Preface to A Part in History

I’ve been wanting to write a memoir about my family ever since Big Daddy died in 1990, two weeks after I won second place in the Baton Rouge City Wresting tournament, loosing in the second round of finals to Hillary Clinton, a coincidentally named brute of a wrestler who was a returning three-time state champion and undefeated in 1989-1990; he had already beaten me seven times that season, but I was getting better each time and had set my sights on winning City, just like the high school senior in Vision Quest focused on wrestling the undefeated Shute, except that Hillary pinned me 0:44 seconds into the second round. It wasn’t until years later that I understood the significance of Big Daddy’s funeral and who attended.

Big Daddy was Edward Grady Partin Senior, the Baton Rouge Teamster leader famous for infiltrating Jimmy Hoffa’s inner circle and sending what was considered America’s most powerful person not a Kennedy to prison. Our family was showcased on national media, and Big Daddy was portrayed in films and discussed in households daily as Hoffa ran the Teamsters from prison and negotiated with President Nixon for a pardon. His 1990 funeral was attended by our family, reporters from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, as well as all local television crews and news reporters, practically all of the Baton Rouge police, the mayor, a large gathering of the 1954 LSU national champion football team (Heisman trophy winner and hometown hero Billy Cannon was one of the burly pallbearers who hefted Big Daddy’s casket), a slew of Teamsters from all over America, a remarkable number of FBI agents and federal marshals, and a few of the more articulate hitmen from New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello’s organization. I wore my letterman jacket, and my fingers were still taped from being broken by Hillary Clinton, which was the most important thing on my mind at the time, because I was training to face him again in the state tournament.

The Partin characters are well known. Uncle Doug Partin took over the Teamsters in 1980, after Bib Daddy had gone to prison, and ran Local #5 until he retired, then Uncle Keith Partin took the reins. Big Daddy was portrayed by the handsome and charismatic Brian Dennehy in 1983′ Blood Feud, named for how the media dubbed Jimmy Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy’s 15 year feud. (Robert Blake won an academy award for “channeling Hoffa’s rage,” and a daytime soap opera heartthrob portrayed Bobby Kennedy; all three were chosen because they looked and sounded like the real people, who were fresh in the public’s eye. Brian was a well known celebrity and also co-stared with Sylvester Stalone in Rambo: First Blood, that year, harking a trend in his films with the word “blood” in it; he pushed his celebrity status too far, and lied about being a Korean war hero like the photos and medals on his desk in Rambo, but he never served and, in my opinion, acted like an asshole for stealing valor.) In Martin Scorcese’s 2019’s epic about Hoffa, The Irishman, Scorcese chose the burly actor Craig Vincent to portray Big Daddy, tweaking the character to match Craig’s northeastern Italian accent and renaming him “Big Eddie Partin.” (I admire Craig; he called Uncle Keith, Aunt Shannon, and me to research his role by asking about the personality traits Big Daddy had that fooled Hoffa, the Kennedy’s, and a team of almost 500 FBI agents who had pursued Hoffa since the 1950’s; he never served in the military.)

I tweak a few characters in my memoir for discretion and to move the story forward at a reasonable pace. The most obvious will be Tim, who is mostly Tim but is blended with me, Mike, a person who chose to remain anonymous, and a handful of our colleagues from the time. We were all paratroopers in 1st Battallion 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division during the first Gulf War of 1990-1991; I was in Delta-Company, and the only cherry who hadn’t parachuted into Panama over Christmas of 1989. (The 504th didn’t jump, but Mike transferred from the 505th, which had been on DRF-1 during Panama, into the 504th’s recon platoon in 1993; and the other guy, who I’ll call Ass Muncher, was in the 504th’s Delta Company – the heavy machine gun and anti-armor company – when we were on DRF-2 and the 505th’s failed DRF-1 inspection in December of 1989, hence one platoon of the 504th jumping into Panama with the other battalions, a handful of Navy Seals and a couple of guys from Delta Force, and around 20,000 support troops. (It’s likely that all of us agree that Brian Dennehy acted like an asshole.) There are too many of us to detail everyone, especially because we’ve now known each other for 30+ years and have changed and evolved like most people, so I chose to focus on dialogue between Tim and me in 2019, which should sum up the parts of my story relevant to Big Daddy.

Similarly, Lea was my high school girlfriend who knew Big Daddy, and Cristi was my wife who knew all of my family except Big Daddy; they overlap in real life, and I blend dialogue with them to focus on my family rather than teenage dating drama and my life after leaving Louisiana.

All magicians are real, but our dialogue crosses time and space with permission of the magicians or their surviving family; I was in the Baton Rouge chapter of The International Brotherhood of Magicians, the Pike Burden honorary ring #178. I’ve known these people since I was a kid, most remember Big Daddy, and we’ve been chatting about him and Hoffa and the Kennedys for forty years. Magicians are good at keeping secrets, so we never shared our thoughts before now, and to do so efficiently I blended some of our chats across time.

Finally, as a transparent disclosure, I wrote this remembering that Hillary Clinton broke my finger, but he didn’t. Hillary Moore did. When I verified name and dates for one of my earlier drafts, I discovered that 1990 scoreboards had been copied onto internet records with LAwrestling.com, and they showed Hillary Moore, captain of the Capital High Lions, wrestling Magik Partin, co-captain of the Belaire Bengals, in the 1990 city finals at 145 pounds; below our names, and aligned with Hillary’s, was the captain of Clinton high school and the 152 pound finalist, so I may have taken a mental snapshot when I stepped onto the mat and muddled my memory. Two years later, in the fall of 1992, I met Mike in the 82nd’s pre-Ranger course, when nine of us were left after 278 began, and when we chatted about what led 269 people to failing or dropping out, we learned that six of us had wrestled in high school, and that was remarkable; Governor Bill Clinton had just become President Clinton, and we were all on the president’s quick reaction force and had, for the first time, heard the name Hillary Clinton. I showed my poorly healed, gnarled finger and said that Hillary Clinton broke it in finals, which sounded funny to us and it became a running gag over the next 30 years. I included a couple of those puns in dialogue with Tim, because that’s how I recall them regardless of the information I uncovered with 2020 hindsight and the internet.

This memoir is dedicated to my mother. As of now, it’s called A Part in History. The story begins on March 1st, 2019, in Havana, Cuba, when I arrived on an entrepreneurship visa lingering from an Obama administration loophole and met with Tim to have fun diving and climbing, and to research my grandfather’s connections to Fidel Castro. When I arrived, I listened a voice mail from my mother, Wendy Anne Rothdram Partin, who was a 16 year old girl when she met my dad and conceived me, and who would pass away a few weeks later. Her passing changed the perspective of my memoir, and now it include on her part in the story, how she met my dad, and my grandfather’s role in history.

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