surfing. They had created something special and, in their own way, had begun to make a difference, just as they had always dreamed they would do when they were starting out. Future generations of Great Lakes surfers would enjoy what they had created. They also focused on teaching two members of those future generations—their sons Tanner and Trevor.
Chapter Seven
Some Like It Cold Page 13