Introduction, Part II: A Part in History
“We can report that Edward G. Partin has been under investigation by the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office in connection with the Kennedy Assassination investigation… based on an exclusive interview with an Assistant District Attorney in Jim Garrison’s office. We can report that Partin’s activities have been under scrutiny. In his words: “We know that Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald were here in New Orleans several times… there was a third man driving them and we are checking the possibility it was Partin.”1
WJBO radio, New Orleans, June 23rd, 1964; as reported by Walter Sheridan in 1972’s “The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa”
This will make a lot more sense if you start at the Introduction, Part I: Wrestling Hillary Clinton; it’s a quick story about my grandfather’s 1990 funeral, which happened two weeks after my final wrestling match against Hillary Clinton, the three-time Louisiana state champion at 145 pounds. This is the story of my grandfather, Big Daddy, and his part in history; because I’m his grandson, I’m a small part in his story.
In 1924, Big Daddy was born in 1924 in Woodville, Mississippi, to Grady and Bessie Partin. Great-grandpa Grady was a lush who ran out on them during the Great Depression, and my eventual grandfather began providing for Grandma Foster (Bessie later remarried) and his two little brothers, Doug and Joe. All of them had Grandma Foster’s sky blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair and all were remarkably large, but only Big Daddy used his size for gain.
In 1943, a 17 year old Ed and a 12 year old Doug broke into the Sears and Roebuck store and stole all of the guns in Woodville. Big Daddy ripped a hole in the roof, tied a rope around Doug’s waist, lowered him down hand over hand, and pulled him up back up with Doug’s arms filled with hunting rifles, shotguns, and pistols. They did this until the warehouse was empty, then hauled the guns two hours downriver to the city of New Orleans, and found men wanting to buy lots of stolen guns. With a bag full of cash, they bought motorcycles and rode all the way back to Woodville. They were arrested by the Woodville sheriff after speeding through town, hooting and hollering and showing off, and the sheriff found a few rifles and shotguns they had saved and hidden in their shared bedroom of Grandma’s aptly named shotgun shack.2
Doug was set free because he was a minor, but the judge gave Ed a choice: join the marines or go to jail. He joined, punched his commanding officer in the face, stole a watch off the unconscious body, and became a dishonorably discharged marine within two weeks of the judge’s decision; he returned to Woodville a free man. He turned 18, and with all the young men away at war, he easily took over the Woodville sawmill union. After the war, when trucks and gas were in supply again, he also ran the trucker’s union of southern Mississippi.
A young International Teamster President named James “Jimmy” Riddle Hoffa admired Big Daddy’s style. In 1954, Big Daddy and his young wife, Norma Jeanne Partin (my Mamma Jean) moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Big Daddy began to run Teamsters Local #5 under Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa was amassing an army and needed lieutenants. His 2.7 million Teamsters paid him monthly dues that was set aside as untraceable cash in the Teamster pension fund, estimated to be around $1.1 Billion (an unfathomable amount in 1950’s money), and Senator John F. Kennedy of the U.S. labor relations committee had set his sites on reigning in Hoffa’s power and taxing the Teamster pension fund. Hoffa and Kennedy’s clashes began making national headlines, and Hoffa grew more powerful in Everyman’s eyes because of Kennedy’s public failure to reign in the Teamsters.
The Louisiana Teamsters controlled all shipping in and out of every state. In Louisiana, that included the ports of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and all trade with Fidel Castro in Cuba. Big Daddy would fly there and meet with him and his generals, allegedly selling ships and arms to communist Cuba, and training Castro’s generals (we never learned what that meant, but I assume it was in how to get guns and ships in and out of New Orleans). The cold war against the Soviet Union was escalating, President Eisenhower began planning what would become the Bay of Pigs invasion under President Kennedy.
In 1960, Senator Kennedy was elected president, and he appointed his little brother, Harvard law graduate Bobby Kennedy, as U.S. Attorney General with two tasks: get Hoffa and stop organized crime. Organized crime was a new concept in America that the government denied publicly, but secretly worked to stop it. Bobby publicly embraced his role to stop Hoffa, and he told America he would stop at nothing to get Hoffa; media began calling the confrontation between Bobby and Hoffa “The Blood Feud.”
Bobby’s partner was legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the staunch anti-communist and forefather of electronic gadgets used by the FDI for surveillance and skullduggery, a closet cross-dresser and deviant who, for 37 years, ironically used secret recordings of senators and congressmen’s lives behind closed doors to blackmail them and force his agenda. Hoover learned about Big Daddy delivering arms and ships to Castro ahead of Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and he assigned the New Orleans FBI office to follow my grandfather and monitor Teamster activity in and out of New Orleans. Hoover’s 1962 records of Big Daddy were classified, but they’d resurface in 1992’s release of the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King JuniorAssassination Report show that in 1962, Big Daddy met with Jimmy Hoffa in an undisclosed location, probably Teamster international headquarters, and Hoffa plotted to kill Bobby Kennedy.
In Hoover’s report, Hoffa wanted Big Daddy to get plastic explosives, like the military’s C4, from a contact they both knew to be Carlos Marcello , the New Orleans mafia boss, who would probably get them from Castro. Hoffa wanted to toss explosives into Bobby’s home, according to Hoover, and he let this part of his files be shared publicly; a scene based on this meeting was shown in 1983’s “The Blood Feud,” with the famous actor Robert Blake portraying Hoffa. The camera zooms in on Blake’s face, and he ignores Brian Dennedy, who was portraying Big Daddy, and wistfully imagines killing Booby. He gently lofts an imaginary grenade into Bobby’s home, and he whispers: “Boom…” He relaxes, and smiles.
Big Daddy said he was averse to killing kids, so they shouldn’t bomb the home. Hoffa agreed; and that’s part of why Big Daddy was called an all-American hero. But the film omitted the second part of Hoover’s report on plotting to kill Bobby, the part where Hoffa said that if Big Daddy were adverse to explosives, they could recruit a sniper with a high powered rifle, one outfitted with a scope to shoot from afar, and that the sniper could shoot Bobby as he rode through a southern town in one of the convertibles “that snot-nosed brat Booby” likes to ride around in and show off.
Hoffa often called Bobby “Booby” in public, and the chapter in Hoffa’s autobiography about Bobby is titled: “That spoiled brat.” At one point during a news conference, Hoffa lunged at the much-taller Bobby in front of reporters to show who was the bigger man. Bobby, in return, pulled no punches in his public pursuit of Hoffa, strangling him with petty misdemeanor charges that required all Hoffa’s attention, and making his business dealings more difficult under the watchful eye of 500 federal agents. Their public feud was called “The Blood Feud” for a reason. On journalist called it the most expensive, over-publicized, fruitless pursuit of one man in any government’s history. Everyone in America knew Hoffa would be suspected if anything happened to Bobby Kenedy. If they used a sniper to kill that snot-nosed brat, Hoffa said, they’d have to ensure he couldn’t be traced back to the Teamsters.
A few months after Hoffa and Big Daddy plotted to kill Bobby Kennedy, Big Daddy helped 23 year old Baton Rouge Teamster Sydney Simpson kidnap his two young children after he lost them in divorce court. Though he was averse to killing kids, my grandfather seemed okay with kidnapping them; that was the “minor domestic problem” Jimmy Hoffa quipped about for the next ten years. Sydney and Big Daddy were arrested and put in the Baton Rogue jail. Coincidentally, Big Daddy was also charged with manslaughter in Mississippi, saving their police from searching for him across the state line. Word got out, other charges began to roll in. Big Daddy faced life in prison.
Big Daddy told Sydney, “I know a way to get out of here. They want Hoffa more than they want me,” and when Sydney asked what if he knew enough to help the FBI get Hoffa, Big Daddy replied, “It doesn’t make any difference. If I don’t know it, I can fix it up,” and said, “I’m thinking about myself. Aren’t you thinking about yourself? I don’t give a damn about Hoffa. . . .'” Big Daddy made a phone call, and a few days later Bobby Kennedy had him sprung from jail. Poor Sydney remained and went to prison, but his words were recorded by attorneys.3 Through Walter, Hoover and Bobby offered Big Daddy immunity and wipe his record clean if he would infiltrate Hoffa’s inner circle and find “something” or “anything” to remove Hoffa from power.
That was a violation of the 4th Amendment, which was hand-written by our founding fathers in 1791 to privide privacy in American homes and to protect us from unlawful search and seizure. It says:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Bobby was a Harvard law school graduate and the lead lawmaker for America, so I assume he had read the 4th amendment, but his sending Big Daddy into Hoffa’s camp without particularly describing anything was a violation of the 4th amendment. Bobby had a black eye in the face of his big brother that blurred his view, and he would probably have made a deal with the devil to get Hoffa.
Big Daddy accepted the offer and called Hoffa to set up a meeting. He talked about his legal trouble in Baton Rouge, and Hoffa trusted Big Daddy so much that he asked his shadow, a young man named Chuckie O’Brien, to toss Big Daddy $20,000 in cash from the safe for legal fees and went on with business as usual. Big Daddy began telling Walter everything he saw and heard behind closed doors. As Chief Justice Earl Warren would write, Edward Partin “became the equivalent of a walking bugging device.”
For the next two years, the Get Hoffa Task Force revolved around what he told Walter, and Walter wrote transcripts for Hoover, and Hoover wrote summaries for Bobby; in November of 1963, only a week before his death, Bobby and Hoover escalated the report about Big Daddy and Hoffa’s plans to President Kennedy, saying the plot may be targeted towards the president and not Bobby. He said there were always threats, and he proceeded with his plans to visit Dallas.
On 22 November 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed by at least one gunman as he rode through downtown Dallas in his open convertible. Less than an hour later, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for shooting and killing Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit with a bulky .38 revolver, about the size of a standard police issue, outside of a movie theater a few blocks away. Oswald was arrested, and police found his 6.5 mm Italian surplus carabine in the 6th floor of a book repository overlooking where Kennedy was shot; the mass produced Italian army rifle was notoriously inaccurate, but a few months before Kennedy was shot, Oswald’s had been retrofitted with a scope by a Dallas gunsmith, as if Oswald was planning on shooting something from a distance. He was immediately charged him with killing both Tippit and President Kennedy. When he was arrested, Oswald exclaimed, “I’m just a patsy!”
Two days later, before he could testify what he meant about being just a patsy,Oswald was being led from the police station in handcuffs, and was shot and killed by Jack Ruby.
Hoffa, upon hearing the news of Kennedy’s death and Oswald’s arrest, was in Florida in a pre-planned meeting, and he told his entourage: “Bobby’s just another lawyer now.” He told all Teamster halls to keep American flags at full mast, and said he was glad President Kennedy was dead.
Evidence rolled in. Oswald was a New Orleans native who, a few months before Kennedy was killed, inexplicably moved from New Oreleans to Dallas and was given a job in the book repository. Police matched the 6.5mm rounds with a failed assassination attempt on a Dallas-based army general a few months before, a missed shot through this office window that embedded in a wall near the general’s head (Oswald’s marksmanship records from the marines were abysmal). Photos of Oswald with his bulky pistol and that Italian carbine were found, and his pro-Castro pamphlets were collected. Oswald was a New Orleans native and Castro sympathizer, a former marine, and a defector to The Soviet Union who returned to New Orleans with a Russian bride and their baby girl; their trip from Russia was inexplicably paid for by the FBI, who said they did that every now and then. Oswald trained in the Baton Rouge civil air force under the alias Harvey Lee.
But Oswald was never tried, because American law gives a defendant the right to defend themselves.
Jack Ruby attracted less attention, and no one doubted his guilt because he shot and killed Oswald on live television and surrounded by hundreds of police officers, reporters, and townspeople who saw and heard everything. Kennedy’s death overshadowed officer Tippet’s murder, but Dallas knew that they lost a hometown hero. Tippet was a decorated police officer, a WWII soldier who won the bronze star, and a respected family man in his neighborhood; Oswald would probably be a target for revenge. He was heavily guarded so that he could stand trial. Two days after arresting Oswald, police escorted him out of the police station in handcuffs, and somehow Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, air force veteran, low level mafia runner, and associate of Hoffa and my grandfather, walked through the police station, past a few dozen armed police officers outside, slid a Colt .38 “detective’s special” handgun from his trenchcoat pocket, and shot Oswald in the stomach point-blank. Despite all of the police protection, Ruby was so close to Oswald that he could shot a double leg takedown, had he been a wrestler instead of a hitman with a plan to shoot Oswald at least a few times. He only got one shot off before police subdued him. A Pulitzer-prize winning photo showed Oswald doubled over in pain, and Ruby’s middle finger on the trigger, a mafia technique for close-up kills. (In theory, when shooting from the hip with a stubby gun, you’re more accurate if you point your trigger finger along the barrel and pull the trigger with your middle finger; killers say it’s the ultimate Fuck You.) A few hours later, Oswald was pronounced dead; Ruby would eventually be found guilty of first-degree murder by a jury and sentenced to life in prison. Records would show he called Jimmy Hoffa a few times in the weeks leading up to Kennedy and Oswald’s death, but that was not reason to suspect Hoffa for silencing Oswald. Ruby’s role would practically be forgotten, because most people were focused on who, if anyone, was behind Oswald’s move to Dallas and preparations for shooting people.
Vice President Lyndon Johnson became president and spearheaded the investigation into Kennedy’s death, appointing Chief Justice Earl Warren to head the committe, and granting the 70 year old J. Edgar Hoover a waiver from forced retirement so that Hoover could continue growing the government’s surveillance program. Johnson then escalated Kennedy’s 50 or so thousand “special forces,” championed by Kennedy to minimize loss of life in the decade-old, CIA-led mission to halt the spread of communism, and soon 500,000 drafted soldiers fought in the Vietnam police-action with billions of dollars in high-tech equipment, prompting some people to claim Kennedy’s death was motivated by internal ideologies and financed by lucrative military contracts. Others claimed the mafia, a new term for organized crime that was a new concept in America, was to blame. And of course, many people suspected Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters, though few other than Hoover and Bobby knew of his links to the heads of mafia families (I don’t think even Walter knew the extent). Hoover, Warren, and a handful of other high level people worked on finding out if there had been a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.
Ten months later, the hastily assembled 1964 Warren Report was mistaken when it said that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed President Kennedy, and it was also mistaken when it said that Jack Ruby acted alone when he shot and killed Oswald. Behind the scenes, a second, longer study was planned; it would become the 1979 JFK and MLK Assassination Report. I don’t know why it was classified, or why the second part of Hoffa and Big Daddy’s plot was kept confidential to all but the president’s inner circle of security clearances.
Around the same time the Warren Report was released to public scorn, and in a small courtroom in Chatanooga, Tennesee, Jimmy Hoffa’s otherwise minor and easily dismissed jury tampering trial was underway. It was the Test Fleet case, a charge of jury tampering in 1962, from soon after Big Daddy was sprung from jail. Hoffa was annoyed, but confident of another win against the nipping little snot-nosed brat. Bobby and Walter and a team of federal agents reporting to Hoover lurked everywhere. Big Daddy was in Hoffa’s corner of the courtroom, near Chuckie. When he stood up as the surprise witness, Hoffa’s otherwise stoic and calculating face went pale, and he exclaimed “Oh God! It’s Partin!” in front of the jury, probably sealing his fate before Big Daddy gave his testimony.
Big Daddy smiled the smile that made people trust him, and in a calm southern drawl captured pretty well by Brian Denehy in the 1983 film Blood Feud. He told the jury that Hoffa suggested he bribe a juror by tapping his back pocket and implying that $20,000 “should do it.” There was no other evidence. A few days later, the jurors deliberated less than four hours and found Jimmy Hoffa guilty of jury tampering. The judge sentenced Hoffa to eight years in federal prison based solely on Big Daddy’s word.4
At Hoffa’s trial, Hoover announced that he’d assign extra federal marshals to protect the Partin family from inevitable retribution. He then released parts of FBI records to Life magazine, and told media that Big Daddy thwarted a plot by Hoffa to bomb Bobby’s home using plastic explosives. Edward Grady Partin was dubbed an all-American hero, and Big Daddy and Mamma Jean’s five children – my dad (Edward Grady Partin Junior), Janice, Keith, Cynthia, and Theresa – were showcased alongside the Johnson family, by then known as the first-family of America’s new president. (Mamma Jean’s absence from photos and quotes wasn’t discussed, though she’s mentioned extensively in court records as Big Daddy’s “estranged wife.” In American law, people are allowed to remain silent rather than testify against their spouse.) To America, the star witness against Jimmy Hoffa was a trustworthy family man who risked the lives of his children to steer America in the right direction by standing up to corrupt unions and the newly recognized mafia: an all-American hero. Big Daddy returned to running Louisiana Local #5 with federal immunity. To the best of my knowledge, he never returned to Cuba.
Over the next two years, Hoffa’s army of attorney’s attacked Ed Partin’s credibility in national media, claiming he was a Castro sympathizer, murderer, dope fiend, and thief. He had perjured. He had “raped a Negro girl,” but he was let free because one juror would not vote guilty; Doug said that juror told everyone, “Ain’t no white man should go to jail for nothing he did to a Negro girl” (the juror used another word). But no one could find records for all the crimes, as if the proof had vanished like a magician’s tiny red handkerchief.
It wasn’t a lack of resources. Hoffa had $1.1 Billion in untraceable cash, and he invested it like a pro. He lent $121 Million to mafia families so they could build casinos and hotels, but only if they hired Teamster truckers to haul building materials, guns, and a slew of things. And he lent to Hollywood film producers, so they could hire Teamster trucks to haul equipment and trailers to house actors. He had almost 3 million fiercely loyal Teamsters motivated to keep him in power, mafia bosses who wanted to keep him in control of the pension fund, and the best lawyers money could buy.
Frank Ragano, known as the “lawyer for the mob,” had only had two clients other than Jimmy Hoffa, New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcell and Miami mafia boss and Cuban exile Santos Trafficante Junior, men known for their ruthless tactics and debts to Hoffa (Marcello alone owned $21 Million from money he borrowed to build New Orleans hotels). Hoffa used his lawyer’s contacts and everything in his power to discredit Big Daddy or intimidate him into recanting his testimony. They began to spread word that all mafia debtwould be forgiven if “someone” could do “something” to get Edward Grady Partin to change his testimony, or to have Hoffa’s case thrown out. Ragano and other Hoffa attorneys argued that Bobby violated the fourth amendment by sending Big Daddy into Hoffa’s camp to find “something” or “anything” against Hoffa, rather than specifying exactly what they wanted. Hoffa’s lawyers spent two years preparing for a battle in the United States Supreme Court, which only sees a handful of cases out of the thousands submitted each year.
Despite the clear violation of our constitution, Hoffa’s lawyers failed. Chief Justice Earl Warren, a household name by then and the chief justice for cases like Roe vs Wade, Brown vs The Board of Education, and the trial that gave us Miranda Rights, oversaw “Hoffa vs. The United States.” It’s just as much of a landmark case as the more commonly known ones, and is still taught in practically every law school in America today, but it is only of interest to prosecutors planning surveillance. Hoffa vs The United because a bent 4th Amendment weakens American freedoms like a broken finger weakens a kung-fu grip against Hillary Clinton in the Baton Rouge city wrestling finals. Of nine justices, two abstained from voting in Hoffa vs The United States, and only Warren dissented against using Big Daddy’s testimony. Some people claimed Hoover blackmailed the justices, others say Bobby convinced them, but none of the justice’s memoirs allude to why they voted the way they voted, or why they abstained.
In 1966, Jimmy Hoffa, one of the world’s most powerful men with an army of attorney’s fighting for him, began an 11-year prison sentence based on Big Daddy’s word. For his work detail, he spent six years pounding mattresses eight hours a day, six days a week; at night, he wrote and iterated his autobiography, and plotted how to regain control of the Teamsters.
Coincidentally, Jack Ruby died in prison that year from lung cancer, after claiming the FBI poisoned him with cancer-causing pills (Ruby was a lifelong smoker). For two years, his statements vacillated between him loving President Kennedy and wanting to protect his widow from seeing a lengthy trial, saying he was an avenger for Kennedy’s death, to spikes of moodiness and ranting about conspiracies and recanting his earlier statements. Though I can’t find the reference today, what sticks most in my mind is what I’d read in 1993, in a bulging dossier given to me by someone I truest; it was a photocopied 1965 small-town news article verified by an FBI agent whom I also trusted, and the reporter quoted Jack Ruby as saying: “No one will ever know my part in history.”
In 1971, Jimmy Hoffa published his first autobiography from prison. In it, he ranted about Big Daddy and that snot-nosed spoiled brat Booby, and said the situation was too complex for even Hollywood to swallow. He would know; Hoffa had been financing Hollywood films for years, and his autobiography included character descriptions to help future screen writers. He then sent word to President Nixon, who was up for re-election, and offered his endorsement and the support of almost 3 million voting Teamsters if Nixon would offer Big Daddy a pardon for perjury, allowing him to recant his 1964 testimony without penalty and free Hoffa.
Richard “Dick” Nixon called WWII hero and star of 40 Hollywood films, Audie Murphy, known world-wide as “America’s Most Decorated War Hero,” a legendary infantryman with 278 confirmed kills against Nazi forces in practical hand-to-hand machine-gun combat. His memoir, “To Hell and Back,” was made into a film that defined the genre. He was awarded every medal America had to give, some of them multiple times. If anyone could get something done, it would be Audie Murphy. Even mafia hitmen with names like Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan spoke highly of Audie – 278 kills in close combat is remarkable by anyone’s standard. And because most mafia families had fled the Nazis and Italy’s Mussalini, they had additional respect for Audie single-handedly taking out platoons of Nazis. Everyone followed what was happening, thinking that if anyone could free Hoffa, it would be President Nixon and Audie Murphy; even Walter Sheirdan and the stragglers from his Get Hoffa team trailed Audie and Big Daddy, wondering what would happen.
Dick sent Audie him to Baton Rouge with a draft pardon, asking him to convince Big Daddy to free Hoffa. Audie flew a small private plane there, and landed in the same airport Harvee Lee had used ten years before, the same airport where CIA legend and gun-running pilot Berry Seal called home base. It’s a small airport north of downtown, just off I-110, and not too far from Teamsters Local #5 headquarters, and four miles from my grandmother’s house, so it was convenient for everyone. A few weeks later, Audie escorted Big Daddy to San Diego – where Audie lived and raced horses at the Del Mar racetrack – and they drove to Nixon’s beachfront home north of Camp Pendleton, perched on the cliffs above a challenging surf spot humorously called “Tricky Dick.” Big Daddy refused again.
Audie persisted, and returned to Baton Rouge in his plane with four colleagues; he was broke by then, suffering from PTSD, and on a national crusade to educate America and the returning Vietnam veterans on the suffering that even he experienced as a result of combat; he was a good person, and did the best job he could. But he was desperate, and he left his plane at the airport and met with Big Daddy and begged him to free Hoffa, so that Hoffa would finance another film for the aging actor and war hero; being a celebrity doesn’t put bread on the table or hay in the stalls. Audie declined lucrative advertising dollars for whiskey and cigarettes, but he said he knew he was a role model for kids and he wanted to be the best hero he could, so he was trying to use his history as best he could, and get back into the saddle again.
On 28 May 1971, two weeks after Audie left his final meeting with Big Daddy in Baton Rouge, his plane went down in Virginia for what was then unknown reasons, killing Audie and all four passengers instantly. Most people suspected Big Daddy had sabotaged Audie’s plane. In Uncle Doug’s 2017 autobiography, “From My Brother’s Shadow: Teamster Douglas Wesley Partin Tells His Side of The Story,” he says that if you knew Ed Partin, you’d have no doubt that he was behind killing America’s most decorated war hero and an airplane full of innocent passengers. So did the mafia, which helped Big Daddy’s image and therefore there was no reason for him to deny the charges.
Because Walter Sheridan was so intent of stopping Hoffa from paying for a pardon, he tailed Audie Murphy daily in 1971, documenting every detail and publishing it in his 1972 opus, “The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa,” and dozens of military historians and nonprofits dedicated to the memory of Audie Murphy tracked his death. (A decade later, research eventually led people to believe Audie’s aging plane simply failed, but that doesn’t change the anchor bias that people had about Big Daddy killing him, which was so strong that Doug still claimed it up until his death in 2020.)
Unreported, and ignored in Doug’s autobiography, was that in 1971 my dad, the 17 year old drug dealer for Glen Oaks High School, Edward Grady Partin Junior, deflowered a 16 year old girl named Wendy Anne Rothdram; ten months later, on 05 October 1972, I was born in the Baton Rouge General Hospital at 9:36 in the morning, weighing 8 pounds and 9 ounces. (Audie died before I was born, but I’ve read everything he’s ever written. He never made it through Airborne, which he called “the paratroops,” and because of his small stature some people assumed he wouldn’t accomplish much in the standard infantry, proving that size doesn’t always matter.) It’s probably because of Audie’s role in history that I focus so much on his time with Big Daddy, though they only overlapped for a couple of months.
After Audie died, Hoffa donated at least $1.1 Million to Nixon’s reelection campaign, and for the first time in Teamster history the Teamsters endorsed a republican. Nixon won and pardoned Hoffa on the condition that he remain out of the Teamsters for eight years, and that he help Nixon’s image and the growing public outrage at the Vietnam conflict and the Mai Lai massacre by going to Vietnam and negotiating the released of American prisoner’s of war.
Hoffa never made it to Vietnam. He famously vanished from a Detroit Parking lot on 30 July 1975, creating one of the FBI’s most famous unsolved mysteries. Coincidentally, American began withdrawing from the Vietnam conflict ended that year; almost 56,000 Americans had died, and so did 4.5 million Vietnamese. Around 1,200 missing soldiers are still unaccounted for. To this day, no one knows why. President Nixon was impeached and resigned. President Ford pardoned him a few years later, worked with a congressional committee to secretly solve President Kennedy’s murder, and was defeated by a young naval nuclear engineer and peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter in 1976.
In 1979 and behind closed doors, the U.S. congressional committee on assassinations completed the JFK and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report with 15 years more research and information than was available to the 1964 team headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren. For reasons I don’t know, President Jimmy Carter kept it classified. Among many things, Carter was dealing with the oil crisis and our economic fallout, 300 Americans held hostage on a runway in Iran and a failed rescue attempt by the nacent anti-terrorist team Delta Force, and probably many things behind closed doors that probably no one but J. Edgar Hoover knew about. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior also kept the reports classified in the 1980’s.
Over Christmas and New Years, 1989-1990. the world watched President Bush Senior send America’s Quick Reaction Force, the 82nd Airborne, parachuting into Panama to overtake Noriega’s government. A slew of soldiers from the President John F. Kennedy special forces warfare center were sent in, and two Delta force guys and a few SEALS died; I don’t recall how many Panamanians were killed. That March, I wrestled Hillary Clinton, and Big Daddy died and FBI agents surrounded us, asking what his final words were. (“No one will ever know my part in history.”)
Eight months after Hillary Clinton broke my finger, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait with 400,000 soldiers and the world’s largest fleet of tanks since Hitler’s forces in WWII. A few hours later, on 03 August 1990, President Bush Senior sent the fatigued 82nd Airborne to “draw a line in the sand.” Eighteen hours later, a few C-141 airplanes full of young paratroopers armed with machine guns, and a few platoons of three-man Humvee teams armed with 50 caliber machine guns and TOW II anti-tank missiles capable of piercing 38 inches of armored steel, landed in the 117 degree August heat of Saudia Arabia; they heard the news about a line being drawn, and quipped that they were only “speed bumps in the sand.”
But they did their job, and they held their ground and soon more than 560,000 allied troops from a coalition of countries stood behind them, with General Stormin’ Norman Scwartzcoff in their corner. The 82nd was given Mk-19 automatic grenade launchers, the same type John F. Kennedy used in Vietnam as a merchant marine, but upgraded with armor-melting rounds that would penetrate up to 2 inches before exploding with a 5 meter kill radius, a brutal but ideal weapon against armored personnel carriers. I don’t know why it took so long, especially because the TOW is practically useless against tanks that can fire off eight to eleven rounds in the time it takes to guide a missile towards them. Nine months and a lot of 50 cal and MK-19 rounds later, the allies liberated Kuwait. Most Americans and allied soldiers returned home alive by the end of 1991.
In 1993, three years after Big Daddy died, President Bill Clinton released the first part of the JFK and MLK Assassination Report. Clinton was a staunch fan of Kennedy, so he may have released the JFK assassination report out of respect, but most commentators say that it took voters demanding that he do it. They were riled up only after 10 million people saw Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, which was based on New Orleans district attorney’s memoir “On the Trail of Assassins,” and somehow it was leaked that the government had a classified report dating back to the 1970’s.
President Bill Clinton released approximately 60% of the report, and everyone could see that it reversed The Warren Report, and concluded that though they didn’t have proof and therefore it’s inconclusive (seriously – you can’t make that up, and the government probably had a department of redundancy department add noncommittal words to their lengthy and meandering report), the three leading suspects with the means and motivation to kill President Kennedy were Jimmy Hoffa, Carlos Marcello, and Santos Trafficante Junior.
Big Daddy was omitted from the JFK film and from Garrison’s book, because both witnesses who saw him ride with Oswald and Ruby in 1962 had vanished, and an alleged black and white photo of them together in the months before Kennedy was shot and killed also disappeared. But what was in the JFK report was discussed ad nauseum, finally deemed unlikely as part of a bigger plot, probably by the government’s office of coincidences.
There were thousands of other names and coincidences, and a deluge of books and films flowed from the pens of people who knew one name or another. Most were crap. They made the waters of history murky, and the list is too long to bother with. The full report was kept classified. Each president released a bit more, but part is still confidential to this day. I don’t know why the report remains partially classified, or what Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, Biden, and then Trump again saw in it that they wanted to prevent the public from seeing. If I were president, I’d want everyone to know how to stop killing presidents. But what do I know about presidents?
In 1992 I was a 19 year old paratrooper on President Clinton’s quick-reaction force. Like all enlistees, I swore to defend the U.S. Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to obey the president. I had already served on President Bush Sr’s quick reaction force, the one famous for drawing a line in the sand against Saddam Hussein’s fleet of tanks, and I sported a chest full of medals that would have blown my 17 year old mind if I were to see me two years later. My dress greens were adorned with shiny silver parachutes with wings, helicopters with wings, and a few other things with wings (Airborne likes wings). My lapels shone with the blue and gold crossed muskets of an infantrymen, and fancy braided ropes dangled from my shoulders and looped under my arms. A medal from the prince of Kuwait, a desert palm tree with two crossed scimitars, was prominent on my chest. A few rows of colored ribbons were where my 36 gold pins had been two years before; I still don’t know what they all meant, though paperwork for one credited me and a buddy with capturing some of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard in a bunker outside of the Khamisiya airport in what was described as brief but intense underground fighting in a pitch black bunker.
Atop my closely cropped hair, I wore a maroon beret with a flaming gold sword across a blue shield. My size 14 feet sported spit-shined jump boots. My shoulders were adorned with two red and blue 82nd Airborne patches – a big AA for All Americans, topped with an Airborne tab – one on my left for my current unit, and one on my right that was mine forever, saying I had fought in combat with the 82nd Airborne.
My uniform only wore an expert rifle marksmanship badge, but I was certified expert in practically every American and NATO weapon, from the simplest bayonet test, to 50 caliber machine gun demonstrations, to expensive anti-tank weapons, like the $1.1 Million Tube Launched Optically Tracked Laser Guided Missile (TOW-II) firings that garnered attention from the highest levels. Big Daddy had taught me how to shoot, and he was an excellent marksman and trainer of marksmen. Unlike the hunting rifles and scopes of my youth, the M16 machine gun has a pistol grip that, when combined with my tenacious grip, led me to being remarkable accurate shooting a lot of rounds in hostile situations. Similarly, the 50 caliber requires two firm grips, and a stance not unlike a wrestling stance to hold that much force on target. The TOW system had state-of-the-art infrared scopes to find warm engines or resting bodies miles away, and our night vision googles amplified light and gave us super powers unimaginable to even J. Edgar Hoover.
I wore my uniform with a similar pride that I worn Belaire’s letterman jacket, but with the calm of someone who had been a part of many small teams by then. I saw my uniform in a bigger picture. I was an All American with a uniform that said so, just like I had been an all-Louisiana wrestler wearing a simple white t-shirt that told the world what I stood for: we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the evil rulers of the world. When I stepped on the mat, I represented Coach and the Belaire Bengals; when I wore my uniform, I swore to uphold the U.S. constitution from all enemies, foreign or domestic, and I answered to a calling higher than the president, because in my heart I was still co-captain of the Belaire Bengals, and I only answered to Coach. I was not religious, but if there were a God then Coach was closer to Him than any president, army chaplain, or television loudmouth with an opinion on right and wrong.
Ephsians 6:12 was on my mind daily. I spent idle time at night, reading books about history and physics and spirituality, and in the evenings, when not deployed, I focused on wrestling with the Fort Bragg wrestling team. I was 187 pounds by then, and a below-average wrestler who didn’t make the official team. The competition was fierce at Fort Bragg, the world’s largest military base in terns of population, with around 45,000 soldiers (more than the population of most Louisiana towns) from all over the world, and home of the 82nd Airborne and Delta Force. I did better as a paratrooper. Like I earned second in city finals, I earned runner up for the 82nd’s soldier of the year, second out of around 12,000 paratroopers, and was invited to train with Delta Force the summer of 1992, and in 1993 I was issued a diplomatic passport and sent to the Middle East and an unarmed peacekeeper, officially called a “communications liaison,” with President Carter’s lingering Multinational Force and Observers peace-deal from the 1979 Camp David accords. But, to this day, I’m still most proud of wrestling Hillary Clinton, and Coach shaking my hand and telling me I did a good job.
By 2019, I was a middle aged man who wore nondescript clothes and had an unimpressive job title, and I had a collection of scars and awkwardly healed bones that I rarely discussed whenever coworkers complained about things I rarely paid attention to. I had long since ignored most of the JFK assassination theories. Whether or not Oswald could have made the shot was immaterial; I could have made it, and, like my dad and grandfather trained me to shoot well, I could probably train anyone to make the shot. As for multiple shooters and an orchestrated plot, any one of my teams could have pulled off the operation and coordinated multiple shots at once. I was convinced my grandfather was involved, but I was unsure at what level. I rarely discussed news with anyone.
I managed an innovation laboratory at the University of San Diego, one of 17 Catholic universities in America and the only one not under control of the diocese, with an admirable mission to serve the world and the poor. (Whether they did or not is similar to if every all-American hero in the news really is what they say). The lab was a new addition to the newly renamed Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering, called “Donald’s Garage” after Donaly Shiley’s widow, Mrs. Marcos, donated $21 Million in her husband’s honor. (Donald never went beyond a bachelor’s degree, but in his garage he co-invented the world’s best performing heart, a pyrolytic carbon device called the Shiley-Bjork heat valve, which was purchased for a few hundred million dollars by Pziezer.) USD tuition was a whopping $56,000 a year, almost twice as much as I earned from the GI Bill for college, and my classes were full of children of American millionaires and Middle Eastern royalty. I led a few courses in engineering, physics, and entrepreneurship; our courses immersed into the community to discuss what it means to serve the poor, and we made local news for being an ideal way to lead education teams.
At the time, USD had just launched a new “cyber-security” program, thanks to generous donations from a few philanthropists and several San Diego cybersecurity companies who wanted more local employees. The cyber-security program merged into the department of computer science and they joined the newly named Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering, named after Donald Shiley, a man who stopped at a bachelor’s degree but made hundreds of millions as the co-inventor of the Shiley-Bjork pyrolytic carbon heart valve. At the opening ceremony of the cybersecurity program, portly professors with tenured jobs and PhD degrees in leadership gave long speeches about what it takes to serve your country, and how WWIII will be fought in cyber-space. I had no PhD, and I was not invited to say anything at the ceremony.
On USD’s website, they summarized my life into a paragraph that fit the role of an innovation lab manager and an engineering instructor, that I had invented a few medical devices and started a couple of small companies. On my three page cirruculum vitae, seven years of official military service was reduced to a few sentences; on Linked, those seven years dwindled down to a single line below my first engineering job. I liked my job and working with students, and reviews overwhelmingly said I was good at it. We even made the local news as an example of altruism, just like I had with David Copperfield’s Project Magic in 1990, proving that a Partin can make the news for good things now and then.
I’m Jason Ian Partin, former co-captain of the Belaire Bengal wrestling team. Like James Riddle Hoffa, I sign legal documents using my middle initial, Jason I. Partin. I pronounce my name Jason Ian Partin (in Louisiana, it’s ee-ann). Like Jimmy, I answer to any one of my nicknames, Magik, JP, Jase, J, or Dolly (my small teams were often in other country’s with radio discipline against using real names; with a last name of Partin and Dolly Parton’s persistence in pop culture, Dolly was an inevitable nickname, a lifetime of payback for all of the jokes I made about Hillary Clinton and a Boy Named Sue). People who know me well say I have Big Daddy’s smile, though not a smidgen of his charm. I lost my Louisiana accent decades ago.
The internet has a gaggle of Jason Partin’s, including my cousin, Jason Partin, a Baton Rouge physical therapist Joe Partin’s grandson (he played football for the Zachary Broncos while I wrestled for the Bengals). But there’s only one jasonpartin.com; another url of mine, LSUmagic.com redirects there.
My website currently says I’m a part-time rock climbing guide and close-up magician, who frequently leads rock climbing trips to Joshua Tree National Park, and performs at Hollywood’s Magic Castle (only the member’s rooms so far). It mentions that I’m also some type of engineer and consultant.
My Linkedin profile adds things like my medical device patents, documents with puns built in, like “Active Compression Technology to facilitate healing of broken bones,” small implants that use tiny Nitinol springs to pull broken bones together with a focus on hands and feet, with ACT now! written in the patent application; a pyrolitic carbon wrist-resurfacing implant with a fin to stabilize it in the radial bone (it looks remarkably like a San Diego “fish” style surfboard and is dubbed The Fish); a hydrogel spine nucleus implant that rehydrates diurnally, compressing in the day and swelling at night, like a healthy nucleus does (I ran out of jokes for that one); and a handful more under Jason Partin, Jason I. Partin, and Jason Ian Partin, depending on whims of attorneys and patent agents. I’m listed as a co-author on a couple of ASTM spine fusion implant strength testing (each disc is about one square inch; balancing body weight, rucksacks, etc. leads to around 600 psi across a fusion implant), one in mixed-metal implant corrosion testing (certain types of stainless steel act like one half of a battery terminal when near Nitinol inside the body), and a safety standard for wrestling mats (impact softening, durability, anti-microbial, etc.) I wrote most of my patents, and though I don’t have a law degree, I paid attention to news every time a supreme court decisions interpreted our constitution differently. Though I no longer “obey” any human being, I take my oath to defend the U.S. Constitution from all foreign and domestic enemies seriously.
As a by-product of focusing on Big Daddy, I saw the consequences of Bobby Kennedy getting Hoffa by bending the 4th Amendment and having my grandfather look for “something” or “anything” against Hoffa. Ever since 1966, lower courts would cite Hoffa vs The United States and stop cases claiming a violation of the 4th amendment because of ambiguous search criteria. Prosecutors planned for it, and pushed their own agendas without judicial oversight. This rose to the highest level when, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks sent airplanes crashing into the New York twin towers and Washington’s pentagon building, President George W Bush Junior’s legal team used Hoffa vs The United States as a cornerstone of the 2001 Patriot Act.The Patriot Act, officially called “The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism – USA PATRIOT – Act of 2001,” which is even stickier when dummied down to The Patriot Act. It was used to imprison, and unfortunately to torture, suspects behind 9/11 without a trial or even a lawyer for more than 20 years; some of them are in Guantanamo Bay to this day.5
Not all things got worse after 1966. Some things have improved. Pundit thought 1979’s Title IV would destroy college athletics, but today we have more sports than ever before, with women pro teams gaining momentum every day. I’m unsure if overt racism improved, but at least it’s no longer acceptable to use words like “Negro” in public, which was common throughout Hoffa’s trials and used by even the Chief Justice of the United States in the JFK and MLK Assassination Report. And I can’t imagine with today’s social media, society allowing someone like Big Daddy to freed from rape charges by a jury of his peers because “ain’t no white man deserve to go o jail for nothing he did to a Negro girl.” But, I have not finished reading the MLK portion of the report, and I can’t comment on it and if we’ve improved society for women and African Americans. I’m sure Hillary Clinton would have more useful things to say about it than I would.
I do have a few things to say about the constitution, and how to support it. Everyone who joins the army must repeat the phrase: “I, ____________________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and that’s an interesting place to be if you’re a person of your word and you recognize attack on the constitution that relatively few people realize is happening. Everyone must also swear to “have faith” in the constitution (I’ve never been a religious person), and to “obey” the president (I stopped obeying any human in 1993). But, I do support the constitution – it’s imperfect, but one of the best options so far – and I would like to see it resist entropy, which means we must continuously add energy to it so that it doesn’t degrade. When I look at what happened to the 4th Amendment in 1966, and how it impacts today’s privacy and Guantanamo’s torture victims, I’d be a hypocrite to not share my family history and give some energy to supporting and defending the constitution as if it were a wounded teammate on the battlefield. Like any fallen soldier, we must first heal the wound before training to improve performance for the next battle. But the constitution isn’t a fellow soldier that I can rush to and drag out of harm’s way, it’s a democratic entity that requires hundreds of millions of people to help, and they can’t help if they don’t know it’s injured.
My motivation is to shine light on our old friend The Constitution, and hope other people try to help. The sharpest tool I have is my family history, and this work is the light that I hope helps the constitution.
In March of 2019, exactly 29 years after wrestling Hillary Clinton and my grandfather’s funeral, I went on sabattical to Cuba to understand how my grandfather’s word in 1964 continues to shape history. I returned a month later. Armed with what I knew to be true, I put the proverbial pen to paper, and typed a rough draft of my grandfather’s part in history. Then I used the internet to check facts and challenge my assumptions; according to ancient texts like “The Art of Warm,” to challenge one’s assumptions is harder than to challenge an enemy, and to defeat one’s self is a greater victory than defeating the world’s largest fleet of tanks.
The first thing I learned was that Brian Dennehy, after portraying Big Daddy in “Blood Feud,” and then the sheriff and Korean war veteran in “Rambo: First Blood,” stole valor, claiming military honors he did not have. Only assholes do that, so no matter how many awards he won or how well he mimicked Big Daddy’s smile and southern drawl, Brian Dennehy is an asshole.
After learning that trivia about Brian, I wondered if any of my records existed from the 1980’s. For the first time, I googled my name and Louisiana wrestling. I read the Louisiana High School Athletic Association records on LHSAA.org for the first time since high school, and I was shocked. New evidence, to me at least, proved that Hillary Clinton didn’t break my finger, Hillary Moore did.
That hurt my brain at first. I was probably more shocked than you are right now. I called a bunch of old buddies and confirmed it. Of course they said, Hillary’s last name was Moore. A few reminded me of that throw – it really was gorgeous.
You’d think I’d recall Hillary’s last name because he beat me so badly, but wrestling is not like that. We shook hands before every match, and in front of a few fans and parents as representatives of each other’s teams in dual meets, but we never spoke. Not once. I can’t tell you what he sounded like. To me, he wasn’t anything more than A Boy Named Sue, the first obstacle in a series of hero journeys. I never focused on his name, and when other wrestlers mentioned him to me, they said something like: “Hey dude! I heard Hillary kicked your ass again.”
Maybe I remembered Hillary as Hillary Clinton because in late 1992, a few months before I first read the JFK Assassination Report, and when the governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, was running for president with his wife, Hillary, by his side. That was when I took a break from practice with the Fort Bragg wrestling team to enter the 82nd’s pre-Ranger course. Only around 5,000 Rangers graduate from the Fort Benning course each a year, and a few come from Fort Bragg to test their metal. Competition is fierce to represent the All Americans among all other units. Of 269 paratroopers who began, only nine of us crossed the finish line. Of the nine, six of us wrestled of us in high school. Two also in college; we wore no rank, so I assumed they were either officers or some of the few enlisted men who joined the army after college.
After two weeks of food and sleep deprivation and nonstop missions adorned with M16’s and 80 pound ruck sacks full of water and ammunition, we ate and slept for the first time in longer than we could recall. We spoke socially for the first in two weeks, and because of the remarkable statistics of our group, we chatted about wrestling (fasting is second hand for wrestlers), and internal fortitude vs team motivation (wrestlers train as a team, but perform as an individual), and of course we talked about teammates and coaches and the lingering influence they have on us (everyone had similar stories). That was the first time I told the story about Hillary Clinton, and I held up my Spock-like left hand to show proof. Everyone laughed, and the name stuck.
I’ve probably told that joke and held up my hand more than a hundred or more times since then, just like Pat wiggled his eyeballs to get a team to laugh. Three decades later, my mind sees me wrestling Hillary Clinton with the same precision as any other memory I think I recall perfectly. Even know, after believing the internet and confirming with my friends, my memories are stronger than facts and confirmations.
That, to me, is the best proof of the most persistent problem in reconstructing President Kennedy’s assassination: conflicting memories of the same event. I can see how that could happen. All memories are flawed, yet we gather those that support our view and lock on to them with a tenacious kung-fu grip. It’s no wonder that 60 years after Kennedy’s assassination, people still have an abundance of theories and opinions, but relatively little analysis of facts. And no one seems to have a plan on how to stop people from killing each other, to make us see that we’re all humans and on the same team.
That’s why I wrote this as a memoir, not an allegedly true crime, like Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan’s account of Hoffa’s demise, or an attack on the justice system like Jack Goldflake’s book “From Hoffa’s Shadow,” Or even a call to all Americans to stop political influence and corruption, like Walter’s “The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa.” I’m more like Hoffa, perhaps with a bit of pride or personal agenda, but mostly writing just to let people know what really happened so they can make informed decisions next time, with less reaction and more demanding accountability from elected officials, like how New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s memoir sparked Oliver Stone to make the film JFK, which led to voters getting what they wanted from President Bill Clinton.
Mostly, though, I just felt an urge to tell the story about Coach and wrestling Hillary Clinton, and to shed light on what probably happened to President John F. Kennedy. I’d be a jerk if I didn’t at least try to use my part in history to make the world a better place for everyone, even Brian Dennehy; who, incidentally, passed away in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. So did Uncle Doug Partin, and many other people; may they rest in peace.
In a memoir, words mean less than how a moment impacted you. Hillary was a beast, and a beast by any other name would have thrown me just as savagely. Regardless of the official results, I won that match in 1990, and Coach is still in my corner.6 It’s not about your opponent, it’s about wrestling, and someone I love and trust told me I did a good job. After his passing, when Louisiana finally renamed the Robert E. Lee memorial tournament the Coach Dale Ketelsen memorial tournament, everyone who wasn’t a dumbass said it was about time.
A job what you do with all of your heart, with nothing else mattering while you focus on it. Now my job is telling you about Big Daddy, and my small part in his story.
Given those disclaimers, this story is true.
If you keep reading, I’ll shed light on the things about Big Daddy and people who knew him that changed history, and how being his grandson shaped my adult life.
Go to the Table of Contents
- New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was a ridiculously tall man and larger than life character who portrayed Chief Justice Earl Warren as a cameo in Oliver Stone’s JFK, the film that finally got America to manage their elected officials. Garrison brought the only trial in history against someone for killing President Kennedy, a New Orleans businessman with links to the CIA, FBI, mafia, Oswald, and my grandfather. He suppoened Big Daddy and claimed to have a black and white photograph of him meeting with Ruby and Oswald a few months before President Kennedy was shot and killed. The two witnesses vanished, and so did the photograph, never to be seen again. Without that evidence, the Grand Jury didn’t call Big Daddy to stand, and Garrison omitted the incident from his book, the one Oliver Stone used to make JFK, “On the Trail of Assassins.” ↩︎
- A lot of stories about Big Daddy growing up are in Uncle Doug autobiography, “From My Brother’s Shadow: Teamster Doug Partin Tells His Side of the Story,” self-published without an editor or fact-checker in 2017 by “Oak of Acadiana Publications,” Greenwell Springs, Louisiana. It’s his voice, and I can attest to most of my family agreeing with his stories, though he makes a lot of typos and mistakes in chronology and facts, and he perpetuates rumors because he never went back and followed through with old assumptions we all had before the JFK Assassination Report was released. Doug served two years in the air force, and passed away in 2020, in the midst of Covid-19, in a veterans convalescent home, a 90 year old man with a lot of stories and no one left to listen to them; the title he chose as an old man tells you more about Big Daddy and his impact on those around him than details of the stories Doug tells at the end of his life. But his book has a place on my bookshelf, because I hear his voice every time I read a chapter. Doug was a good man with no more flaws than I have; may he rest in peace.
This was Uncle Doug’s obituary:
Douglas Westley Partin, 90, passed away Wednesday September 9, 2020 at the War Veterans Home in Jackson, LA. He was born April 17, 1930 in the Buffalo Community of Wilkinson County in Mississippi. He served in the Army Air Corp in World War ll and Korea. In following years, he was a Teamster Business Agent for Local #5 in Baton Rouge, La. He is survived by his wife, Sandra McCraine Partin of Zachary, La.; two sons Douglas W. Partin, Jr. and wife Melinda, and Earnest Willie Partin; one daughter, Beverly Armand; two step-sons, Berch Wilbert, lll and Brem Wilbert, six grandchildren and numerous great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his parents, Edward Grady Partin and Bessie Mathis Partin, and one son Donald Edward Partin. Visitation will be Monday September 14, 2020 at Brown Funeral Home in Gloster, MS., from 10:00 a.m. until time of funeral services at 11:00 a.m. Monday at the funeral home, officiated by Rev. Rusty Bowser. Graveside services will follow in Roseland Cemetery in Gloster. The family requests that in lieu of flowers, make donations to the veteran services of your choice. Due to the Covid-19, we request that you wear a mask and practice social distancing while inside the building. If you have one or more of the symptoms, or just feel bad, we respectfully ask you not to attend the services.
↩︎ - See Hoffa vs The United States in the 1966 US Supreme court records. ↩︎
- Chief Justice Earl Warren mentions Big Daddy 147 times in his three page missive attached to Hoffa vs The United States. This is an excerpt:
“This type of informer and the uses to which he was put in this case evidence a serious potential for undermining the integrity of the truthfinding process in the federal courts. Given the incentives and background of Partin, no conviction should be allowed to stand when based heavily on his testimony. And that is exactly the quicksand upon which these convictions rest, because, without Partin, who was the principal government witness, there would probably have been no convictions here. Thus, although petitioners make their main arguments on constitutional grounds and raise serious Fourth and Sixth Amendment questions, it should not even be necessary for the Court to reach those questions. For the affront to the quality and fairness of federal law enforcement which this case presents is sufficient to require an exercise of our supervisory powers.
Warren reiterated Big Daddy’s history to his fellow justices again and again, with the frequency and force of Hillary’s kicks, yet Warren did not break through to his peers. I don’t know why. Here’s a taste you can sample and ponder how anyone believed Big Daddy:
“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.
↩︎ - See “In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth,” by Jack Goldsmith, assistant Attorney General under John Ashcroft and lead U.S. attorney on the Patriot Act, reporting to President Bush Junior. The title of his book comes from a coincidence: Jack is the adopted stepson of Chuckie O’Brien, Hoffa’s right-hand man. Like me, Jack disowned his family when a younger man. He happened to go to law school and do well; after learning more about the Patriot Act and America’s wounded constitution, he became the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University, and spends his time trying to shine light onto the hobbled American freedoms dating back to 1966. Incidentally, Chuckie passed away in 2020, just like Brian Dennehy and Doug Partin, as an old man with a lot of stories to tell. Jack captured a few of Chuckie’s stories in his well written book. It was, like a lot of truth, overshadowed by Scorsese’s film and the attention it brought to The Irishman; and, of the Covid-19 pandemic distracted everyone on Earth and spread our attention even more thinly. ↩︎
- Coach passed away in 2014. When I began writing this, his oldest son, Craig, was head coach at St. Paul’s School in Covington, Louisiana, and on the board of the LLHSA. When I asked Craig if I could use Coach’s name in a memoir I was writing, he asked Mrs. K and Penny; they all gave me their blessing. What they wrote in his obituary was like Coach: concise, humble, and remarkably short for such an accomplished person.
Dale “Coach” Glenn Ketelson Obituary: 2014
Dale Glenn Ketelsen, 78, Retired Teacher and Coach, passed away March 22, 2014 at Ollie Steele Burden Manor with his wife by his side. A Memorial service will be held Saturday, March 29 at University United Methodist Church, 3350 Dalrymple Drive. Visitation will begin at 10 am with a service to follow at 12 pm conducted by Rev. Larry Miller. Dale is survived by his wife of 52 years, Pat Ballard Ketelsen, 2 sons: Craig (Emily) Ketelsen of Covington, La; Erik (Bonnie) Ketelsen, Atlanta, Ga and one daughter, Penny (Lee) Kelly, Nashville, TN; 5 grandchildren: Katie, Abby, Brian and Michael Ketelsen and Graham Kelly; a Sister-in-Law, Karen Ketelsen of Osage, Iowa, and numerous neices and nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents, 2 sisters and a brother. Dale was born in Osage, Iowa where he attended High School, lettering in 4 sports. Upon graduation, he attended Iowa State University as a member of the wrestling team where he was a 2 time All American and won 2nd and 3rd in the NCAA finals in Wrestling. He was a finalist in the Olympic Trials for the 1960 Olympics. After graduation, he joined the US Marine Reserves and returned to ISU as an Asst. Wrestling Coach. In 1961, he took a job as Teacher/Coach at Riverside-Brookfield High School in Suburban Chicago, Ill. While there, he also earned a Masters Degree from Northern Illinois University. In 1968, he was hired to start a Wrestling program at LSU in Baton Rouge, La. He was on the Executive Board of the National Wrestling Coaches Association and a founding member of USA Wrestling. He was the wrestling host for the National Sports Festival in 1985, He was instrumental in promoting wrestling in the High Schools in Louisiana. He was head Wrestling Coach at Belaire High School for 20 years and Assistant Wrestling coach at The St. Paul’s School in Covington, La. He was devoted to Faith, Family, Farm and the sport of Wrestling. Among his many honors were induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and being named Master of Wrestling (Man of the Year) for Wrestling USA magazine. He was a long time member and Usher of University United Methodist Church. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Alzheimer’s Services, 3772 North Blvd., Baton Rouge, La. 70806.
Published by The Advocate from Mar. 26 to Mar. 29, 2014.
According to online reports I trust, Coach revived a high school team in Iowa that went on to win a conference championship, produce 30 all-conference wrestlers, 20 district champions, eight regional champions and two state titlist; in the twelve years as head coach of the new LSU program, his teams won two SEC Intercollegiate Wrestling tournaments, produced 15 individual conference champs, and rose LSU to be ranked 4th in the nation, surpassing even Iowa.
As a young man, Coach wrestled at 126 pounds. He left me with big shoes to fill, and at the weakest point in his life he was stronger than Big Daddy ever was. But both made me who I am, a combination of nature and nurture. May they rest in peace, wherever they may be.
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