When I learned that mother was dying 3,000 miles away, I flew to Baton Rouge and went straight to her hospital. The night receptionist told me her room number, and, after I asked, directed me to a room dedicated to prayer and meditation. A few minutes later, I left the small chapel and rode the elevator to Wendy’s room in intensive care.

A year before President Kennedy was assassinated, my grandfather, Edward Grady Partin, and Jimmy Hoffa planned to kill the president’s little brother, Bobby Kennedy, in the same way that President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in November 22, 1963.

In 1962, Bobby Kennedy, whom had been appointed as the US Attorney General, and the FBI task force on organized crime and Hoffa’s Teamsters Union, knew of Hoffa and Partin’s plan. The infamous FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, even warned J.F. Kennedy a few days before the president’s death that there was a plot to shoot him with a sniper rifle as he rode in his convertible through a southern town, but the president choose to ride through downtown Dallas. He was allegedly shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, who was shot and killed by Jack Ruby on live television two days later. But the files of warnings to Kennedy and the complete content of surveillance of Hoffa and my grandfather remained sealed until 1992, when President Bill Clinton released 30 years of congressional reports on President Kennedy’s assassination and posted them in the National Archive. I don’t know why they were withheld for allost 30 years.

A few years after President Clinton released the files, what was then the newly created internet suddenly allowed anyone in the world to read the official US conclusion on JFK’s 1963 assassination. By that time, relatively few did.

Andrea and I arrived at her parents house and walked in, barely able to squeeze in the living room because of all of her dad’s partially completed projects and her mom’s collection of things that she felt added decor. Her mom waved from the kitchen, where she was feeding the baby. Alice, Andrea’s younger sister and the baby’s mom, was trying to clear away enough dirty dishes to make room for two boxes of Little Ceasar’s pizza, the one that had commercials with a tiny cartoon Caesar, dressed in a toga and chirping “Pizza! Pizza!” I devoured two slices while watching Alice learn to feed her daughter by helping her mom.

Some time after I saw Stevie Nicks and single handedly helped deliver phone books to all of Baton Rouge, I stayed with Uncle Bob and Auntie Lo for a while, and they took me to Disneyland to see my grandfather. Not Big Daddy, but Wendy’s dad, they said. He was a cartoonist there.

I said goodbye to PawPaw and crawled into my dad’s truck. I was anxious to show him my award from school for having drawn the best art in Baton Rouge for my age. It had been all over the news, but he didn’t have a TV. Even if he did, it’s unlikely he would have been awake at 7AM for the Buckskin Bill Black show that I watched with Paw Paw before school. But I wanted him to know that I had been on television and was famous, just like Big Daddy had been so much lately.