Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part I
“Here, Edward Partin, a jailbird languishing in a Louisiana jail under indictments for such state and federal crimes as embezzlement, kidnapping, and manslaughter (and soon to be charged with perjury and assault), contacted federal authorities and told them he was willing to become, and would be useful as, an informer against Hoffa, who was then about to be tried in the Test Fleet case.
“A motive for his doing this is immediately apparent — namely, his strong desire to work his way out of jail and out of his various legal entanglements with the State and Federal Governments. And it is interesting to note that, if this was his motive, he has been uniquely successful in satisfying it. In the four years since he first volunteered to be an informer against Hoffa he has not been prosecuted on any of the serious federal charges for which he was at that time jailed, and the state charges have apparently vanished into thin air.“
Chief Justice Earl Warren in Hoffa versus The United States, 1966; Warren was the only one of nine justices to vote against using Edward Partin’s sworn testimony to convict Jimmy Hoffa.
I heard that Hillary was born in mid-October of 1971, and that he began kindergarten at age 5. He turned 6 a month later, and by the end of the 1989-1990 high school wrestling season he was a legal adult about to turn 19. He had been able to vote in presidential elections and buy beer since the 11th grade (possible because Louisiana was the last state in the United States to raise the legal drinking age to 21), and he had been shaving since the 10th grade.
I knew he shaved. At tournaments, everyone in the same weight class would stand side by side to weigh in, and referees checked for clean-shaven faces because a few wrestlers shaved a few days before a match to make their chins and arms abrasive, like course sandpaper. But Hillary shaved his face smooth each morning before competing. He kept his body hair natural.
He had Brillo pads for forearm hair, and thorny spines for chest hair. He would pin me seven times our senior year of wrestling, and the joke my co-wrestlers retold was from Eddie Murphy’s standup skit: “His underarms are so hairy, it looks like he has Buckwheat in a headlock!” When Hillary pinned me, I had had either had my nose in his armpit or my face squished against his chest seven times. (The joke was that I looked nothing like Buckwheat.)
His stout hairy forearms were so strong that he could get anyone to turn their head without needing to cheat. If someone grabbed his leg, he crossfaced the hell out of them, and they usually let him go. Or, they’d be distracted enough for him to high-leg, low-leg over and end up with a two point reversal before turning and pinning you with a half-nelson, a move where you pull up on their head with your armpit crushing your face. Two times.
If you wore braces, like I did my junior year, his crossface would shred your lips and you’d choke on your own blood while he pinned you.
I never once saw him cheat; he was an exceptionally talented wrestler. I wouldn’t be surprised if he became famous.
The closest thing my friends and I had to compare him to was Wolverine, the then practically unknown comic book anti-hero with a hairy body, an Adamantium skeleton and claws, and a gruff disposition; unlike the version made popular by the 6’2″ Hugh Jackmon years later in the Marvel movie franchise, the original Wolverine was only 5’2,” though his arms and legs bulged through his yellow skin-tight costume that looked a lot like the Robert Lee High Rebels and their crotch-hugging yellow wrestling singlets.
Wolverine’s famous line was something like: “I’m the best there is at what I do, and what I do isn’t very nice.” He always scowled, as if telling you from far away that he could rip your head off if you gave him a reason to.
Hillary was like Wolverine, and I never asked him probing questions about his background. That’s probably why we got along so well; we never talked. Not once. In two years.
Hillary was only 5’4″ and hadn’t grown taller since the tenth grade. His burly arms were proportionate, not gangly like a lot of growing teenagers, and his body didn’t waste precious pounds on an otherwise useless extra inch of arms or legs. His thighs bulged with muscles and his lats were wide. To fit into Capital High’s skin-tight maroon wrestling singlet, he had to wear a larger size than his lean stomach needed. His uniform looked like a second skin stretched tautly across his dark chest and thighs, but it hung in loose folds around his stomach unless he was bridging in his signature move, a brutal bear-hug throw worth a full five points in summer Freestyle tournaments, one that would almost always end in a pin for Hillary. He could clamp a bear hug and arc backwards 360 degrees without his feet leaving the ground; at that moment, with his opponent’s feet flying through the air above him, Hillary’s maroon singlet was pulled tautly across his stomach.
That was the closest thing Hillary’s body ever came to staring at the ceiling; he was undefeated, and only a few people took him down. And I had never seen anyone get Hillary to his back. But, I saw at least two dozen wrestlers get pinned with his 360 degree throw. He was good at it, and flocks of wrestlers from other teams would gather to watch him compete. At the Robert E. Lee Invintational, schools from as far away as Texas, Florida, and Oaklahoma came to Baton Rouge to compete in Lee High’s annual tournament.
Those Rebels in their silly little yellow suits, we’d joke from under our blue hoodies.
No one doubted that Hillary was the best wrestler in the state, not even the kids from other states (who, it were to turn out, were only there to test themselves against New Orleans’s Jesuit High BlueJays, who had been state victors since probably before the civil war). Over summers, he competed on the national Freestyle circuit, and he devastated the Bluejay’s 145 pounder every time they met.
For three years, Hillary had been captain of the Capital High Lions, a 100% African American school located near the downtown state capital building. The surrounding homes were Capital neighborhood, once a nicer area near downtown and the port of Baton Rouge.
Like a lot of downtowns back then, interstate cut through and over Capital, and created bridges to other highways and sliced communities in half. Capital was separated from both the old and new state capital buildings by the criss-crossed and elevated interstates 10 and 110.
I-10 was the longest; it stretched from near the east coast of Florida through New Orleans and Baton Rouge and all the way to the Santa Monica pier near Hollywood; if only five miles longer, it would stretch coast to coast.
The confusingly named I-110 only stretched from the downtown Baton Rouge to a row of petrochemical plants 30 miles north of Baton Rouge.
Along the way, I-110 passed the Baton Rouge International Airport, Glen Oaks High, and the turnoff to Parish road 19 and a row of billowing smokestacks from petrochemical plants like Exxon, DuPont, CoPolymer, and Exxon’s subsidiary, Exxon Plastics, where my mom was a secretary. Her mother, my Granny, was a secretary at CoPolymer, and had been since 1958. Locals called that part of I-110 Chemical Alley, and Teamster 18 wheelers from Local #5 moved in and out all day, shipping raw gas and processed plastic across America. Their 18 wheelers bypassed the airport, train station, and Mississippi River port on their way to I-10.
A dozen or so miles after Chemical Alley was Zachary High, where my cousin Jason went to school and my great-uncle, Big Daddy’s little brother, Joe Partin, was both principal and the beloved football coach of the Zachary High Broncos. A lot of engineers worked at the petrochemical plants, along with a lot of secretaries who were grateful to finally have more jobs farther north of downtown. They settled in Zachary and sent their kids to school under Coach Joe, which is what everyone called him even after they made him principal.
A mile after Hwy 19, I-110 just quit and died. It ended only two football fields from Scotlandville Highway and Parish Road 61, a two lane parish highway that had been around since Teamsters drove horse wagons. Scotlandville was a predominately African American neighborhood and school, but balanced by a new magnet program for the engineering professions that recruited white kids from Baton Rouge willing to take the 45 minute bus ride. Famous alumni include the guy who invented the Sim City video game franchise, and Stormy Daniels, a Baton Rouge Gold Club stripper would become a household name after she accepted President Trump’s settlement in her sexual harassment suit.
(I attended Scotlandville Magnet my ninth grade year; I was dropped off by my mom, so it was not such a long commute, and it was close to Granny’s house, by the airport, so I could stay there after school and wait for my mom to get off work and drive us all the way back to near Belaire. But, because of failing grades and a long rap sheet of disciplinary actions for pranks, like breaking into school and rearranging bookshelves, I was told I couldn’t return. For years, I’d joke that Stormy Daniels did two things I couldn’t: graduate Scotlandville Magnet High School for the Engineering Professions, and slide down a pole with the grace of a ballerina.)
If you continued past Scotlandville for a few miles along Hwy 61, you reached Fort Pickens State Park, site of the longest battle of the civil war and a popular field trip for Baton Rouge schools. We grew up seeing old white men dressed up like rebel soldiers, waving Dixie flags, and staging mock battles with muskets and bayonets. It was such a short ride from Scotlandville that a few of us were disciplined for cutting class and going there instead; I must have seen the show dozens of times.
After Fort Pickens, you drove along miles of pine forests and passed a paper mill that had Teamster trucks hauling logs in and paper out. A dozen or so miles later, you’d reach the quaint plantation borough and retirement community of Saint Francisville, which was only an hour upriver from Baton Rouge by boat. In the civil war, northern iron-clad warships with steam engines trudged upriver to bombard the small towns of southern Louisiana, and to this day a hobby around the plantations of Saint Francisville is scouring the area with metal detectors, hoping for mementos of an era a mere 107 years before I was born.
A few miles beyond that was Woodville, Mississippi, a sawmill driven town and where Big Daddy was born in 1928, and where his mother, my Grandma Foster, was born in 1903.
In the mid 1950’s, when Big Daddy first took over the Baton Rouge Teamsters, the criss-cross of overhead interstates were just being planned and built, and they changed Capital High more than the civil rights acts of the late 1960’s could help. The area became undesirable, and white families moved to newer, nicer subdivisions as far away as Zachary and gated communities popping up around Saint Francisville. The phenomenon was nation-wide but especially pronounced in the deep southern cities like New Orleans, Atlanta, Baton Rouge, and Burmingham; urban poverty followed the interstates, and the worse pockets seemed to all share a street named after Martin Luther King Junior, which was a common punch line in standup comedy routines of famous African American comedians like Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. And, because schools were, and mostly are still, funded mostly by local taxes, the wealthier neighborhoods got better schools and the poorer ones had to fight against entropy to maintain what they had.
It was that urban poverty that produced the hairy terror I knew as Hillary Clinton.
No wonder he scowled.
I was the opposite. I usually wore a sly grin, though that’s more of a facial feature I inherited from Big Daddy that makes it look like we’re smiling even though we’re not, because our cheekbones naturally pull up on the corners of our mouths; now that you know that, you can see it in our photos.
I was born on 05 October 1972. I began kindergarten in late August of 1977, when I was a mere four years old. I was always the youngest, smallest kid in class. Had I been born a few days later, I would have been too young to start kindergarten and would have been pushed back a year. If that had happened, or if the cutoff date were shifted two days, I would have began my senior year at 17 instead of 16. I would have been 18 my senior year, and able to vote and buy beer like Hillary. Instead, I began my senior year as a 16 year old, 145 to 147 pound, 5’5″ tall, mid-pubescent kid with disproportionately long arms, wide hands, long knobby fingers, and scuba fins for feet.
My toes were bulbous monstrosities best kept hidden inside of tightly fitting size 11 wrestling shoes that, on my feet, looked like two torpedos strapped to the bottom of my legs. My blue Belaire singlet was pulled taunt by my long torso. I had negligible underarm hair, and my pale face and shoulders were dotted with bright red pimples that stood out against the blue singlet. I had auburn hair that seemed to turn red with the increased sunlight of spring, and I kept it cut like a mullet, stopping just before my collar so I was still within state wrestling rules.
My mullet was less to be fashionable and more to hide a few scars on the back of my head, including an 8-inch long, finger-width thick scar and shaped like a big backwards letter C that I had hidden with hairstyles of the 70’s and 80’s ever since I was five years old. My left hand, which wasn’t broken yet, was already scarred and knobby. I had a smaller C shaped machete scar across my left forefinger from helping my dad cut down male plants before they seeded the female buds, and I had a sprinkling of pinpoint scars all over my hand from handling barbed wire on our Arkansas farm; I had held the machete and wire cutters in my right hand, which came out of summer trips with my dad unscathed.
I had never shaved and didn’t need to. Unlike Hillary’s Brillo pads, my arms and legs was soft like the fur on a puppy. Unless you were ticklish, they would do me no good. I never stripped naked to weigh in because I was embarrassed to have only a few scragly black hairs hidden by my underwear. (That’s not true: I stripped off my wet underwear before wiping my body off once again and stepping back on the scale to make 145.0 pounds, but by then everyone was focused on nothing but the eye-level needle bounce slowly up and down before setting on 0. I had my sweat-soaked underwear back on before anyone noticed.)
My only saving grace was that I had quads thick with muscle from hiking the Ozark Mountains with my dad most summers in the early and mid ’80’s, carrying hefty backpacks full of horse and chicken maneur to his marijuana fields hidden far from roads. We were arrested in 1985, which is how I ended up back in Louisiana and at Scotlandville in the ninth grade. After my dad went to prison in 1986 for selling marijuana, coincidentally the same year Big Daddy was released early, when I was a fledgling wrestler, at a mere 126 pounds and still wearing size 10 shoes.
I augmented my leg strength with runs in capital steps and laps up and down the Belaire football bleachers. On a few lucky occasions, I’d ride with a couple of teammates and sneak into Tiger Stadium through a gate in the apartments, then run up and down the steep steps to the top of Death Valley and turn around. Our stadium held more than 80,000 fans on game day, and at that moment we were on top of the world. We’d raise our hands and jump up and down like Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, then scuttle back down before anyone saw us.
My cross-face was strong. Not because I had upper body strength, but because when I pushed my fist across someone’s face my bulbous thumb knuckle caught and opponents nose. I was rarely taken down by a shot because my crossface would deflect their face and halt their momentum. It’s a legal move; a good crossface is essential if you don’t have strong arms yet.
But my Achilles Heel, the weakness I couldn’t seem to overcome, was my lack of upper body strength when standing. I was vulnerable to throws and bear hugs by stronger opponents like Hillary. Because he was almost two years older than I was, it was unlikely I’d ever catch up with strength. I suspected I’d eventually grow to be like all the other Partin men (I was the runt in the family; even my aunts and girl younger cousins were bigger than I was), but that was unlikely to happen between the four months of wrestling season.
The difference between Hillary and me is obvious in hindsight. Coincidentally, in the mid 1980’s a research scientist noticed that professional hockey players in Canada were statistically likely to be born in spring. At first it seemed like astrology, but then researches realized that Canadian laws required being five years old by January 1st to begin practice; kids born the first few months of the year had an entire year advantage over kids born in the final few months.
Every year after, the kids who started sooner outperformed the ones who didn’t, and they placed higher and were therefore promoted faster and received better coaching, similar to how Hillary began kindergarten as the oldest kid in class and I began as the youngest. A year at four to five years old is a lifetime on an exponential growth scale, and the differences between two kids in the same class but eleven months apart grow and multiply each year.
That research study was practically unknown until brought to the world’s attention in 2008 by a book: “Outliers, the Story of Success.” It was written by Malcom Gladwell, a Canadian by birth who became a journalist for The Washington Post, writer for the New Yorker Magazine, author of several bestselling books, and popular TED speaker. He combined other research studies to paint a bigger picture in Outliers, and he pointed out that America didn’t have the sports laws as Canada, but the age cutoff for kindergarten creates a similar academic disparity: older kids in kindergarten begin with a 17% advantage on aptitude tests. Like how older hockey players are placed in more competitive groups and therefore grow stronger in a self-fulfilling prophesy, many older American students are grouped academically and their initial advantages grow over time, which, by definition, creates a class with disadvantages.
Gladwell quoted a social justice expert and called the phenomenon of advantages from birth and circumstance “The Mathew Effect,” after the New Testament’s book of Matthew, where Matthew wrote something like:
Whoever has, will be given more, and they will have an abundance; whoever does not have, even that will be taken from them.
Most of Gladwell’s books focused on topics about how little companies outmaneuver big ones, detailed in his book David and Goliath (named for the biblical and David who defeated a much larger foe, Goliath, using only a slingshot), and how individuals have brief moments of intuition that outperform teams of experts, detailed in his book Blink, as in the blink of an eye. In Outliers, Gladwell pointed to the unseen trends that shape success, like which month you were born; but, though dozens of interviews and case studies and research reports he showed how constant, persistent determination and practice seems to help anyone succeed. He interviewed people like Bill Gates and cited famous bands like The Beatles, and pointed to the 10,000 hour phenomenon that implies 10,000 hours of effort is necessary to overcome obstacles.
Most outliers, by Gladwell’s definition, are lucky. Luck is the first and often most unseen way, he concluded, but it’s not the only way.
Others create their abundance. They are rare. America was graced with a large size and abundant natural resources, and because of international mobility we rose to the top of the world after WWII; but, our rising waters didn’t raise all ships, and a few pockets were left. The Matthew Effect isn’t just for people. Entire regions of the world are affected. Because of how schools were funded and the mobility of lucky people, The Matthew Effect, more than the interstates or civil rights struggles, had been Capital High’s nemesis.
I viewed Hillary Clinton differently than most wrestlers did. I didn’t view him just as captain of the Lions and a three-time state champion, I viewed him as an Outlier. He was me, if I had been born black and the son of a slave instead of white and the son of Ed Partin Junior.
Grandma Foster, Big Daddy’s mother, helped me see it that way the year Big Daddy was released from prison. Slavery wasn’t a long time in her mind. She was born in 1903. One of the first stories I recall her telling me, was that after Big Daddy’s father, great-Grandpappy Grady Partin left her during them in the Great Depression, she struggled to raise her three sons in the small lumber mill town of Woodville, Mississippi. It across the river ferry and only a short motorcycle ride away from Saint Francisville through a dense forest of pine trees.
Her soft and mumbled rural Mississippi accent provided a link to the past that no book or film could recreate. I was 123 pounds and around 5’2″ back then, the runt of the family, but I was still taller than Grandma. She looked up at me, a remarkably tiny woman given the size of her children and grandchildren. She was about as big as Yoda, and looked a lot like him; she had his wispy gray hair and wrinkled cheeks, and a twinkle in her eye of wisdom earned from having lived many more years than anyone else in the room. She was more than 80 years old, the oldest person I knew. She had Big Daddy’s sky blue eyes, but hers had been turning more and more hazy from cataracts, and by the mid 1980’s they looked more like Yoda’s dark grey muppet eyes. Like Yoda, she hunched a bit, probably from compressed vertebra over a lifetime of labor. She sounded poor.
“Some of our neighbors was slaves as chil’ren,” she told me. “They had it worse than we did.”
“But they worked hard and never complained,” she said.
“But there weren’t no work during the depression,” she said. “We all did what we had to do to feed our chil’ren.”
She and her neighbors lived in shotgun shacks that surrounded the sawmill, she said. It was a popular style after the civil war. In southern working towns, the thin facade of shotgun shacks allowed a lot of homes to be packed within walking distance of where cheap labor worked, like at the Woodville sawmill.
“We was all poor,” she said, “But we was white. At least no one looked down on us.”
If it hadn’t been for Grandpa Foster being willing to marry her, she said, she didn’t know what she would have done to raise three boys by herself.
She would have been a catch in the Woodville during the depression. She wouldn’t have complained, she had Big Daddy’s smile, and she did sewing jobs for anyone willing to pay. When not working for someone else, she made quilts and sold them to neighbors. When they had a big cast iron pot of something on the stove, she shared after her boys were full.
When Big Daddy moved to Baton Rouge, he brought her, Grandpa Foster, and his two little brothers with him. She found a job at Dillard’s in Cortana Mall, and worked behind the counter there for almost twenty years. She retired soon after Grandpa Foster died. I never met him, but I had known Grandma since I was a little boy. Everyone knew she was home all day, every day, and could look after me last-minute. (She always had food ready; though I never told her, she had never learned to cook. I sometimes lied and told her I was cutting weight for wrestling when I wasn’t; I suspected that even Big Daddy and Uncles Doug and Joe said they were full when they really weren’t.)
Her quilts, though, were works of art, and her kind smile was a treasure.
“We was lucky,” she said.
She looked at Big Daddy and smiled a genuine smile; she had the same cheeks as Big Daddy and me, but when she smiled a genuine smile her wrinkled cheeks bunched up under her blurred eyes.
“Edward looked after us,” she said, patting his thigh. “He always has.”
“When your Grandpa Foster asked me to marry him,” she said, “he knew we was already takin’ care of.”
It’s because of Grandma Foster that I viewed the time since the end of the civil war as only a blink of an eye blurred by cataracts in an old woman’s smiling face. As she got older, she often repeated stories in her small, three bedroom, one bath house by the Baton Rouge airport Big Daddy had obtained for her, a mansion compared to her Mississippi shack. Her old eyes saw everything in the light of her memory of having been a single mother of three growing boys during the Great Depression.
Because of her, not any books or tours of Fort Pickens, I didn’t see 107 years as ancient history. She had lived through the birth of airplanes, two World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam conflict, two presidential assassinations (William McKinley and John F. Kennedy), the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King’s assassination, and the internet. She would die in 2003, soon after sending her first email to me using a Yahoo! account. It only said, “hi,” and by then that probably took her most of the afternoon at the Goodwood public library in order to learn how to hit send.
All of her stories had been orally, and I remember every one. At least every one of the ones I remember; we don’t know what we forget. But it was hard not to pay attention to all of her stories about my family.
“Edward didn’t rape that Negra girl,” she told me when I was in tenth grade.
Big Daddy had just been released from prison early, and was living with her then. The old charges were resurfacing in news.
But he had changed. He was a deflated version of what he looked like when he first went to prison in 1980, but still smiling and not denying anything Grandma said. Even sitting, his head was taller than mine.
Grandma said that when Big Daddy was a teenager, there was an air force base nearby their shotgun shack, and one of their neighbors ran a whorehouse in theirs. The nearby Air Force recruiting station that took advantage of the whorehouse, and Doug was 12 and earned a quarter for each air force recruit he brought there. That was his attempt to help put food on the table after Grandpappy Grady left, something he was so proud of doing that he would expound on it 80 years later in his 2017 autobiography, but for some reason the owner had a grudge with Big Daddy. According to what Big Daddy told Life magazine, that owner charged him with raping one of the girls without paying for it.
“Look here,” she said, pointing to the Look! and Life magazine photos of her oldest of three sons, and four of her grandchildren. Doug was never mentioned in those articles.
“It says so right here. Bobby had the FBI put a lie detector on Edward,” she said.
She flipped the Life issue to the full-page photo of his lie detector results, a series of squiggly lines that looked like the seismic detector in LSU’s geophysics laboratory, with random spikes for when 18 Wheelers rumbled near campus to drop off supplies. Under it was a photo of Big Daddy, smiling in a chair and wearing the gadgets necessary for a lie detector test, and a white lab-coat wearing person holding a clipboard and standing behind him.
“That cathouse owner told that lie,” she said, as a matter of fact. “People didn’t like unions back then, because they was uplifting all people outta poverty. When you is a Teamster leader, they say all kinds of nasty things to make you look bad.”
“Hoffa, too,” she added. “He’d say anything about Edward to get out of prison.”
She was talking about Hoffa’s books and news reports that Hoffa’s army of lawyers were banned from sharing Big Daddy’s history to jurors. Hoffa’s two autobiographies and Walter Sheridan’s 1972 “The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa” were on her dining room baker’s rack, along with all the Look! and Life magazines with Big Daddy showcased as a hero. The books looked new, but the corners of the Look! and Life magazines were stained with burnt roux and bent upwards; she showed those photos of her son and grandchildren atop the Baton Rouge State Capital Building, with Bobby Kennedy calling her boy an all-American hero.
“But there’s another Edward Grady Partin, one the jury never got to hear about,” Hoffa wrote in Hoffa on Hoffa.
“This Edward Grady Partin is mentioned in criminal records from coast to coast dating from 1943, when he was convicted on a breaking and entering charge, to late 1962, when he was indicted for first-degree manslaughter. During that twenty-year period Partin had been in almost constant touch with the law. He had had a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps. He had been indicted for kidnapping. He had been charged with raping a young Negro girl. He had been indicted for embezzlement and for falsifying records. He had been indicted for forgery. He had been charded with conspiring with one of Fidel Castro’s generals to smuggle illicit arms into communist Cuba.”
The 1962 kidnapping and manslaughter charges were what Hoffa always referred to using “bunny ears” to say Big Daddy was in jail “for a minor domestic problem.” That was what Chief Justice Earl Warren ranted about in Hoffa versus The United States, though he emphasized the perjury charges to imply that Big Daddy had perjured in Hoffa’s trial.
I never learned why the other justices allowed Big Daddy’s testimony to send Hoffa to prison. Growing up, I heard a lot of theories that Hoover had something on all of them, including Warren. (Another theory was that Hoffa had something on Warren, and another was that Warren was simply sharper than the other eight guys.)
“But Edward was a good boy,” Grandma said. “When Bobby asked him to get Hoffa, he did. They put a lie detector on him, and the FBI said he told the truth.”
She tapped the Life magazine.
“He saved Bobby’s life,” she said.
She pointed to the full-page photo of Big Daddy smiling and holding Aunt Janice on his lap, with her laughing face gazing at his lovingly. (Like most adult women I knew, Grandma adored the Kennedy boys and called them by the pet names Bobby, Johnny, and Teddy.) Under that photo it said something like: “Ed Partin stopped a plot to kill Bobby Kennedy and his children.”
“And the lives of his chil’ren, too,” she said, tapping the photo like morse code to a beat that matched her voice.
“Now, what kinda man do that?” she said, as a mater of fact. “He get away with it, too, if not for Edward.”
She patted my hand and her face bunched back. It took a few breaths, and then she said: “And he told Bobby that for him to risk his life, they had to take care of his momma. And Jean, too. And they’s children.”
She looked at me and said: “Your daddy is alive because of Edward. He told Walter to put all those FBI agents around Jean and his children and protect them, and he did.”
“That’s when Bobby bought me this house,” she said proudly, waving her gnarled arthritic fingers around her living room and out the double glass door towards her back yard. The hint of airplanes taking off and landing was barely noticeable. Her back yard faced a thick forest of pine trees, a rarity in her working class subdivision, and she adored that yard. Despite being old and hunched over, she pushed her gas powered lawn mower and maintained her vegetable garden religiously. It was a shame; she grew lovely vegetables, but somehow she overcooked them in pot that began with a burnt roux, as if her old eyes couldn’t see the color changing from brown to black, and her old nose couldn’t smell the change from baked bread to the arid stench of burnt oil and flour.
“He wouldn’t rape no girl,” she said. “Even if she was a Negra,” Grandma emphasized.
“Edward was a good boy,” she said, patting my hand and smiling up at me. “He weren’t like his daddy. Grady was a lush and ran out on us.”
“Edward haven’t never drank,” she said, gazing lovingly at Big Daddy. “He has always been good like that.”
“You a good boy, too,” she said, looking back up at me. “Your daddy was a good boy, too.”
She patted my hand and smiled at the thought of three generations of her children all alive at once.
“But Ed’s got problems in his head,” she said, meaning my dad, Edward Grady Partin Junior. “Walter says it’s like a disease. But you don’t got it.”
“And look, Hon.” She waved her hand towards the faint roar of airplanes landing and taking off from the airport, and the faint but constant rumble of Teamster 18 wheelers headed to and from the lumber mill and the row of petrochemical plants ten miles north of her home.
“Edward had the governor build the interstate here. Think of all them people,” she said, “Black and white, that’s got jobs now because of Edward.”
She patted my hand and gazed lovingly at her son, who smiled back at us and practiced his Miranda Rights. Even sitting down, his head was taller than mine. He just sat there, smiling as if he knew the funniest joke in the world he’d never share. It’s no wonder so many people looked up to him.
I hadn’t understood any of that conversation, I just remember Grandma’s adulteration and Big Daddy’s silent smile. I’d hear the same stories several times over the next few years, but I was only twelve years old when Big Daddy was released from prison and moved in with Grandma Foster and first paid attention to my family history. And, like everyone in Baton Rouge, I always wondered why I-110 had been built.
I-110 benefited northern Baton Rouge as if it were built for that purpose. Growing up, I’d overhear adults talking about how Big Daddy was responsible for getting politicians to build I-110 and put the petrochemical plants far away from railroads or river ports. Teamsters drove petrochemical products past the airport, train tracks, and Mississippi River port that led upriver to most of the country and downriver to all of the world. I-110 joined the cross-country I-10 in an elaborate sky bridge that circled downtown and allowed 18 wheelers to barely slow down as they swung onto I-10 and into the lifeblood of America. In the oppossite direction, they hauled in things bound for global trade, especially Latin America and the Caribbean Islands, including Cuba before Kennedy’s 1961 embargo against Fidel Castro’s communist regime. President Kennedy, I had heard, used New Orleans to get a case of Cuban cigars before declaring the embargo.
Almost every product bought or sold in America or overseas depended on Teamsters, which is why then Senator Kennedy first tried to stop Hoffa; with his word, Hoffa could call a strike and slam the American economy to a halt. He knew it, and so did the 2.7 million Teamsters loyal to him and paying monthly dues that built the Teamster Pension fund up to $1.1 Billion in untraceable cash, a ridiculous sum of money back then, more than the annual output of some some countries. Big Daddy was a small version of that, but to Louisiana, which depended on shipping petrochemical and agriculture products by truck and anything at all through the port of New Orleans.
Big Daddy was an outlier. He had no high school diploma, had never attended college, and was a known criminal, yet somehow he ran the state of Louisiana. In Walter Sheridan’s 1972 opus, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, Big Daddy’s discussed more than anyone except Hoffa. To explain him to the public, Walter explains how he became an outlier by referencing my grandmother, Mamma Jean, who finally got him to settle down.
“Partin, like Hoffa, had come up the hard way. While Hoffa was building his power base in Detroit during the early forties, Partin was drifting around the country getting in and out of trouble with the law. When he was seventeen he received a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps in the state of Washington for stealing a watch. One month later he was charged in Roseburg, Oregon, for car theft. The case was dismissed with the stipulation that Partin return to his home in Natchez, Mississippi. Two years later Partin was back on the West Coast where he pleaded guilty to second degree burglary. He served three yeas in the Washington State Reformatory and was parolled in February, 1947. One year later, back in Mississippi, Partin was again in trouble and served ninety days on a plea to a charge of petit larceny. Then he decided to settle down. He joined the Teamsters Union, went to work, and married a quiet, attractive Baton Rouge girl. In 1952 he was elected to the top post in Local 5 in Baton Rouge. When Hoffa pushed his sphere of influence into Louisiana, Partin joined forces and helped to forcibly install Hoffa’s man, Chuck Winters from Chicago, as the head of the Teamsters in New Orleans.”
The difference between Jimmy Hoffa’s blurb about Big Daddy’s history and Walter Sheridan’s thoroughly researched account is that Walter omits the rape charge from when Big Daddy was 17, and he ignored the charges of collaborating with Fidel Castro. And, instead of just saying Big Daddy received a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps, he says Big Daddy stole a watch.
I don’t know why Walter omitted the rape charge or anything about arming communist Cuba ahead of President Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion, but I can explain the discrepancy between his and Hoffa’s version of Big Daddy’s dishonorable discharge.
According to stories I recall and Doug’s autobiography, “From My Brother’s Shadow: Teamster Douglas Westly Partin Finally Tells His Side of the Story,” the jury found Big Daddy innocent because one juror said, “Ain’t no white man need to go to jail for nothin’ he did to a nigger girl.” That man was the town barber, known to talk to anyone willing to sit down and get a haircut.
That case had to be hidden, even in the 1964, because it was too abrupt for the national news coverage that followed Big Daddy’s testimony against Hoffa. But, Big Daddy was found guilty of petit larceny when he and Doug stole all the guns in Woodville, Mississippi, and sold them to the New Orleans mafia, which was only a few hours downriver. That, and his marine records, couldn’t be swept under a rug when people looked at Big Daddy.
The Woodville judge let Doug, who was only 12, go free. Doug was only a tool, a patsy who allowed himself to be tied to a rope and lowered through the roof of Woodville’s Sears and Roebuck hunting store by Big Daddy, who was only 17 but already so strong that he could raise Doug and his armfulls of hunting rifles, shotguns, and pistols back up through the roof hand-over-hand. Big Daddy had noticed that the doors and windows were locked and barred, but that the roof was vulnerable if you could climb up there and hoist things out. He recruited his little brother to help, and that story was how I learned to break into Scotlandville Magnet High School for the Engineering Professions in 1986; it”s still true, and a surprising number of security guards for big buildings don’t check the air conditioning or ventilation vents on roofs.
In 1943, in the middle of WWII, Big Daddy and Uncle Doug sold all but a few of the guns to a couple of mafia men in New Orleans, about two hours downriver from Woodville. They bought motorcycles with the money, and had the summer of their lives, riding all over the south with pockets full of gas money in an otherwise poor time for people, until a sheriff noticed and found the remaining guns in their shared bedroom of Grandma’s shotgun shack house. They were arrested and pleaded no contest. The judge gave Big Daddy a choice: join the marines and fight in WWII, or go to jail.
Big Daddy joined the marines and punched out the basic training commanding officer two weeks later. On a whim, he reached down and removed the unconscious captain’s watch. Stealing doesn’t get you discharged, it gets you demoted; Big Daddy was dishonorably discharged for punching out an officer. But he liked to talk about taking the watch, which may be why Walter reported it that way.
Big Daddy returned to Woodville as a free man with a new watch on his thick wrist. He had honored his contract with the judge to join, not to remain in, the marines. He was more free than most men his age, because with a dishonorable discharge, he was unable to be drafted and was only 18 years old. A whole life unfolded before him. He had all the time in the world to do whatever he wanted.
With all the young and able men gone to war, Big Daddy quickly rose to power as the union leader for the Woodville sawmill workers. He then soon also ran the truck driver’s union, which brought in trees and carried out cut lumber. Though he never worked in the sawmill or drove a truck, he was soon running unions for both of those industries, and began growing his union like a franchise growing among similar towns. As Doug wrote, “Ed did what Ed wanted to do,” and he was really good at getting out of contracts and influencing juries.
Jimmy Hoffa was rising to the top of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters around that time, and he knew that Big Daddy was the type of person who could negotiate trucking contracts and grow the Teamsters in Louisiana. Hoffa was already in and out of court cases with then Senator John F. Kennedy, who was chairman of the U.S. labor relations committee, already on his back. Knowing how to fix a jury was a useful skillset to someone fighting two or three mosquito cases a year, petty trials meant to pester Hoffa and slow him down.
Hoffa already knew Big Daddy’s history when he asked my grandfather to head the Baton Rouge Teamsters. The Teamsters Hoffa selected as leaders were all like Big Daddy, and it was another local Teamster president, Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan, who would claim to have killed Hoffa on behalf of the mafia. I’m sure both would have made different choices with the gift of hindsight.
All history, not just Doug’s memoir or Earl Warren’s report on Kennedy’s assassination, is subject to mistakes. Memories are flawed, people are biased, and information has unknown gaps that are uncovered long after people form their opinions. In the official congressional report on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior, began just after Hoffa vanished and couldn’t speak for himself, researched for fifteen years, and kept classified until President Bill Clinton released the first part in 1992, they reversed the hastily assembled 1964 Warren Report and said that the three main suspects for orchestrating Kennedy’s murder were Jimmy Hoffa, New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Miami mafia boss Santos Traficante Junior.
All of the reports about Big Daddy from before 1992 were flawed, because so much information was hidden back then. Walter, a former senior FBI agent, campaign manager for both President Kennedy and Senator Kennedy’s presidential run, and investigative journalist for NBC, had his own biases and motivations; so did the team of high paid lawyers working for both Hoffa and the mafia. All made mistakes.
I’ve read a few hundred books about Hoffa and the Kennedy’s, but I haven’t learned what it meant to “forcibly” install Hoffa’s man, Chuck Winters. Big Daddy never once spoke of things not publicly reported. Whatever happened, I assume it wasn’t very nice. Everyone I knew who knew Big Daddy, whether they admired him or were repulsed by him, felt that, in addition to being big, rugged, handsome, and charming, he was like Wolverine and Hillary Clinton: the best there was at what he did. And, apparently, he did whatever he wanted.
I told Craig Vincent the same thing when he was researching his role for 2019’s “The Irishman,” and to this day I think they were all right about my grandfather, in their own ways. As Doug wrote in the final chapter of his autobiography: “You either loved Ed or you hated him. There was no in between.”
To Grandma Foster, he was always a good boy who looked after his family.
To me, who had read the books on her shelf, I was striving to be more like Coach.
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