Unless you are in an area where there is an active NAR or TRA club, or know a member of a club, or you are in 4H. the Scouts or CAP, or unless you go to school that has a teacher or club in rocketry you are not likely to get into the hobby. The dollar value in a hobby store is low, and shelf space is expensive, so there are fewer and fewer stores stocking hobby rocketry items. AFAIk while there are a number of on-line vendors, there are an order of magnitude more big on-line vendors selling quadrotors that you can fly in your yard and even in your house and all you need to do is to recharge your batteries. It's a tough sell with the other hobbies out there.
It was claimed that 250,000 folks fly a rocket each year. Well there are ~7500 folks who are interested enough to fork over ~$60 a year to join NAR/TRA and 40% belong to both. If that's correct only 1 in 33 rocket fliers are interested in rocketry enough to join an organization and IIRC the average residency time is less than 5 years......and about 1 in 50,000 Americans belong to NAR and/or TRA.
Massachusetts has a population of ~7,000,000 so in theory there are 140 rocket folks in the state. CMASS is the only club in the state and we have ~142 members so the numbers don't lie. And we do lots of outreach with TARC, SLI, Scouts, 4H and CAP, and many schools and science clubs.
Bob