Preface

“Punch them in the gut first. Get it out of the way. Then tell them what to do, and go from there.”

Jimmy Hoffa: circa October 1971, New Jersey Federal Penitentiary1

In the summer of 2019, Martin Scorsese’s 3 hour, 29 minute opus, The Irishman, opened in theaters. Investors spent $257 Million making the film, and it starred all of the biggest names actors, many of whom had worked with Scorcesse in his gangster films over the previous few decades. Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Ray Ramona, and many more viewer magnets stared in The Irishman. which suggested it would explain Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa’s famous 1975 vanishing. In this version, the film says he was killed by a Teamster leader and mafia hitman, Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan, based on his 2004 memoir, “I Heard You Paint Houses.” To paint houses was mafia lingo for painting walls red with spattered blood, and Frank says he painted a suburban Detroit home red with Hoffa’s blood on 30 July 1975.

My grandfather, Baton Rouge Teamster leader Edward Grady Partin Senior, had a small part in the film as the Teamster leader in Hoffa’s inner circle who was also a mole, working with U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to find “something” or “anything” against Hoffa; it worked, and my grandfather’s surprise testimony in 1964 convicted Hoffa jury tampering, and sent Hoffa to prison in 1966. He was portrayed by the burly actor Craig Vincent as “Big Eddie” Partin, a simplified character to match Craig’s physical appearance and Italian-American accent; in Baton Rouge, where he spoke with a southern drawl Craig couldn’t master, we called my grandfather Big Daddy. Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan knew Big Daddy well and mentions him throughout his memoir, focusing on Big Daddy’s interactions with President Nixon and national war hero Audie Murphy, but those parts were omitted from the film because the focus was on Hoffa and the man he trusted but allegedly killed him, not on the man he trusted who sent him to prison.

What stuck in my mind was from before The Irishman was filmed, when Craig called my family to research Big Daddy’s. At the time, my uncle Kieth Partin was still president of Teamsters Local #5, and Aunt Janice ran the Partin family genealogy website. Craig asked me to help him understand the personality traits that led people like Hoffa, Bobby Kennedy, FBI to trust him and to be intimidated by him. It’s more than just brute size, and Craig wanted to tap into it. Like all of the few people who remember Big Daddy, especially those of us who were at his funeral in 1990, we couldn’t answer Craig’s question concisely.

Craig’s part in The Irishman was so simplified it only garnered about five minutes in the final cut, but it got me thinking: how do you characterize a person like Big Daddy?

I read “I heard you paint houses” and saw “The Irishman,” I saw what Scorsese did: he changed the camera angle to show Big Eddie Partin as even bigger and more looming, a snapshot of storytelling to show how one person would be unafraid to be a mole in Hoffa’s inner circle of brutal Teamsters and mafia heads; in other words, Scorcesse made him larger than life. But, Scorsese admitted he was making a film to sell tickets, that $257 Million was a lot to owe to investors, so to simplify the script and move the story about Hoffa along. That bothered me, not because of family ties, but because it’s the bigger story that keeps getting brushed aside to give people what they want: a simplified answer to what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.

I decided to write a memoir to describe what my grandfather was like. I try to keep it light. A lot of the story is harsh, and metaphors are more fun to write and read than what really happened. I make a few jokes, and whether funny or not, they are just jokes: appropriate for the characters in this book, and not meant to offend anyone other than the person I call a dumbass, asshole, or jerk.

The story centers around my grandfather’s funeral on 16 March 1990, my senior year of high school and two weeks after my final wrestling match; who attended tells you more about him than I could in an entire book. A year later, after trading my wrestling team for an army team, I was in the middle of the first Gulf war, and I link that into what I learned about my grandfather. This story isn’t about my service, but I’d be a jerk if I didn’t begin any memoir I by acknowledging my teammates from the 82nd Airborne Division.

They are called The All Americans, America’s Guard of Honor, and the quick-reaction force of American presidents. (What that’s important is simple: Big Daddy was cited by America’s leaders as an all-American hero when he was not.) The All Americans were my teammates after the wrestling team centered around my grandfather; for the next few years, my team centered around the 82nd.

To get it out of the way, here’s they’re history, and my image of them as a kid about to join the army. In the late 1970’s to late 1980’s, The 82nd was on the news every couple of years, usually to take over an airport and extract American embassies and citizens during a local military conflict. The 82nd was the first to arrive by airplane or parachute in Honduras (1979), The Dominican Republic (1982), Grenada (1985), Panama (1989-1990), and Sadia Arabia and Iraq (1990-1991); Panama was a 30 day occupation to overthrow President Noriega, and Saudi Arabia was to “draw a line in the sand” against Saddam Hussein’s 400,000 soldiers and the world’s largest fleet of tanks that had just invaded Kuwait, and were poised to invade Saudi Arabia. For decades, the 82nd Airborne served on two-hour call for presidents who had the power to send 12,000 All American paratroopers into battle for 30 days without approval from congress. (I think about that every time I’m tempted to vote for a dumbass, asshole, or jerk.) This time, the 82nd held – in my opinion – a judiciously placed line in the sand for 30 days; congress approved action, and a coalition of nations followed. Nine months later, the 82nd was still there and spearheading the ground invasion of 560,000 allied soldiers, led by General Stormin’ Norman Swarrtzcoff. The ground war ended, officially at least, with the capture and destruction of Khamisiyah Airport, a base of Soviet MiG fighters and Saddam Hussein’s storehouse for the chemical nerve agent Serin.

My first platoon in the 82nd was Anti-Tank Platoon #4, Delta-Company, 1st Batallion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment (pronounced with a cadence: AT4, Delta Company, 1st of the 5-0-4). There were about 15 to 18 of us in AT4 at any given time, and the Delta-Company “Delta Dawgs” ranged from 85 to 100 anti-armor infantryman (standard M16’s and M203’s, plus 50 caliber machine guns, MK-19 grenade launchers, and TOW II missiles). We were one of the small teams that spearheaded the battle to capture Khamisiya, which is known as the epicenter of a chemical weapons explosion that has lingering effects to this day. This isn’t that story, but it overlaps my grandfather’s funeral and therefore is a part of his story.

A memoir is based on memory, so anything I say is inherently flawed. I wrote what I believed to be true, and I cited original sources when I could. Sometimes, to keep the voices at a reasonable volume, I blend old army buddies into single characters and condense our conversations. (The wrestlers, on the other hand, are the real team, because they were the ones there when my grandfather was sick and dying, and there were only a few of them compared to hundreds of paratroopers behind the Khamisiya story. And all of my family are true to life, so I guess it’s only the Delta Dawgs I’m compressing.) To prevent writing how most of us talk in daily chatter, full things like “um,” “hmm,” “Dude,” and “I guess,” I compressed conversations into dialogue, “so that what’s said moves the story along.”

The first part of this story is dedicated, in part, to All Americans past and present, wherever they are now: may they rest in peace.

This story isn’t about the 82nd or my service, it just has to be mentioned because it was such a big part of my life around Big Daddy’s death and the years that followed. And it shaped my views in ways I hope are transparent; getting it out of the way now lets me focus on Big Daddy, and my small part in his story, and how I got there: all of that will be covered in the introduction.

The first chapter begins on 01 March 2019, just after I learned my grandfather would be portrayed in a film; it was then that I decided to start a memoir centered around his funeral and my service, just to describe who he was as a person, and the memoir is a memoir of wanting to write it based on what was relevant to the world then. Coincidentally, a month later, on 05 April 2019, my mom passed away; a memoir doesn’t have the luxury of a planned plot, and you deal with things as they come up, so this ended up also being a memoir with an overlapping center of my mom’s funeral, thirty years after my grandfather’s funeral, and linked by me, Jason Ian Partin.

My mom was Wendy Anne Rothdram Partin, one of the few people left alive who knew both my father and my grandfather, and her story overlapped ours. Because of her passing, my memoir warped to include weaving her story into my grandfather’s; it was as if I learned who she was by writing my story with 2020 hindsight, and seeing my family through her young eyes; she had me at 16, when she knew nothing about the Partin family, and she died when I was 46, just beginning to realize I knew less about my grandfather’s part in history than I thought, and nothing about my mom’s. Like a lot of people who learn to love their family too late in life, I was a dumbass to not have seen what she must have experienced as a young mother in the Partin family. Until her dying day, she joked that she was born WAR, and that marrying a Partin WARP’ed her more than war ever could.

For someone else to understand her part in history, we’d need a shared vocabulary, like her sarcastic humor and puns on her initials and our last name. That’s why I structured this book to begin with my grandfather’s funeral and the first Gulf war, then go from there. At the end, I hope you know her like I do, and understand who killed President Kennedy and why.

Knowing what I know now, I’d be an asshole if I didn’t also dedicate this memoir to my mom, WAR; may she rest in peace.2

JiP 🙂

This was AT4 in 1991; the peace-sign holding Kurdish civilian with us didn’t survive Iraqi retribution after the war (not all stories are funny). I’m the lone oddball on your left; the camera is mine, and one of the Kurds snapped the shot.
And this was the first of two 15,000 bombs dropped on Khamisiya airport after we led the capture of it. You can almost smell Saddam Hussein’s serin nerve agent from where we’re standing (you could definitely smell us – it had been months since we saw a shower or had more than two sets of clothes). I took this photo with my disposable camera.
This is AT4 again, just after capturing Khamisiya (that’s a MK-19 automatic grenade launcher, like the one John F. Kennedy used in Vietnam). We smelled really, really awful. I took this photo, too.
And this is AT4 just before the JFK Assassination Report was released, when we were in my room back in Fort Bragg, after a shitty jump and all-around shitty week in some godforsaken shit hole in a country whose name I still can’t pronounce. I’m the guy in the middle; I inherited my grandfather’s smile, otherwise there’s no resemblance (he was much bigger, hence his nickname, Big Daddy, and he had blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair). I can’t recall how we smelled, but I guarantee Bull and Skinny Foster were the nastiest smelling out of us three. We don’t recall who snapped the shot, but we think it was the other Foster.

This is still a work in progress, and the introduction will change as I add or delete sub-plots.

Go to The Table of Contents

Footnotes:

  1. I made that up to make a point: don’t believe everything you read or hear. Probably the biggest thing that has kept President Kennedy’s assassination from being understood are anchor biases and sharing opinions; it’s hard to discern which information to trust. Any snapshot of something in my memory is just that; but most of my story is public information already trusted public information, so I try pepper the headers and footnotes of each chapter with references to court records, books (mostly memoirs of the people involved, and when I quote them it’s from their books), FBI reports, the 1979 congressional committee on assassinations Report on The Assassination of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and a personal family letter that, combined, paint the picture of who my grandfather was as a person, probably what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, and what I believe happened to President Kennedy and why.

    If you just want those parts without all of the background, skip to “Introduction, Part II” and go from there, though you’d miss the build-up to a punchline if you don’t read, “Introduction, Part I.”
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  2. Wendy Rothdram Partin, a resident of St. Francisville, LA, passed way on Friday, April 5th, 2019 at the age of 63. Wendy attended Glenoaks High School in Baton Rouge, LA, and retired from Exxon Mobil. She is survived by her son, Jason Ian Partin, of San Diego, CA. She was preceded in death by her mother, Joyce Rothdram, and her aunt and uncle, Lois and Robert Desico, all of Baton Rouge, LA. During her retirement, she became a master gardener and enjoyed helping people with their lawns. She enjoyed cooking, and took food to anyone she knew who was ill or grieving. Wendy loved animals, and worked with local shelters to foster dogs until they found permanent homes. She passed away unexpectedly from liver failure. In lieu of gifts or a service, please spend time sharing what you love with your neighbor, listen to what they love, and help each other.

    My mom’s obituary was printed in the Baton Rouge Advocate on April 9th and 10th, 2019; like most of our Partin history, it is available online, and an analog original is on public record somewhere.
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