Your first system and your journey...

Hitachi receiver
Turntable- Pioneer?
Speakers-ARS?
Columbia Record Membership
Off to the races.
Oh yea discarded headphones from Spanish class.
It was all about the music until some vets turned me on to their silver behemoths. Then it was sound and the music. 

"Oh yea discarded headphones from Spanish class." 
Hilarious!

I bought my first real stereo system when I was 15 in 1969. I had been working in my uncles liquor store (under the table) doing bottle returns and stock for 2 years and saved every cent I got. I proudly came home with a 10wpc Sansui receiver, a BSR turntable with the cheapest Shure Magnetic Cartridge, a pair of Rectilinear bookshelf speakers and a Sony Cassette deck (pre Dolby). I believe I dropped around $500-600.00 that day. The speakers were used and everything else was brand new. I felt like I was sitting on top of the world.

It was circa '61, and I was 15.  I built an integrated tube amp from a kit: it was an Eico ST40.  Next came really crappy 12 inch speakers with wizzer cones, a Garrard table with a Pickering cartridge. A FM tuner and an Ampex tape deck soon joined the team.  I toiled in the lube room of a gas station in Pasadena Ca. to make all of this possible.  Looking back my first system wasn't much, but it lit a fire in me that still burns today.

Yes, I was at first pumping gas, repairing tires..etc.  Then I got a job at a high-end mens clothing store.  By the time of my senior year I was taking one 7:30 class, working full time, wearing great clothes and driving a one year old GTO...a great time that came to an end with my service in the Vietnam War.  However I survived and way too many, including my 1st cousin/friend did not.  Watching a B-52 crash with no survivers and being in situations of picking up dead bodies make a person grow up a bit too quickly.  My interest in music and stereo gear was part of the survivial.  Too many of my fellow service members got into drugs and some died......a very long time ago.