I have you beat by 2 months.
There must be a Newbie convention in town.
Knowing what I know now, I wish I'd joined when I started lurking here. I clicked on the Whitewater link on Drudge, so it was before FR started keeping track of registration dates. AFAIK, they started that in November of 1997.
But I think I remember reading posts back in the late summer / early fall of 1997.