Michael Williams loved loud shirts, hunting for mineral mines, teaching science and playing the tuba.
When friends and relatives gathered for his memorial service, they got a taste of it all.
Two bands played, people were encouraged to wear Hawaiian shirts and high schoolers put Mentos in Diet Cokes to produce some explosions. Luckily, the event was on the high school football field.
Williams collapsed and died on a geology field trip May 5 in Arches National Park in Utah. His students found a nurse, who tried unsuccessfully to revive him. Williams, who was 55, died of a heart attack, said his wife, Felicie Williams.
Michael Williams taught high school science classes at Fruita- Monument High School near Fruita.
But to students he was more than that. He was a friend they could talk to, someone who challenged them and made them think about things beyond the classroom.
“He got us to question things and was so enthusiastic about life,” said Carmen Winn of Grand Junction.
“He always wanted us to re-evaluate our ideas and assumptions,” said Travis Winn, now a student at the University of Oregon and brother of Carmen Winn.
Always interested in what students were thinking and doing, “We had to trick him into talking about himself,” Travis Winn said.
Williams was a geologist and spent several years doing mineral explorations, often with his wife, who is also a geologist.
They met on a mineral exploration trip in Alaska in 1979.
After marrying, they traveled for several months to Australia and the Pacific doing mineral exploration while visiting copper, gold, uranium, nickel and asbestos mines.
Michael Morgan Williams was born Aug. 21, 1951, in Miller, S.D., and was reared in South Dakota and Montana. He graduated from Rosendale High School in Eldorado, Wis., where he learned to play the tuba.
He earned a degree in geology at the University of Wisconsin, and a master’s degree in environmental geology at the University of Idaho.
He and Felicie Chronic were married on Sept. 4, 1982.
After earning his teaching certificate at the University of Colorado at Denver, he taught school in Nebraska and eventually settled in Fruita.
He resumed his tuba playing with the Centennial Band in Grand Junction.
But during the first march he was in, “They didn’t give him the mouthpiece” because he wasn’t good enough to play, said his wife. But the tuba, with its gigantic bell, looked good in the band, she said, laughing.
After practice, he became a regular in the band.
The Williamses and their two children spent three months in Mexico learning Spanish, sometimes living with families and sometimes living in their camper.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Amber Williams, and son, Wes Williams, both of Grand Junction; his mother, Eileen Pinch of Eldorado, Wis; two sisters, Karen Jarvis of Fond du Lac, Wis., and Sharon Isaac of Germantown, Wis.; and two brothers, Owen Williams of Crookston, Minn., and Patrick Williams of Brookfield, Wis.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com.
