'''Mel Tappan''' (1933 - 1980), full name of Melrose H. Tappan III, was one of the founders of the [[Preparedness]] movement,.<ref>http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=950&dat=19810331&id=ixsMAAAAIBAJ&sjid=61kDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6691,4779572 Accessed December 27, 2014</ref> He was the editor of the newsletter ''Personal Survival ("P.S.") Letter''. He was also author of the [[Survival]] books ''[[Survival Guns]]'' and ''[[Tappan on Survival]]''.
A graduate of [[Stanford University]], Mr. Tappan was one of the earliest [[survivalist]]s to promote the idea of [[Vote with your feet]] [[strategic relocation]] to a "[[Essay:Free_States_Movement|free state]]s" from a [[liberal]] "death spiral" [[Nanny state]]-[[Police state]] (See [[Blue state]] - [[Essay:Free_States_Movement#Naughty_State_List|unfree state]]s). Like [[James Wesley Rawles]] and [[Joel Skousen]], Mr. Tappan advocated [[survivalist retreat]]s in [[population density|lightly populated]] [[rural]] regions in .<ref>[http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/532445.html Mitchell, Dancing at Armageddon, excerpt Accessed December 27, 2014</ref>