Some Like It Cold

by William Povletich

  When Lee started suffering panic attacks, he began working more hours at the grocery store. That left Larry to run more errands, bringing back groceries or picking up specialized medical linens from the laundry service. Since he was spending more time with Mitch, often heading straight to the house after work, they decided to shove aside years of disagreements and soon found the humor in their years of squabbles. While talking about the future, they both knew how much they needed each other—if not for each other, then for Lee and Trevor. “The saddest thing is that I won’t be able to watch my family grow old,” she’d tell Larry. “Nothing made me happier than watching my boys smile.”

  Mitch knew her body was succumbing to the cancer, but she refused to let it compromise her spirit. While watching Lee prepare her daily chemical concoction of painkillers, she decided she wanted to do something fun during her Friday night alone with her husband. “Hon,” she said, “I want to watch you surf again.”

  “It’s dark out,” he said. “Plus, how are we going to get you to the beach?”

  She shook her head. “No. I want to watch you surf when you were young. When you were the man I fell in love with.”

  Lee paused, wiping a tear from his eye. Setting down the bottle in his hand, he walked over to the bookcase. Finding a VHS tape labeled with nothing more than a title scribbled in magic marker over a torn-off piece of masking tape, he placed it into the VCR and pressed the play button. Turning the television so Mitch could see the entire screen, he sat next to her as they watched his old Super 8 surfing films from 1968. As he gently held her hand, he wished the night would go on forever.

  Michele Williams died on June 20, 2001. She was forty-eight.

  The visitation room at the funeral parlor was alive with color from numerous floral bouquets and dozens of enlarged personal photos of a young and vibrant Mitch—each as spectacular as the next. While assembling the visual love letter to celebrate his beloved wife’s life, Lee made the pictures even more powerful and poignant when he read the eulogy, which he wrote in her words. Anyone listening to it would’ve thought she had written it herself as she proceeded to thank all the people who had come into her life and to share how much they each meant to her. At the end of the service, Lee stood tall, staying composed as a long line of people offered him condolences. The entire time, he did not cry as attendees shared their favorite memories of Mitch.

  Walking up to his brother, Larry reached out and pulled him in for a hug. When Lee let out one long howling sob that echoed throughout the entire funeral home, he at last revealed the amount of sorrow he felt. It was a display of pain Lee would never show again in public. He had to be strong and carry on, if not for himself, then for Trevor.

  Following Mitch’s funeral, Lee began working long hours at the grocery store, trying to redirect his grief. The thought of being alone with his thoughts was terrifying, so there wasn’t an overtime shift he wouldn’t offer to cover. “There’s nothing for me to go home to,” he’d tell his boss. Spending nearly one hundred hours a week at the store, he made sure to be working straight through the Fourth of July weekend, refusing to even acknowledge it as a holiday. He even stopped returning calls from Larry, who was reluctantly organizing the upcoming Surf Classic on his own. Lee exchanged every free moment in his life for more hours of stocking shelves and displaying produce until his brother showed up at the grocery store toward the end of July.

  Confronting Lee with their mutual responsibilities regarding the upcoming surf event, he said, “Look, I need your help. Kerry is pregnant, and I can’t pull the Dairyland together by myself.”

  “Kerry’s pregnant? Are you sure it’s yours?” Lee joked. “You know you’re pushing fifty.”

  “Oh yeah, it’s mine,” the future papa bragged. “Kerry says the baby is already doing barrel rolls in her tummy. Definitely a surfer.”

  Lee felt happy for the first time in months. “Well, I guess cutting back my schedule here to help you with the Dairyland might be a good idea,” Lee said. “It probably wouldn’t hurt if I found my way back into the water as well.”

  Lee started spending more time at Larry’s house coordinating the upcoming Labor Day event. It served as the perfect distraction for the grieving widower as they sat at the kitchen table less than a week before the Dairyland Surf Classic’s kickoff.

  “Have we contacted the Sheboygan Board of Tourism yet?” Larry asked, going through the final checklist to see what had yet to be done.

  Lee nodded. “And the Wisconsin Board of Tourism too,” he added.

  Both were aware of the looming irony. The surfing journey they had been on through the past forty years had begun arcing into a full circle. The respect they craved from their hometown as rebellious, adolescent surfers willing to push the limits of society’s patience in the sixties had manifested itself into a working relationship with the mayor, local politicians, and the Sheboygan Chamber of Commerce, who now helped to promote the positive aspects of surfing. Public safety officials asked for their help when addressing the rip currents and pier safety problems that, like many communities along the Great Lakes, plagued Sheboygan. With the cooperation of civic, state, and federal officials, the Williams brothers helped develop and place water safety signage around all of Sheboygan’s most populated waterways.

  Despite the numerous posted warnings about the treacherous rip currents and other Lake Michigan water hazards, a young boy playing in waisthigh water was pulled out into open waters, drowning as a result of a rip current. Following the boy’s funeral, the mayor asked Lee and Larry if they could help bring further awareness to the city’s drowning-prevention program. For them, it was an opportunity to give back to a community and the natural resource they had loved all their lives. Larry, never one to shy away from a large crowd, began speaking at schools about the dangers of swimming alone. Lee spent his free weekends filling out grant applications so even more signs could be posted along the shoreline about the dangers of rip currents.

  Knowing they wouldn’t have many free moments in the upcoming week with all that had yet to be coordinated for the Surf Classic, Larry set down his pen and said to Lee, “Let’s go for a surf.”

  Paddling out together, the Williams brothers straddled their boards as a set of six- to eight-foot waves rolled in. Positioned nearly fifty yards beyond the Elbow, Lee anticipated the arrival of the next big wave while noticing an out-of-towner to his left. As the wave began to curl, Lee took it on, balancing himself just outside the impact zone. Realizing the out-of-towner was about to pass underneath him, he pulled up the nose of his board as the wave passed. The maneuver left Lee exposed as the top of the wave pitched him, catapulting him down the growling wave. While somersaulting down, drilling deeper under the water, he watched his wetsuit boots flip past. Just as he was about to surface, his board spanked him on the head. Scrambling for his board, he was able to clear his eyes long enough to see the second wave in the set smack him with the clout of a European bullet train.

  Unable to surface, Lee was now drinking Lake Michigan instead of breathing air. Despite the adrenaline pumping through his veins, he couldn’t orient himself between the surface and lake bottom. Drilled by another wave, despite still being submerged, Lee somersaulted again, sensing he was even farther from the surface as everything got darker.

  Out of desperation, he stopped struggling and let his body go limp, letting gravity show him the way. As he sank toward the soft Sheboygan Bay sand, he flailed his arms and legs trying to find the surface. When his head popped out of the water, Larry was almost on top of him, still straddling his board.

  “Looks like you took a little beating,” Larry said with a smile. “Lake Michigan sure knew how to welcome you back.”

  Lee couldn’t speak, coughing and spitting out as much lake water as he could. Riding the next wave into shore on his broken surfboard, Lee was soon joined by his brother. “Mother Nature sure knows how to put us in our place,” Larry declared. “Of course, only the good die young.”


  “Yeah, and those sixteen minutes I’ve got on you just saved my life,” Lee chimed.

  As they took a moment for Lee to catch his breath and assess the damage to his surfboard, Larry said, “It’s nice to have you back, bro.”

  “It’s good to be back,” Lee replied.

  That would be the last time Lee and Larry had an opportunity to put their feet in the water as they spent the next week working an intense schedule of radio, television, and newspaper interviews while planning and coordinating the final details of the Surf Classic.

  And their hard work paid off. Everyone agreed the 2001 Dairyland Surf Classic was the best one yet. The Saturday afternoon paddleboard competitions were decided by highly contested photo finishes, the skies were blue, the eighty-degree temperature was humidity-free, and the warm breeze blew away all the pesky mosquitoes. And, of course, there was plenty of cold beer to go around.

  Following the annual potluck dinner that night, the brothers gathered around a bright and snapping bonfire in Larry’s backyard with their group of surfing friends, all of whom tried to give Lee a little extra support in light of what he had lost in the past year.

  “Where’s that broken-down surfboard of yours?” Lester Priday asked in his thick Australian accent. “I’ve got a great way to fix it up. Nothing a pyre of flames can’t solve.”

  “The board’s still salvageable,” Lee replied. “Plus, I can’t afford to buy a new one.”

  The burning of Lee’s prized surfboard

  Lee’s lack of cooperation prompted Lester to pull the surfboard from behind the picnic bench he was sitting on. The group of slightly intoxicated men began chanting, “Burn it! Burn it! Burn it!”

  “Calm them down,” Lee told Larry. “They can’t take my board away from me.”

  “It’s not fixable,” Larry said.

  “Yes it is,” Lee barked.

  Knowing his brother was as frugal as he was stubborn, Larry tried flattery: “You really deserve a new board. Not some outdated, chipped clunker.”

  Larry turned to Lester, looking for some sort of acknowledgment. Lester turned to Lee, then at the board and back at Lee. “Let’s burn it, mate!”

  “If it’ll make you happy,” Lee mustered as he finished his beer.

  As the board was passed over the crowd toward the bonfire, Lee watched his fiberglass companion receive a burial fitting a fallen Viking hero, except instead of being cremated at sea, the board met its fate in the middle of a Sheboygan subdivision.

  Lunging the surfboard onto the crest of the burning bonfire, Lester shouted at the top of his lungs, “To new beginnings!”

  The group cheered, “To new beginnings!”

  Lee knew it was time to embrace the technology offered to surfers today. He browsed surfboard suppliers from around the globe via the Internet and realized how far the retail merchandising of surfing had evolved since he had purchased his first shellacked piece of ten-foot-long marine plywood out of a Sheboygan garage for twenty-five dollars. He could not only find a state-of-the-art shortboard that featured an improved rail curve, tail design, and bottom contour, but also view all 360 degrees of the board before purchasing it—a far cry from the grainy, black-and-white mail-order forms shoehorned into the back pages of those 1960s surfing magazines.

  The Internet also gave Lee and Larry the opportunity to post an invitation to the upcoming 2002 Dairyland Surf Classic on the Sheboygan Chamber of Commerce’s Web site and to send out emails to all their friends about the weekend’s schedule. One announcement that wasn’t included concerned the newest addition to the Sheboygan surf scene—Larry and Kerry’s newborn daughter, Madhury “Mady” Lake Williams, whose name was inspired by the Sanskrit word for “sweet.” Between her dad and uncle, everyone knew it would be only a matter of time before she was fitted for her first wetsuit and balanced atop her first surfboard, most likely within days of taking her first steps. As Larry and Kerry passed Mady to her proud uncle and cousin, Lee and Trevor, she cooed and gurgled on cue, bringing joy to their hearts, which had been so badly treated in that terrible year. Mady brought hope and laughter and made them feel alive again. For Larry, life had come full circle. Mady’s birth reminded him how precious life was and how blessed he was to have a second chance at parenthood—a chance he looked forward to taking again.

  Larry, Kerry, and Mady in 2007

  The next summer, in August 2003, Step into Liquid was released in theaters across the United States. Immediately embraced by the surfing community, the film premiered in subsequent months throughout Canada, Asia, and Europe, quickly becoming an international hit. Dana Brown’s film captured not only some of the most incredible surfing footage ever brought to the screen, but also captured the intoxicating power surfing has over people’s souls. Although many of the world’s top professional surfers appeared in the film—including Kelly Slater, Keala Kennelly, Rob Machado, Layne Beachley, and Taj Burrow—theater audiences seemed to connect most with Lee and Larry Williams and their thickly accented Sconnie surfer-speak.

  “I can’t even begin to count how many of our friends from California and Hawaii walked out of the theater mimicking our pronunciation of stoked,” Lee told a Chicago Tribune reporter.

  Since that year’s Dairyland Surf Classic was only a couple weeks away, Lee and Larry were bombarded with a larger-thanusual list of media requests, a salute to their new celebrity status. Although they were excited that the film gave Sheboygan credibility among surfers worldwide, they couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed that their segment portrayed them as more tonguein-cheek than they’d have liked, leaving them to defend some of their comments, which were pulled out of context. “I still stand behind the statement,” Larry said defensively to a local television reporter, “that we do have barrels so big you can hide a Volkswagen in them.”

  When one reporter asked them if they were surfing legends, Lee and Larry realized how the movie had placed them into the pop culture lexicon of surfing. “We’re uncomfortable with it, but flattered,” Lee admitted.

  “When you talk about surfing legends, you’ve got Duke Kahanamoku, Miki Dora, and Gregg Noll,” Larry added. “Then there’s Gerry Lopez, the pipeline master himself. How are Larry and Lee Williams mentioned in with those names?”

  When asked about their legacy in surfing, Larry paused for a moment. “Giving more than we took,” he answered. He mentioned nothing about Lee’s closet full of trophies or his own celebrity status as the face of the Dairyland Surf Classic. “The best surfers do it all the time,” Larry continued. “If you have a good attitude, share your good attitude by sharing a ride or a bar of wax or zipping the back zipper on somebody’s wetsuit.”

  Step into Liquid movie poster COURTESY OF EVERETT COLLECTION

  “If you want to define that as our legacy, that’s more important to us than ever being considered a legend,” Lee concluded.

  The acclaim Lee and Larry received from their appearance in Step into Liquid made them recognizable even among casual surfing fans. From folks in their neighborhood supermarket to fans in places far from Sheboygan, they had become a viable part of the international surfing scene. Their faces seemed to be everywhere, with everyone from old high school girlfriends and surfing buddies to distant family members reaching out to reconnect with them now that they had become famous.

  When Larry’s doorbell rang early on a Saturday morning during the summer of 2006, he was a little taken aback when what looked like a teenage boy stood at the door, nervously rubbing his hands together. “Are you Larry Williams?” he asked as his voice cracked.

  “Yeah,” he replied.

  “Great. I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time.” The young man paused just as Larry cut him off.

  “You’re not going to tell me I’m your father, are you?” Larry asked.

  “No. No. No. I’m Aaron Levanduski,” he replied with a smile. “I’m one of the boys you saved on the pier fifteen years ago.”

  Larry was stunned. All he could muster wa
s, “Really!”

  The boy nodded. “I saw your picture in the paper because of your movie,” he said while becoming visibly choked up. “And I never really thanked you for saving my life.”

  As the young man’s eyes misted, Larry didn’t know what to say.

  “We’d like to have a barbecue in your honor,” Aaron offered. “I’d like you to meet my mom, my grandma, my grandpa, and my wife to be.”

  “Absolutely,” Larry obliged. “It would be an honor.”

  That weekend, Larry met Aaron’s extended family. As they celebrated the anniversary of Larry’s rescue efforts on the pier, it became a tearful reunion as family members, one by one, thanked Larry for his unselfish heroics. Making sure to deflect the attention back onto Aaron, he was just happy the kid took advantage of the opportunity to become an upstanding citizen with hopes of venturing off to college. When wrapping his arms around Aaron and his fiancée for a final photograph, Larry felt a sense of peace from knowing he had made a significant difference in somebody’s life and that Aaron was making the most of it.

  Lee was not recognized as often as Larry but he, too, experienced some surprising encounters. As a volunteer during the 2004 PGA Championship at the nearby Whistling Straits Golf Course, he was tending to the practice green when a gentleman approached him with the all-too-familiar, “Aren’t you one of those brothers from Step into Liquid?”

  Since he was surrounded by the likes of Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and some of the most famous names in golf history, Lee didn’t quite know what to think as the man walked directly toward him across the putting green, dodging numerous golf balls. “I’ve got to get your autograph for my daughter,” the man insisted. Lee stepped off the green, trying not to bring attention to himself.