When did it all start?

When I was growing up in downtown Milwaukee we lived in a two family house. We were quite poor and only had an old tube bakalite radio. My mother always had it tuned to the 'Christian' radio station so I never heard any other music.
One day I was in the bathroom doing my business when I heard music coming from the people living upstairs. It must have been due to some strange plumbing anomoly. It was around 1972 and I was just 11 years old and intrigued. They were playing 'Rock and Roll' it was like nothing I had ever heard. The Beatles were still around, Simon and Garfunkel ruled the airwaves.
I spent way too much time in the bathroom, to my mothers chagrin and puzzlement. Eventually I began to recognize different tunes.
I was in Junior High before I got my own radio. It was an old H & R Block throw-away. Thank goodness they decided to buy something better for the offices.
But if it weren't for that pressing engagement when I was a kid I might never have spent so much money and time on this obsessive past time, and I would have missed out on all this crap.

It all started when I put in my own after market 8 track unit with speakers into a van I bought. At that time it was one of the best sounding units in my home town. I eventually put some into my friends cars and the rest is history. Then someone said you should hear the home equipment. Set the hook and crank me in. Many years later I still get a kick out of this crazy hobby. But now I look for new artist or rediscover old ones.
See Ya!

Nrchy, I realize it may have seemed otherwise at the time to an 11-year-old, but by '72 both The Beatles and S&G had been broken up going on a couple of years... :-)

It all started when I bought a Linn, in 73, and heard old Quads well driven. Still have a Linn as a spare and would have old Quads if I had space for a second system. What I heard then is not so far away from what I hear now.. and it was far less work and expense.

I was nine years old (1970) and won a contest selling the most new newspaper subscriptions door-to-door in my neighborhood. I won one of those all in one crappy systems but I loved it, listened to music night and day in my room. Over the next 4 years I cut lawns, baby-sat, shoveled snow, painted houses, etc and saved my cash. Every Saturday I'd go downtown Montreal to buy records and kept passing by this small audio shop with some cool looking gear in the window. One day I passed by and it was quiet so I wandered in so see/hear what this stuff was. The owner was a young guy and enthusiastic about audio and spent a fair amount of time educating me on what gear he sold, what made one amp better than another, speakers (electrostatic vs. boxes), you name it. Quite something, taking the time to educate a 13 year old kid with a couple of used records under his arm and unlikely to have any money. He carried Quad, Thorens, Mission, B&W, and a new product called New Acoustic Dimensions (NAD). Great guy, Claude got me hooked on audio for life. My first real system was the venerable Thorens TD147 with stock arm and Supex 900 pickup, Mission 700 speakers, and a NAD3020 integrated. Let's just say the time he took to share his audio passion with a young kid sure paid off for him over the years. I still patronize Sound Ideas and we became good friends over the years.