The year – 1982, RAGBRAI X.  After many years of biking and triathlon training, Grant Lewis is persuaded to join Atis Krumins on RAGBRAI.  Atis was a “serious” biker and believed in “live to ride, ride to live”.  Atis did not participate in the shenanigans for which RAGBRAI later became famous.  In spite of this, Grant has a good time and decides to do the ride across Iowa again. 

Skip forward to the following winter and move to the state of New York, we find Glenn Morse reading an article about RAGBRAI in the Wall Street Journal.  Commenting about this over lunch, he asks if anyone knows about this ride.  Grant’s cousin responds and says that Grant did the previous year’s ride and Glenn should call him. 

Glenn does the next RAGBRAI which is also Mara Neal’s first year.  Mara is Otis’s daughter.  It is somewhere along here that Grant and Glenn discover that there is a wilder side of RAGBRAI than what Atis has shown them.  Atis proclaims that even if they “stay up with the owls, they still need to soar with the eagles the next morning.” Glenn has a good time, and during the following winter invites Dick Yost to join in. 

And this is how the “Owls and Eagles” were started.  Skip forward to years 1991-1993 with a slightly larger group.  For these years the “slams” on each member of the team became so prevalent, the group decided that a new name was in order.  Team SLAM was born. 

SLAM, for the church ladies, is “Sophisticated Ladies And Men”.