My brother (who is significantly older than I) went off to college, and came back one year with the 1e books as X-mas presents - I was in Junior High. We had already played Tunnels and Trolls with him as DM while he was still living at home, so we had the basic idea of adventuring.
We played at our homes, at least once on each weekend. In bad weather, we gathered around dining room tables. In the summer, we met several times a week, usually playing at tables set up in our yards. We tended to switch around who hosted, to spread the burden of having a gang of loud boys in the place. All of us, thankfully, had parents who scoffed at the bad reputation the game got in the 1980s. They saw us being creative, clever, and doing nobody any harm, so they were good with our hobby.
Our play was mostly the standard modules, or things from the magazines. We didn't bother with "plot hooks" - we played through whatever the module at hand was. We did, however, take history into account - past events led to development of personality, and so on.
We learned about building our own plots and adventures when Marvel Superheroes (the FASERIP game) came out. We were ravenous readers of comics, so when they handed us the easy way to basically make up our own, we jumped at it. We largely abandoned D&D for a while to play superheroes.
