OK, here's my Hardy Boys story:
I was a fan of the show when I was a kid, but I was more into Joe (Shawn Cassidy) at the time. Of course, I wasn't just a little boy who liked the Hardy Boys. I liked the Hardy Boys, if you know what I mean. Fortunately, the adults in my life didn't pick up on that, or at least, if they had any suspicions, they didn't give me any grief about it.
The teenage girl across the street, who used to baby-sit me, had grown out of her Shaun Cassidy phase, so she gave me all her pin-up pics of him, and I put them on my bedroom wall.
Around this time my grandfather's aunt came to visit. I don't know how old she was at the time, but she lived to be 108. (Let's see...The Hardy Boys was on TV in 1977-78, so I was 6-7 at the time, making my grandfather around 67...so she must have been well into her 80s.) She lived in L.A. and one of her husbands was a director or producer or something, I don't really know. Anyway, she saw the pics on my bedroom wall and said, "Oh, you like Shaun Cassidy. You know, I live down the street from him. He's a nice boy. I have coffee with his mother."
But getting back on topic, my tastes have changed since I was a kid. Although I still like Shaun in a nostalgic sort of way, if I had been an adult when the show was on the air, I probably would have been more into Parker.