Your first memory of chess ...

my first memory was my dad teaching me the moves and and basic strategy (control the center and checkmate ends the game) and then winning family tournoment when we were stuck inside due to a storm

My earliest awareness of chess was from the 1957-1963 CBS television series Have Gun-Will Travel.  The main character "Palidin" used the knight chess piece on his business card. 

I've a question for those of you (well almost everybody) who learned chess at an early age. Do you all have memories of swiping all of the pieces from the board when you were too bored or too frustrated? I did that with my dad a number of times and he did too sometimes. Neither of us did it in anger. Mostly I did it and laughed or when I was too bored.

I never did, though I may have wanted too

I never knocked over the pieces in frustration no matter how badly I lost.  I guess that, even at an early age, I already understood that I should not be upset with the opponent, only with myself.  Then again, I am an introvert, so I try to keep my negative emotions to myself.

My brother, who was about 5 years older than me, used to play against his friend, around 1969-71 (year not rating!). We lived in La Jolla, San Diego, in those days.

I thought they were both very good. I may have been wrong though - they thought that "discovered check" was when a player suddenly discovers that one of the Kings is in check. I remember one game being abandoned when they noticed that the two Kings were on adjacent squares.

When I was a child, that sort of behavior would have led to significant restrictions upon my mobility and access to things over the course of the next week or two. "Poor sportsmanship" was unacceptable behavior. Once I was scolded severely for the way I said that I was gonna start reading the dictionary after my little sister beat me at Scrabble. I think that I was 11 years old at the time.

Was anyone's first awareness of chess from Bobby Fischer's column in Boy's Life magazine?

My first memory of the game was around 13-14 years of age. The angles and the lines caught my attention. I said to my self......"I said self, this is cool". Cool is my general term of something that's keeps my attention. I am not a great player, I fault many times but yet that does not keep me from playing the game. I will continue in my time. Lose or win, does it really matter. I tip me hat to the best game on the planet.

1972.

My father knew how to play Chess and I remember him getting out the chess set around summer 1972. When the Fischer/Spassky match started, being a precocious 7 year old, I asked him to teach me the game that "those 2 guys are playing in Iceland"

Dad taught me the moves and he bought me Imre König's book how to play chess!

My seventh game I think the brother of the brother and did have a sister that played (House full of Chess players) He took my Queen of the board and I had to play him. I lost! I was very young. That was over 40 years ago. I did win with his younger brother with the same set up. I'm very happy I was introduced to the game because checkers was my game board favorite outside of Risk as time went on.................And yet Im still what I am. does the number matter? I enjoy what we all do, some of us will chase that number. As for Fischer/Spassky......Remember that was my era and many others, but Spassky was too conventional in his moves and Bobby was on a mission. All said and done we know what the end result was in the games.

  the oldest memory of chess for me is playing a game in 5th grade. I remember the teacher was helping the other player make correct moves. I remember i won. I think earlier i checked out school library books and learned how to play and basic mates etc. but i really don't remember doing it.

He was, in the series, an accomplished chess player.  There is one episode I remember where he played in a simul with some GM type visiting SanFran where Paladin lived.  Paladin's play caused the GM to actually have to sit down and study the board.

I was just learning chess at that same time from a friend whose father was an avid tournament player.  Probably about 1961-62.

saved your eyesight too,  you're lucky.

TurboFish; Nice chess set and a prize to have held onto. You're dad looks like a swell guy.

I was taught by my grandfather (no dad around). My Grandad taught us all kinds of fatherly things; taught us how to swim, play baseball, etc.

I learned, back then, how the pieces moved, but didn't get much chance to play. When I did start to play as a young man, my opponent, an ex-merchant marine, trounced me repeatedly. I withdrew for many, many years. I'm only now coming back to it.

One of the first times I remember seeing chess presented as something "cool" was an advertisement for cigarettes in, I believe, Popular Mechanics magazine.  There was a series of these ads featuring a macho-looking man exploring the world while smoking Camels.  In one such ad he was playing chess against a older, sage-looking Asian gentleman while a hot-looking Asian woman leaned admiringly on the Camel guy's shoulder. 

The ad campaign didn't inspire me to try smoking, but I put it on my to-do list to learn to play chess someday.  Decades later, I did. 

Another early memory was the opening of From Russia with Love where the villian Kronsteen is a Grandmaster. 

A bit dramatic was my first encounter with chess. There was a book in the public library , black cover with two over-sized pieces facing each other and the title was something like Fischer vs Spassky. I thought it was about the cold war between USA and USSR, only to find pages and pages of  games in the descriptive notation. From then on, I read the daily chess column in the South China Morning Post ( a local English medium newspaper ) by Leonard Barden featuring a puzzle . Now the same space is replaced by a Sudoku puzzle, while the space for bridge remains unchanged over so many years. 

When i was age 8  my dad taught me to play chess and we would play 1 or 2 games just about every day. He beat me 100 games in a row. From this beating i determined that chess must be a game of skill.

Then i drew a game. Then lost a couple of games and then won a game!

After that my game improved and in a few months was beating my dad just about every game. Then he quit playing me.