My first exposure to role-playing was when I was about six or seven years old. A friend of mine that was a couple of years older brought out his 2nd edition AD&D PHB while my sister and I were over at his house and made us roll up characters. It was an easy sell; we were already deep into fantasy literature by then. As I recall, our friend kinda bungled the rules for stats, and had us roll 4d6 without dropping any of them. That resulted in my sister's character having Strength in excess of 20. We didn't actually do much with those characters, fortunately.
Anyway, we stopped into a hobby shop in Burbank, CA that has now long since closed, the Last Grenadier, where I bought the Complete Wizard's Handbook. I had, of course, no idea that you needed the PHB and other people to actually play the game. I read it cover to cover anyway, and after some time had passed I started collecting the rest of the books. The rest, as they say, is history.