A Part in History
This is a narrative memoir told as three stories overlapping with my grandfather at the center; it’s a work in progress, and I keep the latest iteration on this web page to get feedback from friends and family.
The first story is about a 1990 high school wrestling match for the Baton Rouge city championship and my grandfather’s funeral two weeks later, and then my service as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division in the first gulf war of 1990-1991. The story is mostly about my final match against the three-time state champion at 145 pounds and my relationships with Coach Dale Ketelsen and my grandfather, Edward Grady Partin Senior. Coach was physically small, humble man with a lifetime of service to the sport of wrestling, his family, church, and the U.S. marines; my grandfather was a huge, handsome man and a rapist, murderer, thief, adulterer, and racketeer famous as the mole who sent Jimmy Hoffa to prison in 1962, ten months after President Kennedy was assassinated. The story begins with me as a 17 year old wrestler struggling with nature versus nurture at my grandfather’s funeral, when my eyes were set on escaping Baton Rouge through the army, and then looking back through the eyes of a combat veteran serving on President George Bush Senior’s quick-reaction force.
The second story is about a month-long trip to Cuba in 2019, when I met with an old army buddy now in the state department to learn his part in overseeing prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, and to research my grandfather’s role in killing President Kennedy. The story begins immediately after I spoke with Craig Vincent, the actor who would portray my grandfather in “The Irishman,” Martin Scorcese’s opus about a Teamster and mafia hitman nicknamed The Irishman who claims to have killed Jimmy Hoffa in 1975. Craig asked a simple question: what where the characteristics of my grandfather that allowed him to fool so many people for so long? It was the question any character actor would seek, and one that decades of FBI investigators and reporters had not asked, and for the first time I begin trying to see my family through other peoples’s eyes. In Cuba, I sought people who could recall my grandfather visiting Fidel Castro a year before Kennedy’s assassination in 1962; and, because Craig’s question flooded my mind with flashbacks from the 1970’s, I spent the trip lost in memories, recessing my assumptions and trying to envision how Edward Grady Partin Senior fooled so many people, and wondering how his supreme court case testifying against Hoffa could still be influencing American laws including at Guantanamo Bay.
The third story is immediately after Cuba, and is the story of my mom’s final days in a coma. She was Wendy Anne Rothdram Partin, a 16 year old girl who lost her virginity to Edward Grady Partin Junior in 1971 and had me, then abandoned me after a series of mental breakdowns after she met the Partins, Hoffa’s men, and the mafia. My mom passed away a week after I returned from Cuba, and her death sparked a renewal in my childhood quest to understand nature versus nurture and my family’s part in history, linking back to my high school wrestling days with flashbacks of Coach and mentors and different views of my mom when I was a kid escaping Baton Rouge versus as an adult and returning home to stand by her side as she lay dying 35 years later; I spent the final night with my mom seeing her through the eyes of an aging adult in 2019 rather than a kid in the 1970’s and 80’s. She passes away and then Covid-19 shutters the world, and the final chapter is a reflection on my mom’s role in my nature versus nurture, and my grandfather’s part in history and how it still affects me and our country.
Peace,
Jason Ian Partin 🙂