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And like you, I found it terrible. And with enough cream and sugar, I could tolerate it.
But I wanted to drink it black, so I taught myself to like it that way...
Nearly 50 years on, I'm still drinking that big mug after breakfast, and it's still black.
But, as bad as that burnt Folgers or Maxwell House crap was early on, it surely beat the POSTUM that my boyfriend at the time drank. Uggh. 
Is that stuff still being made?
...and real cream, not that fake shit you can use to start a fire with. No sugar ever in brewed coffee or an Americano, but depending on the beans I like espresso with just a hint of sugar, no dairy.
It's just a Southern thing. We all did. Living in a cafe a lot didn't hurt. Coffee was the staff of life at breakfast and sweet tea at lunch and dinner. I'm lucky I have teeth and a working pancreas. 
Gave up the sugar long ago but coffee? Why yes, thanks. 
I thought it was the worst stuff ever, but the first quarter of my freshman year, I had to leave the house at 6:30AM to commute to campus with the others from our town who were attending the University of Minnesota, so I needed caffeine to survive. I always put milk in it, though.
One I lived on campus at another college, I discovered that I liked Taster's Choice better than Nescafé.
I drank whatever was available (always with milk or cream, never sugar) until I went to the University of Hawaii for a summer seminar on the way to study in Japan. One of the options available was a weekend trip to the Big Island, which included the lunch buffet at a major hotel. That was where I first tasted a single-variety coffee: Kona. We all remarked about what great coffee the hotel made.
Later that year in Tokyo, I discovered Japan's coffee culture, which goes all the way back to the 1950s. They used to have all these little shops (now largely crowded out by Starbucks and its imitators) where you could get a freshly brewed cup from any one of a couple dozen varieties of beans as well as fantastic iced coffee that came in a tall glass with a little pitcher of cream and a little pitcher of sugar water.
When I came back to the States, I bought a Melita, but good coffee beans were hard to come by, and there were as yet no little shops where you could by a cup of coffee and sit for hours.
For one year, I commuted from a temporary teaching job back to the graduate school campus where my boyfriend lived. I always took a thermos of coffee for the 250-mile trip, but I soon found that the milk I put in tended to go sour during the trip, so I started drinking my coffee black and gradually learned to like it.
In 1984, I moved to Corvallis, Oregon, which had a funky coffee shop called The Beanery. It was the closest thing to a Japanese-style coffee shop I had ever seen, so I became a regular.
By the time I left Corvallis in 1986, coffee culture had percolated ( ) down from Seattle, so I was a happy caffeine-o-holic.
I kept hounding my mother to let me try it. Finally, she had had enough and handed me her cup. I took a big gulp...and puked all over the table.
To this day, the smell of coffee makes me gag. If I accidentally eat something coffee flavored, there's a good chance that my body will reject it. 