1sr time you had a guitar in your hands

In the summer of the fifth grade I took guitar lessons because I liked the Ventures. My Dad bought me a $20 Harmony flattop at a pawn shop, with rusted Black Diamond strings which hurt like hell! I had ugly black calluses, which sometimes bled, on my fingertips. In six months I could play "House of the Rising Sun", which impressed him enough to buy me a Kustom Kraft electric. By the sixth grade I could play "Gloria" in a talent contest and the next day at school a girl I didn't know asked me for my autograph. I was hooked!

My first 'guitar' was a ukulele when I was in Kindergarten. We lived in Hawaii at the time, and ukulele music was da kine. The first song I learned was Tiny Bubbles, by Don Ho:

Tiny bubbles
In the wine
Makes me happy
Makes me feel fine

This set the course for my life in two important ways: (1) playing music, and (2) alcohol.

My first tune was a drinking song. Lovely.

WHERE ARE THE PARENTS?

At 14 yrs old, I was visiting friends of the family, I found a blue Silvertone acoustic lying around and picked it up. It only had four rusty strings on it and was no where near in tune. But after fooling around a bit, I started to play the guitar intro to Wild Weekend by Johnny and the Hurricanes. 57 years later, I think I've got it.

My uncle had a guitar. It had an arched top, but instead of F-holes, it had a round sound hole like a flattop. I was in elementary school, like the rest of y'all. My uncle let me hold his guitar and mess around with it, but I got nowhere with it. Don't know the brand name or model.

IIRC it had a headstock like a classical guitar, but had steel strings.

My brother played piano, and was getting into the folk rock of the late 60s. He brought home an autoharp and I fell in love with the sound of the strings. My dad was a jazz musician and tried to teach me to play the upright bass but I was just too small so he bought me a Regal acoustic for my 11th birthday. I remember trying to form chords and being frustrated by thudding strings. My brother's guitar playing friend just said you gotta press harder. I figured that out and strummed my first chord the rest is history.

This looks an awful lot like my uncle's archtop guitar with the round soundhole and classical-style headstock. It has been several decades since I last saw his guitar, since he passed away in 1984. Don't know where the guitar went, since he was a single man all his life.

 reverb.com/item/1604021-kay-archtop-round-sound-hole-guitar

Probably my older brother's Epiphone Century, mid/late 60's, but I'm sure the encounter was brief. I got my own electric, a Strat-like Silvertone around 1970. I actually used it for a couple of my first gigs 3 or 4 years later. My bro's Century got stolen in the great Garage Band Heist in the early 70s and he switched to bass shortly afterward.

My cousin's acoustic when I was about 12 yrs old.

After my paternal grandmother died, a flattop appeared in our house. Summer 1963, age 12, I tried it out, and took lessons with it for a while. The action was about half-an-inch, as seems common in this thread.

Years later I found out it had been my grandfather's, who died on 1939. It still had his strings on it.

Not sure... Probably 10 or 11. I do remember around 11-years old - my dad trying to show me a rhythm guitar part from a song that he had written and recorded on an old 45, then something magical happened, the lead came on, and I said; NO... I want to do that! Lol

Probably in a department store. My parents gave me my first one for Christmas but I didn't learn anything on it. My older brother picked it up and he got a new one then taught me some Joan Baez songs from chord charts. I owe him for that and it took several tries before I got it. I was 12 by then.

I had a plastic ukulele for awhile around 5th grade. Not only was it cheesy, it also had a contraption you put on the neck with buttons you could press down to make the chords (allegedly). I never learned to properly play anything on it, and also could never figure out how to tune it properly to "My Dog Has Fleas". Huh?

But my 6th grade English teacher (Mr. Hamlin, Hermantown Public Schools, H-twon, Minnesota) used to bring his Telecaster and amp (either a Vibro Champ or Princeton, I'm pretty sure) to class and play songs for us like "Tie Me Kangaroo Down" and other Irish sounding ditties; I was VERY interested...

When I was 13/7th grade, I'd listened to enough of my dad's Johnny Cash and Duane Eddy records that I wanted a guitar of some kind - and that's what I got; a guitar of some kind, but not the kind Johnny or Eddy played.

We were living outside Madrid where my dad was stationed at the time (1970, Torrejon A.F.B.), so my dad took me into downtown Madrid and we found one of many little shops that sold all variety of nylon string guitars.

When I got it home, it only felt right to play it lefty, so I took all the strings off and reversed them - which was a miracle in itself with nylon strings! Learned an Em and A chord and strummed them back and forth till I probably drove my mom nuts! But took a guitar club class at school and started learning stuff like "If I Had a Hammer," "Sounds of Silence," "House of the Rising Sun," and "Let It Be." Learned on my own after that... scratched up a lot of records and no doubt wore out the needle on my dad's cheap Sears phonograph.

I later put steel strings on that classical guitar, which finally destroyed it after a couple years, and I moved on to other guitars...

Early 1970's, my older brother had just got his first decent guitar, a brand new Gibson L6S.

He left for the day, I pulled it out and tried to play it and was hooked. About 47 years ago IIRC.

People were generally thinner back in the day!