I was 3 in 1970 when my dad took me into a K-Mart. Went through the toy section when I spied this box:
That was the first model I built. I remember the glue fingerprints all over it, and I also remember that my dad built the Monogram P-38 at the same time (somewhere I have an old Polaroid photo of both builds sitting atop my parents' stereo cabinet). I suspect my dad assisted me greatly in building that P-40, but let me actually put the parts together, hence the glue fingerprints.
This was the beginning of a life-long hobby that I only put on hold when I discovered baseball and girls. Upon returning to the hobby as a professional software engineer in the mid-1990s, I found a bunch of kits in yet another K-Mart (mostly Monogram, but also a Revell 1/32 Beaufighter). I believe the first one that I actually built out of that impulse purchase was a Monogram Apache helicopter.
And to add to the comments in other posts about WWII vets disavowing anything German or Japanese, I had a couple of similar experiences with my materal grandfather. He served in the Pacific in the USN. My parents divorced in the mid-1970s, and maybe a year later or so, my mom moved us in with her parents where we lived for a year or two before my mom was able to get her own house. I recall watching Baa Baa Black Sheep every week when it aired. My Papa would sit in his recliner, with the little poodle in his lap, and would say absolutely nothing while this show was airing, but there was something about his appearance that even at my young age I was able to pick up on. It was a quiet discomfort that I could see in him. To me, this was akin to Star Wars - old Pappy was taking up his Corsairs and shooting down the bad guys, but I think my Papa was simply going back to that time in his life, where he had been taken away from his young family (my mom was 3 months old at the time of Pearl Harbor). He never owned anything of Japanese origin.
Then as a new college grad, I bought a Toyota Camry and returned to my home town to visit family. I stopped at my grandparents' house and made the mistake of parking that Camry in his driveway. He let me know that the Toyota would be moved one way or another. Once I parked it in the street outside their house, he seemed happy. It was at that moment that one of the two most cherished conversations I ever had with him happened. I didn't really dig into his WWII experiences (wish I had), but did ask him point blank if he would have responded the same way had he gone to Europe and I had parked a BMW in his driveway. He thought he would have. And we as a family have a very strong German heritage. This was when I really understood what he experienced, at least from a family point of view. I don't have the exact details, but am presuming there are some shore leaves involved. He was returning to his ship when he received a telegram informing him of the birth of his second daughter. And then to have survived sinking of not one, but two, ships to which he was assigned (a detail that I did not learn of until his funeral in 2002), I can readily understand his hatred of all things Japanese.