Your interest in GAC stems from??

[darkmark (RIP)]

Well, the first GA books I ever encountered were a small pile my uncle left behind, when I was about 5 or 6.  They included a BLACKHAWK, an ACTION, an ish of CANNONBALL, one of JOKER (with Powerhouse Pepper in it), a BIG SHOT, and a LOONEY TUNES.  By the time I got back to check on those things years later, they'd given them away.  But my interest was really piqued early on by JLA #21-22, the first issues I bought, the ones with the Justice Society's first crossover.  Also, Marvel put a faux Captain America in STRANGE TALES about that time as a tryout.  Learning that there had been heroes before the present era was always a curiosity point, and I never stopped wondering about them or picking up information on them where I could. 

Decades later, I had a batch of Fawcett CAPTAIN MARVELs and related books that I'd scanned and was looking for gap-fillers.  I happened on this site.  Mirabile dictu!  The rest is historic.

[Ami_GFX]

Working at 12. That is child labor which a violation of the law. Forced into a life of crime by comic bookis 

Could be but at 12 years old in 1974, I saw things differently. I just wanted to buy comic books and I felt fortunate to have the paper route. There was a lot of competition for those paper routes among my fellow 12 year olds. Plus it gave me a lot of bike riding which compensated for the hours and hours I sat around on my duff reading my comics. Comics were, before sex, drugs and rock & roll kicked in, one of my first real motivations in life.

[John C]

I blame Roy Thomas.  Or Adam West.

I watched (in syndication) the Batman TV show and loved it, so when I saw Batman comics, that was what I needed to buy.  On a week with no new book at the local convenience store, I happened on the big Justice League/Justice Society crossover for the year...that also featured the Crime Syndicate, All-Star Squadron, and possibly partridges in pear trees.

The Golden Agers captured my imagination immediately, and All-Star Squadron became the obsession.  Then the All-Star Comics revival and the Adventure Comics run, plus as many JLA/JSA crossovers as I could lay hands on.

It took much longer to step outside of DC, and I can't quite recall when, actually.

[OtherEric]

I first really heard about and got interested in the Golden Age when I found a copy of Crawford's Encyclopedia of Comic Books at the local library.  I now know that that book is one of the worst pieces of Comic scholarship out there; which is quite an accomplishment given how bad some of the early works can be.  What gets missed in how bad it is as a history book is how good a job it does of making old books sound fun and come alive.