I started pursuing the visual arts at an early age -- drawing pictures of cars, airplanes, and boats in First Grade. Under the influence of an unusually talented cousin, I began to branch out to different media -- watercolor pencils at first, then pastel chalks, etc. I taught myself a bit about figure drawing from a small book given to me at around twelve. I got some, albeit little, encouragement from Art subject teachers in school, but absorbed on my own all I could about technique and art history along the way.
Then, at about 15, I inherited a Kodak Pony camera (a 35mm rangefinder) and a darkroom setup from an uncle and I was instantly hooked. Frustrated with the limitations of the rangefinder mechanics, i bought my first SLR -- an East German knockoff second- or third-hand in a seedy downtown camera store. That lasted me less than a year, when I put my first Nikon product on layaway. A real, pro-level SLR! I was so proud! It had a black body (in an age when most SLRs were chrome), as I intended to shoot stage photography and needed to be able to be invisible backstage.
Being able to develop my own film and prints gave me an advantage in that a normally-expensive hobby was less-so -- important for an impecunious teenager, dependent on spotty after-school jobs for pocket money. It also taught me a good deal about the art of photography from a technical standpoint -- a body of knowledge that (unbeknownst to me at the time) was to stand me in good stead in my later career.
Wanting to get published in any way I could, I did my time in the high school newspaper and yearbook staffs. At the end of my senior year, on an outing of the yearbook staff -- to shoot pictures for our own listing in that year's annual -- I dropped my beloved camera and sheared the lens mount off of it. That would have seemed to be the end of my career as a photographer.
In my mid-20s, I got a job in the entertainment industry, working at a local theater and concert venue. At the same time, I was also working for a taxi company as a dispatcher and consequently wasn't as poor as I had been in my teens. So I had enough change rattling in my pocket to buy a second-hand Nikkormat -- Nikon-made, downmarket SLR. I no longer had my darkroom setup, but film processing was cheap and fast and I could live with it. I never went anywhere with the camera directly jobwise, but ... one day, my boss at the theater invited me along to a printing company where, it turned out, they had a little sideline doing print work for the concert business -- tickets, posters, handbills, and .... backstage passes.