Name: Edward Mayer

Age: 28

Ethnicity: German-American

Occupation/Place in the Combination: Outside, Labor Agitator/Anarchist

Personal History: Born on the passage over from Germany, Edward Mayer was the first of five children born to a young German couple fleeing Europe in 1849. Fleeing the continent towards the end of the March Revolution. Being liberals and socialists, they feared for their safety and that of the then pregnant Claire Mayer, Edward's mother when the governments of Germany eventually cracked down. Edward's father, a doctor named Amadeus was confident that when they landed in New York that he may begin a practice and carve out a living in the new land.

However, landing in New York Amadeus had no such luck and as the mixture of fortune and misfortune would have it, the family chose to move west to the promising Central City west of the Mississippi river. At the age of five, Edward was moved with his family from the East Coast to the American interior. Not going straight into Central City though, the family put down roots in a small farmstead forty-miles outside Central City where off and on Amadeus practiced as a country doctor while trying to tend to a small farm.

The family began their move proper into Central City after the American Civil War, in part taking advantage of the growing city offering up more advantages as it swelled with immigrants moving west and freed blacks moving north. Amadeus too had managed to save up from his practice, and moving the family into Downtown set up a practice between the Irish and German neighborhoods where they also lived.

Edward for his part was mostly homeschooled before moving into the city. Largely educated in German from the few odd books the family managed to bring over from Germany and acquired in New York, the young Edward spoke with a soft if noticeable accent compared to children of his own age. Edward only really coming to learn English through attending church. Yet despite the language handicap he had in his early years, he was a bright kid and read voraciously and studied under his father on occasion.

His favorite subjects when he became a teenager turned from learning to emulate his father as a doctor to politics and philosophy and he discovered and read Proudhon, Marx, and Engels in particular.

At the age of nineteen Edward seemed to openly forsake his otherwise middle-class upbringing and left for the east side of town, for close to six years he bounced between jobs at the factories and stockyards exploring the capitalist-industrialist framework of what he realized was the future to come. The conditions of the working man in the factories and the conditions they suffered at the expense of the factory boss's whims greatly effected him as he went in with the ideas of Proudhon and Marx in his head.

Though while he came to see and understand the disaffection of the American worker, he later came to discover the underground labor movement in Central City and that his thoughts were exactly his alone and that there were others who believed at least similar to him; if not just like him.