When I was around 15 or 16, the lads who had become friends at the North Unley Boy's Club, and the lads who lived around me at Young Street, began to congregate at either one of their homes or around a delicatessen on Unley Road, just around the corner from Young Street. At one stage it was owned by an English couple so, of course, it became known as The Pom Shop. Around that time, we were often in the local hills shooting rabbits and many of us owned .22 rifles. One day, I remember, we were collected at one home and with a shooting trip coming up, needed to license or register our rifles, so a few of us visited the Unley Police Station to do just that.
I need to recap.
This was the terrible dark days of the birth of rock and roll, where it was feared the youth of the day, influenced by this outrageous music, were sure to revolt and cause havoc among the community. Gangs of maddened, sex-crazed youths, were feared to begin roaming the streets, pillaging, raping and generally making a nuisance of themselves (if it wasn't for computers, the youth of today would be expected to do the same) so the police were wary of any group of boys congregating together on the streets and tended to label them. I remember, at the time, there were a couple of gangs in Adelaide given, or taken, the names of The Saints and The Joes. There were probably many, many more but I don't think we were aware of them: we were large enough and happy enough to keep to ourselves. (There was another group of lads that hung around Morgan's Milk Bar, a milk bar between the two Unley movie theatres, the Unley Star and the Ozone. If they had a name I never heard of it.) We must have spent a small fortune over a period of around 15 years in these theatres, and the two milk bars between them, all in a space on Unley Road of about 100 metres. Saturday night was movie night and we often took up two rows, back stalls, left-hand side. One night there were so many of us (lads and lasses) that the movie manager of The Star theatre wouldn't let us sit together and split us up into smaller groups. Times all gone now, but not the memories.
But I digress, as I probably often will, trying to put some of a lifetime of memories into so few pages,
So ... here we are, back in the police station, armed to the teeth, doing something with our rifles (mine was a BSA tube-loading, bolt-action repeater) and as we stood there, having given our names and addresses, the (I think he was the sergeant) copper looked up from his desk and said, 'Oh, you're that Young Street Mob'. So there it was, that was good enough for us. We became (and in our hearts still are) The Young Street Mob, and that was what was later painted on the backs of our leathers (jackets, that is). Sometimes the Young Sensible Men, sometimes The Mongolian Yankoff Society, depending who asked (our logo made it difficult to tell which initial came first or second).
So the following are photos of various gatherings and parties held by The Young Street Mob. Although now in my seventies, I still think of them as The Boys.
This page is unfinished as Ron was still working on it when he died.
