When I was about 11 and going to the local YMCA on Saturdays, there was a photography club and I was lucky because they had a dark room and an instructor named Gary Fliss that taught me a lot about both taking photos and processing them. At some point before the photo club, my parents had given me a little 110 Instamatic camera. 

However, when I started really getting into it, my dad let me use the 35 mm camera he had acquired somewhere along his travels, a Kiev 4A http://camerapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Kiev_rangefinder . Kiev's were knock-offs of the 1930s-era Contax II and it was actually quite a good camera to learn with. Unfortunately somewhere in the last 20 years, my dad sold the Kiev in a garage sale.

By the time I was 14, I got my first SLR, a Fujica ST-801. The ST-801 was the first camera with a through-the-lens LED light meter. However, unlike the  automatic Canon AE-1 that came out about a year later, everything else about it was completely manual, aperture, shutter speed, focusing, film advance, everything. I still have that camera and it still works although I haven't put film in it in about 15 years. Through my high-school years, I saved up some of the money I earned from delivering papers and lifeguarding and acquired a 28 mm wide angle, a 2x teleconverter and a 200 mm telephoto. 

That camera served me well over the years and I learned a lot about the mechanics of photography using it and a lot of images captured with it, ended up in high school yearbooks.