AYMF Club

What's the AYMF Club? A motley group of fun-seekers, with no well-defined membership criteria. Many of us originally met when working at Dayton Power & Light, where we habitually terrorized the staff of Sherlock's Home, a nearby emporium of fine spirits (and the infamous DomDr's). Others were drawn into the group, and heartily embraced when it became obvious that they had the AYMF spirits running through their veins (literally and figuratively).

OK, so what does AYMF stand for? AYMF'ers have been known to come up with some very creative answers to this question. I think my favorite was American Youth for a Moral Future; I'm just sorry I can't remember who gets the credit for that one. But frequently, a streetwise individual will ask "OK, I can figure out the MF, but what's the AY?" In cases like these, a common answer is "It's a nautical term", which usually doesn't enlighten them very much.

If I tell you what it means, I'll have to explain it; and the explanation really deserves a page of its own, so here it is.

It's too bad I didn't know about this web stuff back in our glory days 15-20 years ago (actually, very few people besides Al Gore knew about it then); there was a lot of stuff that could have been documented here (or maybe it's just as well that it wasn't). In more recent years, activity has dwindled somewhat as members have become more geographically dispersed, involved in other activities, saner, etc. But small subsets of us still manage to convene occasionally, and I'll try to document some of the recent activities, as well as some of the more historic early ones that I captured on film.

Millenium Finale Ski Outing
The last AYMF outing of the 2nd millenium was a ski trip to Perfect North Slopes in Indiana, Dec 28, 2000. (That's right, I'm one of those obnoxiously obsessive nerds that insists that 2000 was the last year of the old millenium.) Participants were AYMFers John and myself, AYMF-inlaw Pete, and second-generation AYMFers-in-training Laura and Lisa, who are being well indoctrinated in the merits of clean healthy outdoor fun, which is one of the foundation tenets of the AYMF Club.
Twentieth Anniversary Canoe Outing
One of the first fun things I did after moving to Dayton in July 1978 was a canoe trip on the Little Miami River with a bunch of co-workers, some of whom later became the core of the AYMF Club. Since then, some of us have managed to repeat the excursion almost every year, and I got some pictures of the 1998 outing (pretty low-quality pictures, but better than none .. maybe each is only worth a couple hundred words instead of a thousand).
Golly Gauley 1998
AYMFers Rick and myself, and a bunch of Rick's buddies, whitewater rafting on the Upper Gauley River in West Virginia, September 1998. A Lower Gauley trip years earlier had a larger AYMF contingent, but I have no pictures of that one.
TNT - Norris Lake - 1980s
TNT was an annual excursion to Norris Lake for several years in the 1980s, thanks to Rick Trimbach and family. I think these pictures are from 1986, but the story was basically the same each year.