Death in Compton--a Homeless Civic Gadfly Is Mourned : Memorial: Eddie Randolph lived and died outside City Hall. He never missed a City Council meeting. When he died, city employees organized the Vietnam veteran’s rites.

His address was P.O. Box 667. The nearest thing he had to a home was City Hall. And the people who watched over him, who bought him a meal when he was short on cash and called the paramedics when he suffered one of his seizures, were city employees.

So it is not surprising that it fell to them too to organize the only memorial service held for Eddie, a homeless Vietnam veteran who died on the Fourth of July, a month short of his 40th birthday.

The city’s best-known gadfly for more than a decade, Edward L. Randolph never missed a council meeting, which is why city employees at the memorial service in the council chambers Tuesday draped a black cloth over a chair at one end of the last row.

That is where Eddie sat each Tuesday, waiting for his turn to address the council on one issue or another. Sometimes he talked about the trains that run up and down the tracks outside City Hall. What sort of hazardous material is inside those tank cars, he would demand to know. Sometimes it was the city’s dwindling financial resources that drew his attention. “Where’s the money?” he would ask.

When they found Eddie’s body in the plaza outside City Hall, a copy of the city budget and a recent council agenda were inside his two small duffel bags.

A passer-by spotted the body shortly before dawn the morning after the Fourth and summoned the paramedics, but it was too late. Eddie apparently died of natural causes, though the Los Angeles County coroner’s office has not yet issued an official report.

Eddie’s body lay near the steps to the city library, in which he would spend hours reading. A Los Angeles City Library card was in one of the duffel bags, along with a July RTD bus card, a new pair of blue jeans, new socks, a bar of soap, shaving cream and a china bowl with two dinner packages of noodles.

He died a few steps from the bus bench at the intersection of Willowbrook Avenue and Compton Boulevard, where he usually slept. To Compton police officers who worked the graveyard shift during the last 10 to 15 years, he was a familiar sight there.

“I used to have coffee with him at the (nearby) Fresh Donut doughnut shop,” Police Lt. Gary Anderson recalled. “Usually it would be around 5:30 or 6 a.m., when it opened. I used to go over there to check on the shop when it opened. He would be there or come in.”

Eddie’s habits were well-known around City Hall. “He was like a sentinel. He was always standing on the City Hall steps or on the post office steps,” said Omega Shepherd, the receptionist in the city attorney’s office. “I would always look for him. He was there with his knapsack on in the summer and his field jacket on in the winter.”

But Eddie’s personal history is a puzzle. According to his Veterans Administration records, he was born in Long Branch, N.J., and served two tours in Vietnam in the Marine Corps for about 18 months, separating from the service in late 1970.

City Clerk Charles Davis tracked down the woman Eddie lived with when he came to Compton that year. And Davis raised enough money from among city workers to bring the woman, Constance Hunter, and the daughter she bore with Eddie, Charmaine Randolph, 17, from Oakland to Compton for the memorial service.

Hunter and her mother, Sarah Williams, who still lives in Compton, said Eddie told them that he was wounded in the war. They said he talked about a metal plate in his head, though his veteran’s record makes no mention of a combat-related wound, only the planter warts and bent toes that the U.S. government treated at military hospitals in Japan and Long Beach before he was discharged with a lifetime 20% disability entitlement.

No one who knew him could explain the reason for Eddie’s behavior--the seizures, the dazed look he sometimes wore, the homelessness even though he had been a homeowner twice during his first years in Compton. He was articulate at council meetings, they recalled, but seemed unable to sustain a one-on-one dialogue for long.

Compton Police Cmdr. R. E. Allen said: “The black officers, particularly the ones who served in Vietnam, on occasion would take him to lunch, ‘cause they knew where he was coming from.”

Mayor Walter R. Tucker said shortly after Eddie died that he was not unlike a lot of men who went to Vietnam and came back very different.

That’s the way Hunter remembers it. She met Eddie in 1970 between his two tours of duty. When he came back from the second tour, he was angrier, quicker to fly off the handle, she said, and after half a dozen years or so, she left him when his rages grew more violent and he hit her.

From 1970-76 Eddie worked off and on as a Compton city employee, bought a house, sold it and bought another, Hunter said. He was laid off permanently from the city when the federally funded work programs he was part of disappeared, City Personnel Director Sally Taylor said.

For a while, Eddie lived in the seedy motels and hotels around town until, one by one, they were torn down to make way for redevelopment. When the last one met the bulldozer, Eddie moved to the streets, police officers recalled.

Like several others around City Hall, Police Chief Terry Ebert remembers giving Eddie money when he needed it. “That’s one thing, though. If you lent him money, he always paid it back.”

When he did not need money, he waved off offers of help, recalled Rose Knott, a secretary in the city attorney’s office who wrote a poem that was printed on the back of the memorial service program. Knott said she once offered to buy him a sandwich at lunchtime, but Eddie refused.

Knott’s poem says: “He was proud and gentle in an odd kind of way. Asking only a select few for help on a difficult day.”

Eddie got a monthly disability check from the Veterans Administration and a welfare check from the county. There was a Medi-Cal card among his belongings, along with a notice from Los Angeles demanding $125.96 for an emergency ride in a city ambulance to a hospital last year.

He was generous with what he had, recalled Williams, whom Eddie called Momma. When her granddaughter, Charmaine, was visiting two summers ago, Eddie sent flowers and a limo to drive her and some friends around for two hours, she said.

The last time Eddie’s daughter saw him was in April on a visit to Compton. Her mother took Charmaine to the bus bench to find him.

“I don’t remember much of what he said, but he said he was going to buy a house,” Charmaine recalled.

Hunter said, “I always had a harsh feeling for him, but I saw him sitting on the bus bench, and it was all gone. I don’t know if I felt sorry for him or what.”

The black cloth will stay draped over Eddie’s chair at City Hall for 30 days, City Clerk Davis said. Eddie may have been homeless, Davis said, but he was loved.