More about my incipient guitar life

So I began playing these el-cheapo instruments from that day (10/15/1974)
forward. I was 14 at the time.
I hadn't any idea how anything was done on guitar and had no teacher or mentor of any kind (as I said my eldest brother whose guitars these were and who might have shown me a thing or two had already moved out.). All I had was the back cover of "Alfred's basic guitar course, volume 1" which in those days was printed with basic chord forms on the inside of that back cover.
However there was no key to show *how* to read a chord form so I just slowly and very painfully figured it out.
And need I continue on about how cheapo these instruments were? From very early on I was more drawn to the acoustic I had dug out of the attic. Man, was that a hard guitar to play. The strings were more comprised of rust than of steel at this point and I wasn't about to *change* them, god forbid. 2 of the tuning keys were nowhere to be found and so tuning was accomplished by means of a plyers.
Needless to say tuning wasn't really accomplished at all.