Ed Mead - Lumpen: The Autobiography of Ed Mead

1. Family Life

A new fascism promises security from the terror of crime. All that is required is that we take away the criminals rightswhich, of course, are our own. Out of our desperation and fear we begin to feel a sense of security from the new totalitarian state.

Gerry Spence

A good writer would be able to accurately describe the sound a bullet makes being fired into a building as it slams into or ricochets off a wall or whatnot. As near as I could ever come to making that sound comes from having watched old black and white cowboy movies on television as a kid. The ricocheting bullets on TV back then made a sound like paazzziing. But thats not how the police bullets sounded to me as they rattled around inside the bank my friends and I were trying to rob. (In those days, as revolutionaries, we called it a bank expropriation.)

One of my comrades, Bruce, was lying on the floor about six feet away from me; he was in the process of dying from two fatal gunshot wounds. Without any warning or the opportunity to surrender, he had been shot in the back. He had spun around, and the second shot, fired by a different police officer, hit him in the chest. My other comrade was sitting next to the banks main door, his unfired shotgun still in his lap, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the face. I had the bank manager lying down in front of me, parallel to the front door, and was using his body as a shield from which to shoot back at the ever-growing number of police cars arriving at the scene.

It would be nice to say that at that moment I paused to reflect upon the circumstances that led me to this juncture in time and place. However, the fact is that I used the slow-motion passage of events at that moment to focus on the sound of the flying bullets and possibly to lament the fact that my Browning 9 mm automatic contained three clips of ammunition that would not fire properly. John, the man who had been shot in the face, had used up all of my ammo the day before during target practice, forcing me to go out and get military 9 mm bullets. I did not know it at the time, but military weapons have a stronger spring behind the firing pin, and thus their ammo takes a heavier blow on the pin to fire. At least every other shot I fired back at police was a dud. While I may not have reflected on the many quantitative steps that led me to that qualitative moment in time, I have since done soand this is my story.

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Shortly after midnight, on November 6, 1941, Ramona (Ona) Irene Mead gave birth to me, soon to be named Edward Allen Mead, in a Santa Monica, California hospital. I was the second of the six children my mother would eventually birth. The first was Mary Ann. Ann, as she prefers to be called, is a little more than a year older than me. The third of the Mead children was Virginia, just a little more than a year younger than me. Somehow Virginia earned the handle of Duke, a nickname she retained until her marriage at the age of 15. Mother would have three more kids with two different fathers: Pamela and Victor Perrupato, and Jonie McGraw.

My Dad, Edward Leo Mead, came from a poor farming family in Iowa. He was smart enough to find a non-farming job when the time came. He worked in a gas station until he earned enough to buy a used dump truck, which he used to make his living hauling gravel. The trucks were old and required a lot of maintenance. Dad learned to weld while trying to keep his trucks roadworthy. He did well enough to buy a second truck, and, if I remember correctly, had three of them before he went bust. He would ultimately move to the Los Angeles area and spend most of the rest of his life working as a welder.

Most of Moms people lived in the countryside around Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Her grandfather, who was deaf as a result of firing the cannons during the Spanish-American War, had been some kind of a sharecropper, and her father was a small rancher and farmer named Harry Burdick. Harry raised 40 acres of corn and tended animals on the ranch. Moms mother was a fastidious housekeeper and proper little lady named Gladys. Grams, as Gladys was called, was a retiring person whose world revolved around the home and her deep moral and religious conditioning. Gladys and Harry had two childrenOna and Warren. As the oldest, Mom had taken responsibility for many of the outdoor chores on the ranch. Warren was more of the hang-around-the-house type. He had helped Grams, while Mom had taken after her father, spending most of her time with him and the occasional ranch hands, caring for the cattle and the general upkeep of the place.

I cant really describe life on the ranch, as both Mom and Grams always responded vaguely whenever I asked them questions about it. Its as if they lacked sufficient insight about either themselves or that period in their lives to discuss it in any detail. They would talk a little bit about specific events, but skirted any questions about interpersonal relationships. What I gather is that the Depression in the 30s ruined the cattle market. This, along with a drought that devastated the corn crop, forced my grandfather to leave his family and seek work in the city. Personal problems quickly rode in on the heels of the material ones, and before long the family was split apart. My mother was 13 years old at the time, and she stayed with Grams, who worked as a cook and housekeeper, which allowed Mom to finish high school; I believe she was the first one in the family to do so.

I have been out of touch with my father for most of my adult life, and never got the chance to learn very much about his upbringing or his family history before he died in 1971. I was in prison when he died and did not find out he was dead until over a decade later. The last time I saw my Dad, I was about 21 years old (I am 73 now), and at that young age, I had very little appreciation for family history. Now hes dead and it is too late to find out about his childhood and young adult years, let alone to get to know him as a person. The little information I do have I got from Mom and Grams, neither of whom had a particularly detailed grasp of our familys roots. All I can really say about my respective grandparents is that they were poor farmers or poor workers. Dad had quite a few brothers and sisters, who live or lived in various places in Iowa, South Dakota, and Southern California.