The Boys and Men of Auckland's Mickey Rooney Gang.
It was at the Point, a working class suburb of Auckland, New
Zealand, in nineteen fifty-seven, that eight mildly rebellious boys, in the
middle of their adolescence, and frustrated by the conservatism of their
cautious elders, were attracted to the charismatic but delinquent Mickey Rooney
and so joined his little gang. But later, after an especially unpleasant practical
joke – a nasty trick – played by Mickey Rooney on Pearly Gates, the gang broke
up. The hapless Pearly Gates was the gang’s most vulnerable member, despite his
size and strength, and the others came to be utterly ashamed of their participation
in his humiliation. The gang disintegrated then when each of the boys, angry
with himself, with nothing in common with the others but his sex, age and place
of residence, and confused, as all adolescent males are, by his inner turmoil –
went his own way.
This book follows each of them into adult-hood and, for those
who survived, into old age. Nine lives. Nine stories. Nine men with nothing in
common but the adolescent year they wasted in Auckland’s Mickey Rooney gang.
