Spend my days with woman in kind
Smoked my stuff, and drank all my wine
Goin’ to California with an achin’ in my heart
Heard there’s a woman out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair
Led Zepplin, Goin’ to California
The three of us were sitting on the balcony enjoying breakfast tacos with thinly sliced avodado and homemade hot sauce, when Hope saw Cranky Ken approaching.
She finished chewing her bite of taco waved and said, “Hey Ken!”
Ken put down his empty mop bucket and big bottle of liquid laundry soap and said, “Hey, Sweetheart. I’m happy to see you.”
He looked at me and began complaining in a tone of voice that made me long for a balcony further away from the sidewalk, or at least a few floors up.
“I don’t know why people use powdered soap. It clogs the washing machine and I have to fix it. Don’t they see all the frickin’ signs I put all over the laundry room? I should raise all of their rents and make them figure it out! What a bunch of frickin’ morons. I tell you…” I interjected and asked him if he’d like to stop by for a homebrew after he fixed the machine, that I had another bottle of the porter he liked. His eyes lit up and he said sure, that he’d be back in a bit, and he picked up his bucket and liquid soap and limped up the street.
We finished our breakfast tacos, and Cristi and Hope went off an adventure while I did the dishes and waited for Cranky Ken to return.
Ken had bought several small apartment buildings facing Balboa Park in the 1970’s. Recently, an investment firm had offered him $10.7 Million for the one up the street with a clogged washing machine, but they wanted to tear it down and build a high rise condo with underground parking and security gates. Condos went for around $3 million each, depending on how high away you were from the sidewalk, and investors were always hoping Ken would sell at least one of his buildings. But, he had told them to go fuck themselves – his words – and he told them that they’d have to pry the title from his cold, dead hands. Every time they handed him their business cards, Ken would shove it in his pocket and throw it away as soon as he was near a trash can, sometimes at my condo when he walked by in the mornings.
He had grown up poor and had had a rough time as a teenager, working the frigid docks of New York harbor, loading and unloading big crates for mafia bosses and Teamsters, and he had dreamed of owning a place in Central Park one day. When he became wealthy some time in the 70’s, he moved to sunny San Diego and began buying apartments around Balboa Park and Hillcrest. Over time, he grew to love them, and didn’t want to see them turned into condos. He said they cost multi-millions each and kept kids like him from living there, and they blocked sunshine from public spaces and made it less enjoyable for kids wanting to climb trees in the center of a big city. He rented his small apartments for remarkably cheap monthly rates and without checking people’s credit, and many of his tennants and had lived there for more than ten years. Most people mailed their monthly checks – he was old school, and still demanded checks instead of transfers or online payments – and I don’t know if any of them knew who Cranky Ken was. I only did because my balcony faced the sidewalk, and I had seen him lugging big bottles of liquid soap up the street for years, and had invited him over for a beer one morning.
I pulled a porter from the fridge and set it on the balcony to warm just a bit, and I set aside two tulip glasses. I realized that I had something I though Ken would appreciate, a calling card I kept in my pocket when I was younger, and I pulled it out and put it beside his glass.
I had found it by the photos at Wendy’s with my medals, and I had almost forgotten about it until Ken said something that reminded me. It was the size of a business card and faded and frayed, held together over thirty years because I had laminated with strips of Scotch tape many years before. One side had a large black and white Ace of Spaces with a skull in the center of the spade, and the skull was wearing an 82nd Airborne beret with the ubiquitous parachute wings spread across the spade. The other side said, “I’m an American Paratrooper. If you’re recovering my body, kiss my cold, dead ass.” I had been using it as a bookmark while researching my family history.
Ken walked in without knocking and his pockets jingled with quarters retrieved from the washing machine.
I handed Ken the faded Ace of Spades and told him the quick story, and he said thanks and shoved it in his pocket and sipped his beer.
“This is good!” he exclaimed. “I still prefer Guiness. But they don’t know how to pour it here. I gotta teach them, every time. They won’t learn on their own. Bunch of frickin’ lazy bastards, I tell you!”
Ken had bought a bar down the street, closer to the downtown tourist district, and converted it to an Irish pub and named it after his family, who had all died when after they immigrated to New York after WWII. He was a night owl, and always had been, and had always enjoyed a Guiness when he got off the docks night shift. His happy hour began around 8am, but few San Diego bars were open then, and none of ones that were seemed to know how to pour a proper pint, so he bought one for around $20 Million and refurbished it with original decor and bar stools from an old Irish pub near where his family had originated. For some reason, not many of his bartenders stayed long, and he kept having to train new ones so that he could enjoy a proper pint after getting quarters from his apartments’s laundry rooms once a week.
Ken looked at my bookshelf and asked, “Have you seen the Irishman yet?”
I told him I hadn’t, that a lot had been going on. I hadn’t told him Wendy had died and that I had been going back and forth to Baton Rouge to finish details of her estate. I didn’t want to talk about it.
Ken said he had, and he told me what he thought about Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan, a former mafia hitman with, obviously, an Irish background.
“They got a lot right, but it was a movie and not real life. It was for men my age. We grew up seeing Pacino and Peci and those guys play mob bosses. Frank said as best he could, but no one today gets it. They see too many movies, like Goodfellas. The Godfather was good, though, and that’s why people want to see Pacino. They confuse actors with real people. No one today realizes how much Hoffa had to do with all that. He was the most famous man in America! Working class. We looked up to him. He didn’t take shit from no one! Not even the Kennedys or the families. I can see Frank doing it. Like Pacino said in The Godfather, it’s just business. Hoffa was old and no longer in the Teamsters then, and the families did what they had to do to keep him from talkin’.”
I sipped my porter and waited for what I suspected he’d ask.
“Well?” he asked.
I asked him, “What?” I tried to not assume what people were thinking.
“Did he do it?”
“The Irishman?”
“No, no, no,” he said in a tone of voice that made me, for a moment, regret having invited him over.
“Hoffa. Did he try to bribe the Negro?”
He meant the juror, and Ken spoke like his generation. Even Chief Justice Earl Warren had called the juror a Negro in Hoffa vs. The United States.
I let Cranky Ken’s comment slide, and said that I didn’t know for sure. But, I said jury tampering was common back then, and my family knew how to do it well. I realized I had something he may appreciate, and I excused myself and pulled a new book from my bookshelf. It was still shiny, with a bright blue book cover. I had just finished reading it, and had coincidentally tucked my calling card between the pages that may have answered Ken’s question.
“Here. My uncle, Doug, just published a book about it.” Ken knew that Doug had recently retired as president of Teamsters Local#5, and was in a veterans nursing home in Natchez Mississippi, near where he and my grandfather had been born. I tried to joke about it.
“They say you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but I think this one does a good job of summing it up. And he bluntly says that my grandfather lied to send Hoffa to prison, but that was just his opinion. My grandfather never talked about it. You’d have to decide for yourself.”
Ken took the book and looked at the cover: “From my brother’s shadow: Douglas Westly Partin tells his side of the story.” It was published by a small Mississippi publisher, Oak Publishing, and the cover had a simple photo of Doug’s smiling face from about twenty years before, and a small photo of my grandfather’s face above him, looking down as if from heaven.
Ken didn’t comment on the title, but he read the back cover out loud
“Boxes full of money in the trunk of the car, suitcases filled with fresh twenty-dollar bills, assassination plots against President John F. Kennedy and against his brother Bobby, then Attorney General of the United States, deals with the New Orleans mob, arms deals with Fidel Castro, fake passports and Mexican IDs, contracts on the lives of any who dared to oppose, violence against companies that refused to cooperate with union organizers, secret testimony against union boss Jimmy Hoffa, criminal indictments, trials, convictions and imprisonment … these are all part of the story told by Douglas Wesley Partin, younger brother of Edward Grady Partin, ruthless boss of Teamsters Local #5 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for thirty years. Doug witnessed it all from the shadow of his older brother, and then he stepped in, succeeded his brother as principal officer of Teamsters Local #5, cleaned it up and led it for many more years. This is a story for the ages.”
“Hey, thanks,” Ken said. “This sounds good. I’ll bring it back to you next week. I love this stuff!”
I wasn’t sure if he meant Hoffa’s history or the porter and I didn’t ask; it was nice to hear Ken happy about something. I made a mental note to ask Doug for a singed copy made out to Ken; both would probably get a kick out of that.
“You should write a book,” he said.
I said that everything was already out there, waving my hand towards The Universe. But I wasn’t being dismissive. It was all out there, though many book chapters are omitted or modified in films. Even the Irishman’s 2005 book, “I heard you paint houses,” had an entire chapter focused on Edward Grady Partin, Audie Murphy, and Nixon; but that was cut out for the sake of a linear story that fit into a two and a half hour film. It had been the same with Hoffa and even The Blood Feud. My bookshelf had all the books, and each one had much more information than the films; but, few people were old school, like Ken, and, from what I had seen, most people who edited Wikipedia seemed to either get their information from movies or have biases that they propagate. I rarely shared my thoughts about it with anyone, but I would happily lend them a book or two to prime the pump for them. It was all there, but it took a long time to sort through all the information, and it was like sipping water from a fire hydrant. Few people had that much energy or time on their hands.
I told him that he knew enough to write a book, and he guaffed and said no one would read it, that even the frickin’ assholes in his apartment didn’t read the signs he kept leaving in the laundry room to stop using powered soap or he’d raise their rents and put them on the street.
“They don’t know how lucky they are,” he grumbled. “If I had this view when I was a kid, I’d been happier than a pig in shit.”
Ken never told me how he earned the money he used to buy all his properties. He finished his beer and left, and I walked to the corner cafe and worked on the latest iteration of a book I was struggling to write.
——
My mother was born Wendy Anne Rothdram on August 14th, 1955, in Richmond Hill, Ontario, an upper middle class suburb of Toronto, to Joyce Hicks and a man whose last name was Rothdram, but whose first name I never learned. Joyce was 18 years old and the youngest of three daughters of my Great Grandpa Harold “Hal” Hicks and Grandma Hicks, French Canadians who settled in the English speaking metropolis of Toronto; he’s easily found online, too, because he was a professional hockey player with 90 professional games with the Montreal Maroons, Detroit Couars, and Detroit Falconsl and though Wikipedia omits his brief stints with the Toronto Mapleleafs and Boston Bruins, Joyce – my Granny – had kept one of his Mary kept one of his Bruins jerseys, and I trust her more than Wikipedia.
Grandpa Hicks retired his jersies, and thirty years later he retired as an upper manager for the Canadian railway system, and local newspapers and coworkers mentioned him and his work and, of course, his hockey career respectfully in his 1960 obituary.
Grandma Hicks was a homemaker and attended to her daughters, Joyce, Mary, and Lois. Because of Grandma Hicks time and their dad’s stable career, the three sisters wanted for nothing in their upper middle class home; but, in full disclosure, a part of their lifestyle came from their aunt, my great-great-great aunt, Edith Lang. She, too, was well known in Canada, because at age 80 and after a lifetime of being a spinster, she married Canada’s wealthiest man and almost ten years her senior. She had been his secretary for forty years, and it was quite the scandal in newspaper gossip columns. Aunt Edith donated her ex husbands extensive artwork to museums all over Canada and traveled extensively and enjoyed time with her nieces, taking them to fancy country clubs and dinners when she was in town. Though somewhat aloof and cantankerous and ostentatious with her wealth, she didn’t have children of her own, and she ensured her nieces had a comfortable life and wanted for nothing. Granny and her sisters would all say they had a loving home and every opportunity imaginable.
Granny and Auntie Lo were partiers, embracing the post WWII prosperity of the 1950’s and enjoying Canadian rye whiskey on the rocks and an occasional splurge on Good Scotch. Aunt Mary was more of a homebody and, like her Aunt Edith, almost never drank alcohol except for wine with good meals. She married a young, mild mannered and family oriented man named John and they lived the rest of their lives in Toronto, raising their daughter without any events that would lead to Wikipedia pages. Lois was rarely sober, and she married a navy veteran and delightfully indulgent French Canadian named Robert, a middle manager of Montreal’s Bulk Stevedoring Company, and they accepted a transfer to manage the loading and unloading of America’s second largest shipping port in New Orleans and bought an upper middle class home an hour upriver in the smaller, more affordable river port and capital city of Baton Rouge. Joyce was the only daughter left at the Hicks’s home, and one night she stayed out too late and had too much to drink and became pregnant with Wendy and then married the father, a man who’s first name I don’t remember but who gave Wendy and Granny their last name, Rothdram, a man who claimed to be a cartoonist for Walt Disney; though I never found evidence to support his claim.
A few years later, Granny fled an abusive relationship with her husband and took Wendy to Baton Rouge to stay with Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob; they could never have their own children, and they had rooms to spare in their newly built home and they welcomed Granny and Wendy when Wendy was a five year old girl.
Granny was not one to sit idle, and though she was a single uneducated mother in the deeply ingrained culture of southern Louisiana that insisted women were homemakers and looked down upon unwed mothers, she persisted and exhibited confidence and found a job in the newly created “chemical alley” of industry north of Baton Rouge’s airport, a long rural road of chemical processing plants and oil refineries that processed oil from offshore oil rigs in Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. She was a secretary and taught herself to type and studied and learned the lingo CoPolymer’s processes, and in return CoPolymer allowed Granny health insurance – something that had been free in Canada and she had taken for granted until she was a single mother – and they increased her pay equitably, and soon Granny was able to save enough money to put a down payment on a small, 680 square foot home on a relatively large acre of land in a new housing development under the airport flight path. Her commute to work drastically reduced and Wendy had safe streets to play in and public schools and parks nearby. The home had three tiny bedrooms and two bathrooms and a modest kitchen, and Granny’s liquor cabinets rattled every ten to twenty minutes from jet airplane engines above her roof, but Granny was proud that despite her setbacks and obstacles, she had achieved what some people called “The American Dream” of home ownership as a single mother who immigrated to America without an education.
Granny would work for CoPolymer for almost 30 years. She was respected for being a self-driven learner, and for being polite but honest, and forthcoming with useful information, never shy, and she was recognized for never having come to work late or missed a day except except for a brief period in 1975 when she was coming home from work and was sidestruck by a careless driver who had likely been drinking. The accident shattered her right ankle and she was immobilized for a few weeks and couldn’t drive to work, and Wendy volunteered to move back home and care for her. They had been estranged ever since Wendy had eloped with my dad, but Wendy had been maturing and knew she should help her mother, especially because the driver that hit Granny was uninsured and CoPolymer’s health insurance policy wouldn’t cover at-home care until Granny could drive again.
Even before the accident, Granny had been adamant against any type of driving after having had a drink, and she drank every day without concern for what other people thought about it. She would come home from work and relax with a tall glass or two of the best Scotch on the rocks she could afford, and she so enjoyed her lifestyle that she rarely drove anywhere to socialize. Instead, she focused on being home as soon as she returned from work, which was only 20 minutes north of the airport, and she tried to be home when Wendy came home from Glenoaks Elementary and then Glenoaks Middle and then eventually GleanOaks High, and her routine was always to relax then cook dinner for her and Wendy. She was proud of her home she worked so hard to afford, and was happy simply reposing in her recliner with a bottle of Scotch and a carton of Kents and her monthly Reader’s Digest books, including a section of cookbooks, like Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Paul Prudhome’s Louisiana Kitchen and the ubiquitous Times Picayune Creole Cookbook. She was a self-taught chef, embracing the Cajun culture of making delicious food from scratch using frugally purchased ingredients and never shying away from adding extra sherry to her turtle soup or a splash or two of wine in her tomato sauce while enjoying a glass or two for herself.
Granny encouraged Wendy to be independent and to play with her friends on bike in their safe streets or explore her spacious yard with it’s large pecan trees and gumball trees and, typical to old Baton Rouge homes, at least one majestic stately oak tree with branches that reached out and bounced against the ground in heavy winds. Inside, Granny encouraged Wendy to read books from the copiously stocked bookshelf she kept with her other luxuries, an expensive collection of the Encyclopedia Britanica and a subscription to it’s yearly updates and several subscriptions to fiction and nonfiction books for a range of ages. Granny’s bookshelf was so well stocked that some of Wendy’s friends would use it for homework rather than Glen Oak Elementary’s library resources, just like I would, and Granny was generous with her time and would sit and learn with them, if they wanted, just like she would with me. Wendy had her own bookshelf for whichever books she chose for fun, and the encyclopedia’s were down low where she and other kids could reach them.
Wendy grew up playing with her best friends nearby, Linda White and the sisters Cindi and Debbie LeBoux, and they were what most people called Tom Boys, cheerful and playful but preferring jeans over dresses and bicycles over dolls, a rarity in the traditional southern culture where women wore dresses and didn’t get dirty often. They climbed the sprawling stately oak trees in Granny’s yard and caught minnows and crawfish in the drainage canal that wrapped around half of Granny’s yard, and rode bicycles for miles around the relatively sparsely populated subdivision with it’s meandering streets that navigated around waterways and oak grooves. As Wendy got older, she began swimming on Glen Oaks Middle School’s team and playing tennis and golf with Uncle Bob and Auntie Lo in the country club near their home thirty minutes south of the airport.
Wendy grew to be a beautiful young lady with hazel colored eyes that crinkled when she smiled, and long straight strawberry blonde hair that blew in the wind behind her when she rode her bicycle. She was petite, like Granny, and only 5’1” tall, but whereas Granny was thin as a twig, Wendy grew to be full figured and attracted the attention of boys at Glen Oaks High School. Like most of her friends and for reasons I don’t understand, she dated older boys and her first serious boyfriend was an 18 year old senior when she was a 15 year old sophomore. He graduated in the spring of 1971 and was immediately drafted and shipped to basic training and then to the conflict in Vietnam, where he was immediately shot and killed before Wendy would begin her junior year.
Wendy was devastated by his loss. He had faithfully written her letters, but she had procrastinated responding – a trait she would maintain all her life – because she had wanted to send him the perfect picture to remember her and had borrowed Uncle Bob’s fancy and rare color film camera and had Linda and Debbie take her photo dancing under one of Granny’s trees with the last of that season’s red azalea flowers tucked above her ear and augmenting the strawberry hints in her hair. Photos took a few weeks to develop back then, and Wendy enjoyed playing outside during the summer and forgot to pick up the film, and time passed and then she heard he had been shot and killed.
She had what I consider a minor nervous breakdown, and she rebelled against everyone and everything and told Granny she wanted to return to Canada, where there wasn’t a draft and the government didn’t make young boys go to war and die and people could live happily, she thought. But, she hadn’t told Granny she had been dating an older boy and that he had died, so she simply demanded to return to Canada and live with her father, a man she hadn’t seen in more than 10 years but had built up in her mind as a man who loved her more than Granny, and she imagined he would be more fun and supportive than her boring mother who just sat at home ever day and drank Scotch and cooked meals and read books.
Granny was a woman of action and preferred experiential learning over long lectures, and she forewent her good bottles of Scotch to buy Wendy a plane ticket to Toronto for Wendy to see her dad for the first time since they had immigrated to America eleven years prior. Wendy boarded the plane and she saw the trees in her yard from above after having spent her life looking up at them passing over their home, and she thought she’d never return to Louisiana. But, only a few days later she used the return ticket Granny had had the foresight to purchase and returned home, because her father wouldn’t even hug her and said he was happy with his new family and that Wendy was Granny’s problem now. He gave her a hastily drawn cartoon caricature of a drunkard with a 1940’s hobo hat, and Wendy returned to Baton Rouge even more distraught than before, and Granny resumed buying the good bottles of Scotch and, in her pragmatic way, encouraged Wendy to focus on being happy.
Wendy turned 16 a few weeks later and began her junior year at Glen Oaks High School, but was so depressed that she dreaded being stuck inside and all of the questions that permeate southern culture ostensibly to be friendly but usually only mindless of diverse households, like “Who’s your momma, and what church do y’all go to?” and “What’s your daddy do?” and, for those people who know a bit about you already, “Have you heard from your boyfriend?” She had always been friendly but shy, and in her junior year she became reticent and smiled less and less frequently. To tolerate the anxiety of going to school, she began smoking marijuana with her friends and relaxing in class, comfortably numb and passing time until she could go home and smoke again.
She met Edward Partin that fall, a 17 year old senior who was the Glen Oak’s main drug dealer.
He was tall and physically strong and ruggedly handsome, with long black hair and dark brown eyes so dark they seemed black. He rarely smiled in school, and usually frowned or scowled to express his discontent with the system and disdain for authority. He always had abundant marijuana and new cars that attracted attention, especially in the lower economic school district of Glen Oaks, and he had been arrested for selling drugs but somehow a judge set him free, and that added to his reputation as a “bad boy” and confident young man that seemed to attract 16 year old girls going through issues with their fathers. He told his friends that Wendy was “fine,” and soon they were skipping school to ride in his cars and sneaking out at night to meet; coincidentally, he had recently moved in with his grandmother, my Great Grandma Foster, who lived a few blocks away from Granny.
Wendy and my dad snuck out one night in January of 1972 and got high, and they listened to a new album that had just come out, Led Zepplin IV, and the song that was the most popular in America at that time and would become prophetic for Wendy, “Going to California.”
Wendy smoked his stuff and got high and lost her virginity to Edward, and almost immediately realized she was pregnant. She didn’t have enough money for an abortion and didn’t tell Granny for fear of judgement, and when she told my dad she was surprised by his insistence on getting married; his father had had several illegitimate families and, in my dad’s mind, had abandoned him and my dad wanted to be a better father and insisted they get married. Wendy agreed, and they dropped out of school and drove an hour and a half away to Woodville, Mississippi, where state laws didn’t require parental consent for a 16 year old girl to marry a 17 year old boy. They returned to Baton Rouge as Mr. and Mrs. Edward Partin and resided in one of his father’s many homes while my dad started growing marijuana in a dry patch of land in a nearby bayou. A few months later, as JJ Lottingger wrote, I was born; and Wendy soon abandoned me and left for California.
——
“It’s interesting that Lottingger never mentioned my dad’s history,” I said.
After reading about Wendy, Cristi had read what I had written about him, and she agreed that it seemed more odd that Wendy hadn’t, if only to defend her case.
“And it’s funny that the judge went out of his way to say your dad hadn’t seen Wendy drink,” she said.
I mumbled a sound that implied agreement, and tried one last time to imagine why my dad’s history had been omitted. I had been removed from both of their custody, and he was obviously at the 1976 trial, yet only Wendy was blamed for abandoning me. No one explained where my dad was when they found me alone. And he had recently been arrested and convicted of having prescriptions opiotes with intention to sell, though he had escaped jail. He was gone often, which is why I was removed “ex-parte,” without consulting all parties, and that seemed like an important point in a custody trial.
“But the judge didn’t need to prove your dad was wrong,” she said, probably after thinking about it more, like I had. “He only had to prove Wendy was…” She paused and looked at my court record and then said, “‘now morally and emotionally fit’ to care for you, and that she had a… “‘fine‘ home.”
“She had won,” Cristi said.
“Even without talking about your dad’s history, she had gotten you back. She took the high road – no pun intended – because she didn’t have to say anything. Like you said, more counts less.”
I looked at her, surprised that I hadn’t seen it that way. She said I was too biased; I knew to much about Wendy to remain open minded to new ways of seeing her.
She was probably right, and I said I’d begin looking up his history the same way I had Wendy’s, simply searching his name and starting from there.
“And I can’t believe Warren called the juror ‘Negro.’ Why were those adjectives used so much back then? Did it matter which race the juror was? And that your grandfather raped a black girl, as if any word after ‘rape’ mattered.” She was more upset than her voice let on – her father had been a light skinned African – and I knew enough to remain silent. We had already talked about that part, and Doug goes into detail in his book. My grandfather had been found not guilty because one white male juror in Mississippi had said, “Ain’t no white man need go to jail for nothin’ he done to a nigger girl,” and he went free despite considerable evidence against him. I never learned what happened to her or her family, because her name was hidden from court records.
We changed topics and enjoyed the rest of our time together. If writing about Wendy had taught me anything, it was that seeing Uncle Bob’s watch next to her had reminded me, again, to focus on what was important.
Next Chapter
Table of Contents
My Mother
/in Uncategorized /by jasonpartinThe three of us were sitting on the balcony enjoying breakfast tacos with thinly sliced avodado and homemade hot sauce, when Hope saw Cranky Ken approaching.
She finished chewing her bite of taco waved and said, “Hey Ken!”
Ken put down his empty mop bucket and big bottle of liquid laundry soap and said, “Hey, Sweetheart. I’m happy to see you.”
He looked at me and began complaining in a tone of voice that made me long for a balcony further away from the sidewalk, or at least a few floors up.
“I don’t know why people use powdered soap. It clogs the washing machine and I have to fix it. Don’t they see all the frickin’ signs I put all over the laundry room? I should raise all of their rents and make them figure it out! What a bunch of frickin’ morons. I tell you…” I interjected and asked him if he’d like to stop by for a homebrew after he fixed the machine, that I had another bottle of the porter he liked. His eyes lit up and he said sure, that he’d be back in a bit, and he picked up his bucket and liquid soap and limped up the street.
We finished our breakfast tacos, and Cristi and Hope went off an adventure while I did the dishes and waited for Cranky Ken to return.
Ken had bought several small apartment buildings facing Balboa Park in the 1970’s. Recently, an investment firm had offered him $10.7 Million for the one up the street with a clogged washing machine, but they wanted to tear it down and build a high rise condo with underground parking and security gates. Condos went for around $3 million each, depending on how high away you were from the sidewalk, and investors were always hoping Ken would sell at least one of his buildings. But, he had told them to go fuck themselves – his words – and he told them that they’d have to pry the title from his cold, dead hands. Every time they handed him their business cards, Ken would shove it in his pocket and throw it away as soon as he was near a trash can, sometimes at my condo when he walked by in the mornings.
He had grown up poor and had had a rough time as a teenager, working the frigid docks of New York harbor, loading and unloading big crates for mafia bosses and Teamsters, and he had dreamed of owning a place in Central Park one day. When he became wealthy some time in the 70’s, he moved to sunny San Diego and began buying apartments around Balboa Park and Hillcrest. Over time, he grew to love them, and didn’t want to see them turned into condos. He said they cost multi-millions each and kept kids like him from living there, and they blocked sunshine from public spaces and made it less enjoyable for kids wanting to climb trees in the center of a big city. He rented his small apartments for remarkably cheap monthly rates and without checking people’s credit, and many of his tennants and had lived there for more than ten years. Most people mailed their monthly checks – he was old school, and still demanded checks instead of transfers or online payments – and I don’t know if any of them knew who Cranky Ken was. I only did because my balcony faced the sidewalk, and I had seen him lugging big bottles of liquid soap up the street for years, and had invited him over for a beer one morning.
I pulled a porter from the fridge and set it on the balcony to warm just a bit, and I set aside two tulip glasses. I realized that I had something I though Ken would appreciate, a calling card I kept in my pocket when I was younger, and I pulled it out and put it beside his glass.
I had found it by the photos at Wendy’s with my medals, and I had almost forgotten about it until Ken said something that reminded me. It was the size of a business card and faded and frayed, held together over thirty years because I had laminated with strips of Scotch tape many years before. One side had a large black and white Ace of Spaces with a skull in the center of the spade, and the skull was wearing an 82nd Airborne beret with the ubiquitous parachute wings spread across the spade. The other side said, “I’m an American Paratrooper. If you’re recovering my body, kiss my cold, dead ass.” I had been using it as a bookmark while researching my family history.
Ken walked in without knocking and his pockets jingled with quarters retrieved from the washing machine.
I handed Ken the faded Ace of Spades and told him the quick story, and he said thanks and shoved it in his pocket and sipped his beer.
“This is good!” he exclaimed. “I still prefer Guiness. But they don’t know how to pour it here. I gotta teach them, every time. They won’t learn on their own. Bunch of frickin’ lazy bastards, I tell you!”
Ken had bought a bar down the street, closer to the downtown tourist district, and converted it to an Irish pub and named it after his family, who had all died when after they immigrated to New York after WWII. He was a night owl, and always had been, and had always enjoyed a Guiness when he got off the docks night shift. His happy hour began around 8am, but few San Diego bars were open then, and none of ones that were seemed to know how to pour a proper pint, so he bought one for around $20 Million and refurbished it with original decor and bar stools from an old Irish pub near where his family had originated. For some reason, not many of his bartenders stayed long, and he kept having to train new ones so that he could enjoy a proper pint after getting quarters from his apartments’s laundry rooms once a week.
Ken looked at my bookshelf and asked, “Have you seen the Irishman yet?”
I told him I hadn’t, that a lot had been going on. I hadn’t told him Wendy had died and that I had been going back and forth to Baton Rouge to finish details of her estate. I didn’t want to talk about it.
Ken said he had, and he told me what he thought about Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan, a former mafia hitman with, obviously, an Irish background.
“They got a lot right, but it was a movie and not real life. It was for men my age. We grew up seeing Pacino and Peci and those guys play mob bosses. Frank said as best he could, but no one today gets it. They see too many movies, like Goodfellas. The Godfather was good, though, and that’s why people want to see Pacino. They confuse actors with real people. No one today realizes how much Hoffa had to do with all that. He was the most famous man in America! Working class. We looked up to him. He didn’t take shit from no one! Not even the Kennedys or the families. I can see Frank doing it. Like Pacino said in The Godfather, it’s just business. Hoffa was old and no longer in the Teamsters then, and the families did what they had to do to keep him from talkin’.”
I sipped my porter and waited for what I suspected he’d ask.
“Well?” he asked.
I asked him, “What?” I tried to not assume what people were thinking.
“Did he do it?”
“The Irishman?”
“No, no, no,” he said in a tone of voice that made me, for a moment, regret having invited him over.
“Hoffa. Did he try to bribe the Negro?”
He meant the juror, and Ken spoke like his generation. Even Chief Justice Earl Warren had called the juror a Negro in Hoffa vs. The United States.
I let Cranky Ken’s comment slide, and said that I didn’t know for sure. But, I said jury tampering was common back then, and my family knew how to do it well. I realized I had something he may appreciate, and I excused myself and pulled a new book from my bookshelf. It was still shiny, with a bright blue book cover. I had just finished reading it, and had coincidentally tucked my calling card between the pages that may have answered Ken’s question.
“Here. My uncle, Doug, just published a book about it.” Ken knew that Doug had recently retired as president of Teamsters Local#5, and was in a veterans nursing home in Natchez Mississippi, near where he and my grandfather had been born. I tried to joke about it.
“They say you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but I think this one does a good job of summing it up. And he bluntly says that my grandfather lied to send Hoffa to prison, but that was just his opinion. My grandfather never talked about it. You’d have to decide for yourself.”
Ken took the book and looked at the cover: “From my brother’s shadow: Douglas Westly Partin tells his side of the story.” It was published by a small Mississippi publisher, Oak Publishing, and the cover had a simple photo of Doug’s smiling face from about twenty years before, and a small photo of my grandfather’s face above him, looking down as if from heaven.
Ken didn’t comment on the title, but he read the back cover out loud
“Boxes full of money in the trunk of the car, suitcases filled with fresh twenty-dollar bills, assassination plots against President John F. Kennedy and against his brother Bobby, then Attorney General of the United States, deals with the New Orleans mob, arms deals with Fidel Castro, fake passports and Mexican IDs, contracts on the lives of any who dared to oppose, violence against companies that refused to cooperate with union organizers, secret testimony against union boss Jimmy Hoffa, criminal indictments, trials, convictions and imprisonment … these are all part of the story told by Douglas Wesley Partin, younger brother of Edward Grady Partin, ruthless boss of Teamsters Local #5 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for thirty years. Doug witnessed it all from the shadow of his older brother, and then he stepped in, succeeded his brother as principal officer of Teamsters Local #5, cleaned it up and led it for many more years. This is a story for the ages.”
“Hey, thanks,” Ken said. “This sounds good. I’ll bring it back to you next week. I love this stuff!”
I wasn’t sure if he meant Hoffa’s history or the porter and I didn’t ask; it was nice to hear Ken happy about something. I made a mental note to ask Doug for a singed copy made out to Ken; both would probably get a kick out of that.
“You should write a book,” he said.
I said that everything was already out there, waving my hand towards The Universe. But I wasn’t being dismissive. It was all out there, though many book chapters are omitted or modified in films. Even the Irishman’s 2005 book, “I heard you paint houses,” had an entire chapter focused on Edward Grady Partin, Audie Murphy, and Nixon; but that was cut out for the sake of a linear story that fit into a two and a half hour film. It had been the same with Hoffa and even The Blood Feud. My bookshelf had all the books, and each one had much more information than the films; but, few people were old school, like Ken, and, from what I had seen, most people who edited Wikipedia seemed to either get their information from movies or have biases that they propagate. I rarely shared my thoughts about it with anyone, but I would happily lend them a book or two to prime the pump for them. It was all there, but it took a long time to sort through all the information, and it was like sipping water from a fire hydrant. Few people had that much energy or time on their hands.
I told him that he knew enough to write a book, and he guaffed and said no one would read it, that even the frickin’ assholes in his apartment didn’t read the signs he kept leaving in the laundry room to stop using powered soap or he’d raise their rents and put them on the street.
“They don’t know how lucky they are,” he grumbled. “If I had this view when I was a kid, I’d been happier than a pig in shit.”
Ken never told me how he earned the money he used to buy all his properties. He finished his beer and left, and I walked to the corner cafe and worked on the latest iteration of a book I was struggling to write.
——
My mother was born Wendy Anne Rothdram on August 14th, 1955, in Richmond Hill, Ontario, an upper middle class suburb of Toronto, to Joyce Hicks and a man whose last name was Rothdram, but whose first name I never learned. Joyce was 18 years old and the youngest of three daughters of my Great Grandpa Harold “Hal” Hicks and Grandma Hicks, French Canadians who settled in the English speaking metropolis of Toronto; he’s easily found online, too, because he was a professional hockey player with 90 professional games with the Montreal Maroons, Detroit Couars, and Detroit Falconsl and though Wikipedia omits his brief stints with the Toronto Mapleleafs and Boston Bruins, Joyce – my Granny – had kept one of his Mary kept one of his Bruins jerseys, and I trust her more than Wikipedia.
Grandpa Hicks retired his jersies, and thirty years later he retired as an upper manager for the Canadian railway system, and local newspapers and coworkers mentioned him and his work and, of course, his hockey career respectfully in his 1960 obituary.
Grandma Hicks was a homemaker and attended to her daughters, Joyce, Mary, and Lois. Because of Grandma Hicks time and their dad’s stable career, the three sisters wanted for nothing in their upper middle class home; but, in full disclosure, a part of their lifestyle came from their aunt, my great-great-great aunt, Edith Lang. She, too, was well known in Canada, because at age 80 and after a lifetime of being a spinster, she married Canada’s wealthiest man and almost ten years her senior. She had been his secretary for forty years, and it was quite the scandal in newspaper gossip columns. Aunt Edith donated her ex husbands extensive artwork to museums all over Canada and traveled extensively and enjoyed time with her nieces, taking them to fancy country clubs and dinners when she was in town. Though somewhat aloof and cantankerous and ostentatious with her wealth, she didn’t have children of her own, and she ensured her nieces had a comfortable life and wanted for nothing. Granny and her sisters would all say they had a loving home and every opportunity imaginable.
Granny and Auntie Lo were partiers, embracing the post WWII prosperity of the 1950’s and enjoying Canadian rye whiskey on the rocks and an occasional splurge on Good Scotch. Aunt Mary was more of a homebody and, like her Aunt Edith, almost never drank alcohol except for wine with good meals. She married a young, mild mannered and family oriented man named John and they lived the rest of their lives in Toronto, raising their daughter without any events that would lead to Wikipedia pages. Lois was rarely sober, and she married a navy veteran and delightfully indulgent French Canadian named Robert, a middle manager of Montreal’s Bulk Stevedoring Company, and they accepted a transfer to manage the loading and unloading of America’s second largest shipping port in New Orleans and bought an upper middle class home an hour upriver in the smaller, more affordable river port and capital city of Baton Rouge. Joyce was the only daughter left at the Hicks’s home, and one night she stayed out too late and had too much to drink and became pregnant with Wendy and then married the father, a man who’s first name I don’t remember but who gave Wendy and Granny their last name, Rothdram, a man who claimed to be a cartoonist for Walt Disney; though I never found evidence to support his claim.
A few years later, Granny fled an abusive relationship with her husband and took Wendy to Baton Rouge to stay with Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob; they could never have their own children, and they had rooms to spare in their newly built home and they welcomed Granny and Wendy when Wendy was a five year old girl.
Granny was not one to sit idle, and though she was a single uneducated mother in the deeply ingrained culture of southern Louisiana that insisted women were homemakers and looked down upon unwed mothers, she persisted and exhibited confidence and found a job in the newly created “chemical alley” of industry north of Baton Rouge’s airport, a long rural road of chemical processing plants and oil refineries that processed oil from offshore oil rigs in Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. She was a secretary and taught herself to type and studied and learned the lingo CoPolymer’s processes, and in return CoPolymer allowed Granny health insurance – something that had been free in Canada and she had taken for granted until she was a single mother – and they increased her pay equitably, and soon Granny was able to save enough money to put a down payment on a small, 680 square foot home on a relatively large acre of land in a new housing development under the airport flight path. Her commute to work drastically reduced and Wendy had safe streets to play in and public schools and parks nearby. The home had three tiny bedrooms and two bathrooms and a modest kitchen, and Granny’s liquor cabinets rattled every ten to twenty minutes from jet airplane engines above her roof, but Granny was proud that despite her setbacks and obstacles, she had achieved what some people called “The American Dream” of home ownership as a single mother who immigrated to America without an education.
Granny would work for CoPolymer for almost 30 years. She was respected for being a self-driven learner, and for being polite but honest, and forthcoming with useful information, never shy, and she was recognized for never having come to work late or missed a day except except for a brief period in 1975 when she was coming home from work and was sidestruck by a careless driver who had likely been drinking. The accident shattered her right ankle and she was immobilized for a few weeks and couldn’t drive to work, and Wendy volunteered to move back home and care for her. They had been estranged ever since Wendy had eloped with my dad, but Wendy had been maturing and knew she should help her mother, especially because the driver that hit Granny was uninsured and CoPolymer’s health insurance policy wouldn’t cover at-home care until Granny could drive again.
Even before the accident, Granny had been adamant against any type of driving after having had a drink, and she drank every day without concern for what other people thought about it. She would come home from work and relax with a tall glass or two of the best Scotch on the rocks she could afford, and she so enjoyed her lifestyle that she rarely drove anywhere to socialize. Instead, she focused on being home as soon as she returned from work, which was only 20 minutes north of the airport, and she tried to be home when Wendy came home from Glenoaks Elementary and then Glenoaks Middle and then eventually GleanOaks High, and her routine was always to relax then cook dinner for her and Wendy. She was proud of her home she worked so hard to afford, and was happy simply reposing in her recliner with a bottle of Scotch and a carton of Kents and her monthly Reader’s Digest books, including a section of cookbooks, like Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Paul Prudhome’s Louisiana Kitchen and the ubiquitous Times Picayune Creole Cookbook. She was a self-taught chef, embracing the Cajun culture of making delicious food from scratch using frugally purchased ingredients and never shying away from adding extra sherry to her turtle soup or a splash or two of wine in her tomato sauce while enjoying a glass or two for herself.
Granny encouraged Wendy to be independent and to play with her friends on bike in their safe streets or explore her spacious yard with it’s large pecan trees and gumball trees and, typical to old Baton Rouge homes, at least one majestic stately oak tree with branches that reached out and bounced against the ground in heavy winds. Inside, Granny encouraged Wendy to read books from the copiously stocked bookshelf she kept with her other luxuries, an expensive collection of the Encyclopedia Britanica and a subscription to it’s yearly updates and several subscriptions to fiction and nonfiction books for a range of ages. Granny’s bookshelf was so well stocked that some of Wendy’s friends would use it for homework rather than Glen Oak Elementary’s library resources, just like I would, and Granny was generous with her time and would sit and learn with them, if they wanted, just like she would with me. Wendy had her own bookshelf for whichever books she chose for fun, and the encyclopedia’s were down low where she and other kids could reach them.
Wendy grew up playing with her best friends nearby, Linda White and the sisters Cindi and Debbie LeBoux, and they were what most people called Tom Boys, cheerful and playful but preferring jeans over dresses and bicycles over dolls, a rarity in the traditional southern culture where women wore dresses and didn’t get dirty often. They climbed the sprawling stately oak trees in Granny’s yard and caught minnows and crawfish in the drainage canal that wrapped around half of Granny’s yard, and rode bicycles for miles around the relatively sparsely populated subdivision with it’s meandering streets that navigated around waterways and oak grooves. As Wendy got older, she began swimming on Glen Oaks Middle School’s team and playing tennis and golf with Uncle Bob and Auntie Lo in the country club near their home thirty minutes south of the airport.
Wendy grew to be a beautiful young lady with hazel colored eyes that crinkled when she smiled, and long straight strawberry blonde hair that blew in the wind behind her when she rode her bicycle. She was petite, like Granny, and only 5’1” tall, but whereas Granny was thin as a twig, Wendy grew to be full figured and attracted the attention of boys at Glen Oaks High School. Like most of her friends and for reasons I don’t understand, she dated older boys and her first serious boyfriend was an 18 year old senior when she was a 15 year old sophomore. He graduated in the spring of 1971 and was immediately drafted and shipped to basic training and then to the conflict in Vietnam, where he was immediately shot and killed before Wendy would begin her junior year.
Wendy was devastated by his loss. He had faithfully written her letters, but she had procrastinated responding – a trait she would maintain all her life – because she had wanted to send him the perfect picture to remember her and had borrowed Uncle Bob’s fancy and rare color film camera and had Linda and Debbie take her photo dancing under one of Granny’s trees with the last of that season’s red azalea flowers tucked above her ear and augmenting the strawberry hints in her hair. Photos took a few weeks to develop back then, and Wendy enjoyed playing outside during the summer and forgot to pick up the film, and time passed and then she heard he had been shot and killed.
She had what I consider a minor nervous breakdown, and she rebelled against everyone and everything and told Granny she wanted to return to Canada, where there wasn’t a draft and the government didn’t make young boys go to war and die and people could live happily, she thought. But, she hadn’t told Granny she had been dating an older boy and that he had died, so she simply demanded to return to Canada and live with her father, a man she hadn’t seen in more than 10 years but had built up in her mind as a man who loved her more than Granny, and she imagined he would be more fun and supportive than her boring mother who just sat at home ever day and drank Scotch and cooked meals and read books.
Granny was a woman of action and preferred experiential learning over long lectures, and she forewent her good bottles of Scotch to buy Wendy a plane ticket to Toronto for Wendy to see her dad for the first time since they had immigrated to America eleven years prior. Wendy boarded the plane and she saw the trees in her yard from above after having spent her life looking up at them passing over their home, and she thought she’d never return to Louisiana. But, only a few days later she used the return ticket Granny had had the foresight to purchase and returned home, because her father wouldn’t even hug her and said he was happy with his new family and that Wendy was Granny’s problem now. He gave her a hastily drawn cartoon caricature of a drunkard with a 1940’s hobo hat, and Wendy returned to Baton Rouge even more distraught than before, and Granny resumed buying the good bottles of Scotch and, in her pragmatic way, encouraged Wendy to focus on being happy.
Wendy turned 16 a few weeks later and began her junior year at Glen Oaks High School, but was so depressed that she dreaded being stuck inside and all of the questions that permeate southern culture ostensibly to be friendly but usually only mindless of diverse households, like “Who’s your momma, and what church do y’all go to?” and “What’s your daddy do?” and, for those people who know a bit about you already, “Have you heard from your boyfriend?” She had always been friendly but shy, and in her junior year she became reticent and smiled less and less frequently. To tolerate the anxiety of going to school, she began smoking marijuana with her friends and relaxing in class, comfortably numb and passing time until she could go home and smoke again.
She met Edward Partin that fall, a 17 year old senior who was the Glen Oak’s main drug dealer.
He was tall and physically strong and ruggedly handsome, with long black hair and dark brown eyes so dark they seemed black. He rarely smiled in school, and usually frowned or scowled to express his discontent with the system and disdain for authority. He always had abundant marijuana and new cars that attracted attention, especially in the lower economic school district of Glen Oaks, and he had been arrested for selling drugs but somehow a judge set him free, and that added to his reputation as a “bad boy” and confident young man that seemed to attract 16 year old girls going through issues with their fathers. He told his friends that Wendy was “fine,” and soon they were skipping school to ride in his cars and sneaking out at night to meet; coincidentally, he had recently moved in with his grandmother, my Great Grandma Foster, who lived a few blocks away from Granny.
Wendy and my dad snuck out one night in January of 1972 and got high, and they listened to a new album that had just come out, Led Zepplin IV, and the song that was the most popular in America at that time and would become prophetic for Wendy, “Going to California.”
Wendy smoked his stuff and got high and lost her virginity to Edward, and almost immediately realized she was pregnant. She didn’t have enough money for an abortion and didn’t tell Granny for fear of judgement, and when she told my dad she was surprised by his insistence on getting married; his father had had several illegitimate families and, in my dad’s mind, had abandoned him and my dad wanted to be a better father and insisted they get married. Wendy agreed, and they dropped out of school and drove an hour and a half away to Woodville, Mississippi, where state laws didn’t require parental consent for a 16 year old girl to marry a 17 year old boy. They returned to Baton Rouge as Mr. and Mrs. Edward Partin and resided in one of his father’s many homes while my dad started growing marijuana in a dry patch of land in a nearby bayou. A few months later, as JJ Lottingger wrote, I was born; and Wendy soon abandoned me and left for California.
——
“It’s interesting that Lottingger never mentioned my dad’s history,” I said.
After reading about Wendy, Cristi had read what I had written about him, and she agreed that it seemed more odd that Wendy hadn’t, if only to defend her case.
“And it’s funny that the judge went out of his way to say your dad hadn’t seen Wendy drink,” she said.
I mumbled a sound that implied agreement, and tried one last time to imagine why my dad’s history had been omitted. I had been removed from both of their custody, and he was obviously at the 1976 trial, yet only Wendy was blamed for abandoning me. No one explained where my dad was when they found me alone. And he had recently been arrested and convicted of having prescriptions opiotes with intention to sell, though he had escaped jail. He was gone often, which is why I was removed “ex-parte,” without consulting all parties, and that seemed like an important point in a custody trial.
“But the judge didn’t need to prove your dad was wrong,” she said, probably after thinking about it more, like I had. “He only had to prove Wendy was…” She paused and looked at my court record and then said, “‘now morally and emotionally fit’ to care for you, and that she had a… “‘fine‘ home.”
“She had won,” Cristi said.
“Even without talking about your dad’s history, she had gotten you back. She took the high road – no pun intended – because she didn’t have to say anything. Like you said, more counts less.”
I looked at her, surprised that I hadn’t seen it that way. She said I was too biased; I knew to much about Wendy to remain open minded to new ways of seeing her.
She was probably right, and I said I’d begin looking up his history the same way I had Wendy’s, simply searching his name and starting from there.
“And I can’t believe Warren called the juror ‘Negro.’ Why were those adjectives used so much back then? Did it matter which race the juror was? And that your grandfather raped a black girl, as if any word after ‘rape’ mattered.” She was more upset than her voice let on – her father had been a light skinned African – and I knew enough to remain silent. We had already talked about that part, and Doug goes into detail in his book. My grandfather had been found not guilty because one white male juror in Mississippi had said, “Ain’t no white man need go to jail for nothin’ he done to a nigger girl,” and he went free despite considerable evidence against him. I never learned what happened to her or her family, because her name was hidden from court records.
We changed topics and enjoyed the rest of our time together. If writing about Wendy had taught me anything, it was that seeing Uncle Bob’s watch next to her had reminded me, again, to focus on what was important.
Next Chapter
Table of Contents
My Father
/in Uncategorized /by jasonpartinI assume Lottingger was a competent and honest judge, doing his due diligence and reviewing controversial or unusual Supreme Court verdicts, and that he read books and the daily newspapers, or that he would have somehow else recognized my dad’s name, if only for my grandfather, Edward Grady Partin Senior. But he still didn’t share their Partin history, so perhaps he wasn’t aware. Though any internet search today shows that my grandfather was nationally, if not internationally, famous then as the Baton Rouge Teamster leader who worked with Bobby Kennedy to send Jimmy Hoffa to prison; he was the surprise witness sent international Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa to prison for eight years in 1964, and in the years since, especially around the time the Warren Report on President Kennedy’s assassination was released in 1964, When Life did an expose on the newly recognized mafia in America throughout the mid 1960’s, when US Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, when Hoffa finally went to prison in 1969, and when national hero Audie Murphy died in 1971. In many of these times, he and my family, including my young dad, were showcased globally in the monthly Life magazine, on television interviews and newspaper photos weekly, and his name took up the vast majority of all references in books about Hoffa, including Hoffa’s authorized biography released that year, just before Hoffa famously vanished from a Detroit parking lot on July 30th, 1975, just as Lottinngger was assuming my case. My grandfather had even brought the attention of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was the only one of nine judges to vote against using Edward Partin’s testimony against Hoffa, and who wrote a three page missive about my grandfather in Hoffa vs The United States. The governor of Louisiana, John McKiethen, for whom Lottingger had been working, railed against “Partin and his ganster Teamsters” in the New Orleans and Baton Rouge newspapers frequently, making front page several times in response to widely publicized shoot-outs between the Baton Rouge Teamsters and concrete plants across the Mississippi Bridge that had, initially, refused to hire Teamster union labor, but somehow changed their minds after meeting my grandfather. McKiethen lost the election in 1972, just like newspaper had reported Big Daddy saying he would, and many people in the state said Big Daddy would have become governor if he only he had had a college degree.
Judge Lottingger either hadn’t heard the name Edward Grady Partin Senior, or he had heard it and didn’t mention it in Partin vs. Partin; either way, I think it’s remarkable.
My dad was born in 1954 as the third of five children to Norma Jean Partin and Edward Grady Partin. Norma Jean was a gorgeous, confident, well spoken redhead with dark brown eyes and a voluptuous figure. She was from Spring Hill, Louisiana, near Texarkana and the tri-state border of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. She was so stunning that people compared her to the famous model and actress Marilyn Monroe, whose real name was also Norma Jean, and by 18 years old the beautiful Norma Jean that would become my Mamma Jean was courted by almost every man who meet her. Her family was spread across the south, and when she visited her cousins in Woodville, Mississippi, she met my grandfather, a physically large and fit man who was remarkably handsome, with clear skin and rosy cheeks and bright blue eyes and wavy blonde hair with hints of red, and with a charming smile and slick southern accent and sweet words. He was a 26 year old up-and-coming labor union leader who ran unions for both the Woodville sawmill workers and the truckers that delivered raw lumber and carried away cut timber. Almost everyone in Louisiana and Mississippi called him Big Daddy. His Wikipedia page changes often due to its open source, and usually around the time a movie is made about Jimmy Hoffa and only once or twice with anything other than rewording his 1990 obituary, and because photographs were black and white back then, only a few of us remember the hints of red in his hair and slightly rosey cheeks and that’s never mentioned in any summary and, to me, not worth learning how to edit Wikipedia to mention it.
Men would recall his brute force, and that’s well documented in all books about Hoffa and in the movies that portray him. He had briefly been a marine during WWII and had boxed several semi professional matches, and part of his calm demeanor came from his confidence that he could take care of a room full of men with his bare hands, and if he needed more than his hands he always carried a folding knife he used for elk hunting in Flagstaff, and knew how to use it.
Everyone said he was charming. In the chapter about him in Hoffa’s 1975 book, Hoffa begins the chapter about Ed Partin by saying, “Edward Partin was a big, rough man who could charm a snake off a rock.” Mamma jean was smitten immediately.
As soon as Mamma Jean met Big Daddy, she wrote to her family that she had found a handsome, hard working man who she believed would make a good father. They were married six weeks later and began having children immediately. Aunt Janice was born first, followed by Cynthia, my dad, Theresa, and then Kieth. They outgrew Woodville, and moved to Baton Rouge, where Big Daddy took over the Teamsters Local #5 and forcibly installed one of Hoffa’s men into power in New Orleans. Hoffa was so impressed with Big Daddy’s tactics and that Big Daddy quickly became one of Hoffa’s most trusted lieutenants, a decision that would soon cost Hoffa his presidency and many years of his life, and then his life; or so I assume. To this day, even after the 2019 Scorcese film The Irishman, no one knows for sure what happened. I don’t.
In 1963 Mamma Jean fled Big Daddy and hid their five children from him and the Teamsters, placing them with different relatives throughout the south in hunting and fishing camps that were relatively undocumented and difficult to find. She had learned that her husband wasn’t the man she had assumed he was, though he had been a good father to all of his children except my dad – my aunts and uncle would say that Big Daddy was “rough” on him without explaining more – and that he had been married with another family when they met, and that she suspected him of being involved with the mafia and President Kennedy’s assassination, though she never had proof and didn’t discuss her suspicions with anyone out of self-doubt and fear for her children’s safety.
In 1964, Big Daddy helped Sydney Simpson, a 22 year old Local #5 Teamster, kidnap his two young children after losing them in a custody trial in the same East Baton Rouge Parish courthouse that my records would begin appearing a few years later; simultaneously, he was charged with manslaughter in Mississippi, and would have faced trials for both federal crimes, but President Kennedy’s little brother, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, had him freed and provided him immunity and cleared his criminal record in exchange for infiltrating Hoffa’s inner circle and reporting “any attempts at witness intimidation or tampering with the jury,” “anything illegal,” or “anything of interest.” Immediately after Big Daddy’s release from the Baton Rouge jailhouse, the director of the FBI’s Get Hoffa Task Force, Walter Sheridan, located Mamma Jean and her children and offered her a deal: if she remained silent and didn’t divorce Big Daddy until at least after they convicted Hoffa of something, the federal government would buy her a house big enough for her and her five children and pay her a monthly stipend equivalent to what she would have received in alimony. She agreed, and later that year Big Daddy became famous as the surprise witness that sent the world’s most powerful Teamster leader to prison; Jimmy Hoffa was said to be the most famous man in America, after John F. Kennedy. Big Daddy testified that Hoffa had asked him to bribe a juror in a relatively minor case against Hoffa using $20,000 from Hoffa’s petty cash safe, and though there were no witnesses or recordings, Hoffa was sentenced to eight years in prison based on Big Daddy’s testimony and the jury believing my handsome, smiling, charming, grandfather. Immediately after the trial, Big Daddy and his children were showcased across national media, without Mamma Jean but implying they were happy, and Big Daddy became was called an All American hero for helping Bobby Kennedy stop corruption in the Teamsters by putting Hoffa in prison.
Few Americans knew the truth about Big Daddy because Bobby Kennedy and Walter Sheridan had expunged his long history of criminal activity. But Walter kept many of his FBI records, and he listed some of Big Daddy’s history his 1972 book, “The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa,” published just after I was born and including dates right up until the events around my birth, coincidentally. Walter wrote:
“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. [That wasn’t true: he punched a captain and was discharged for assaulting an officer, though I heard he removed the unconscious captain’s watch, but the captain may have been embarrassed by how Big Daddy obtained it and told investigators otherwise. – JiP] 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. [That wasn’t true: my grandmother was from Spring Hill, near Texarkana, and she wasn’t quiet; she was vociferously opinionated among friends and family, and was disciplined enough to remain silent around FBI agents and reporters. She accepted the government payout in exchange for her silence around Waltler and the media to provide for her five children, never lying, and saying the Lord words in mysterious ways. – JiP] 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.”
Many crimes were omitted from Walter’s book and were being removed from court houses across America. But, even then, and with a quick search on today’s internet, you could see that he had been, and probably still was, a rapist, murderer, thief, lier, adulturer, bearer of false witness (Hoffa even knew that), who had begun skipping church on Sundays. And though, technically, rape isn’t a sin in the bible for reasons I don’t understand, I’m sure that if God met Big Daddy that would change.
Chief Justice Earl Warren was perplexed by my grandfather. More specifically, he was the only one of nine judges critical of my grandfather’s character, and the only one to dissent against Partin’s testimony in Hoffa vs. the United States, where he permanently recorded his thoughts on my grandfather for posterities sake, publicly available to anyone seeking it since 1966.
By then Warren was a household name, a respected bipartisan Supreme Court judge with almost a 40 year history, having overseen landmark cases such as Roe vs Wade, Brown vs the Board of Education, and the case that enforced Miranda rights, including the right to remain silent; and, most notably, the 888 page Warren Report on President Kennedy’s assassination that the world had waited for and famously but inaccurately concluded that “Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed President John F. Kennedy.” Of all people, Warren should have had access to all of the facts about my family, yet he was so confused by the situation surrounding Big Daddy and wrote a three page missive of this thought process to forever be preserved in Hoffa vs. The United States for posterity to ponder, not unlike Judge Lottingger had partially documented my family history in Partin vs. Partin for posterity, too.
“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. Shortly after Partin made contact with the federal authorities and told them of his position in the Baton Rouge Local of the Teamsters Union and of his acquaintance with Hoffa, his bail was suddenly reduced from $50,000 to $5,000 and he was released from jail,”
and,
“… Partin’s wife received four monthly installment payments of $300 from government funds, and the state and federal charges against Partin were either dropped or not actively pursued.”
Warren may have known of a few payments to Mamma Jean, but all of us knew about the home and many more payments; those are some of the details of my family history that I know to be true but are undocumented. But, per Mamma Jean’s agreement, no one in my family had ever shared that information publicly until now. Even with only a few payments offered, technically the Partin family is considered America’s first ‘paid informants,’ different than a witness program in which identities are hidden, in that we were paid before a testimony and then we weren’t hidden and our name was known publicly, though the details remained classified or hidden. As I mentioned, my family has a long history of keeping secrets, and we’re pretty good at it.
Earl Warren wasn’t the only person perplexed by Big Daddy’s vanishing criminal history. Jimmy Hoffa had hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal, and he hired the best lawyers possible to discredit Big Daddy, men who defended high profile cases and mafia bosses and knew how to find information and intimidate witnesses, yet even they found nothing in the years of appeals between Big Daddy’s 1964 testimony and Warren’s 1966 missive, where he wrote:
“Partin underwent cross-examination for an entire week. The defense was afforded wide latitude to probe Partin’s background, character, and ties to the authorities; it was permitted to explore matters that are normally excludable, for example, whether Partin had been charged with a crime in 1942, even though that charge had never been prosecuted.”
Warren concluded:
“I cannot agree that what happened in this case is in keeping with the standards of justice in our federal system, and I must, therefore, dissent.”
Despite Warren’s protests and for reasons I don’t understand, his one vote didn’t override Big Daddy’s testimony, and Hoffa went to prison based on Big Daddy’s word and my family remained silent for decades.
Understandably, after seeing behind the scenes of America’s justice system and having a man like Big Daddy be “rough” on him, my dad became a rebellious teenager with distrust of the government and authority, and he left Mamma Jean’s to live with Big Daddy’s mother, my great-Grandma Foster, who lived near the Baton Rouge airport a few blocks away from where Wendy was living with Granny. Walter’s book and a team of FBI agents and federal marshals were following my family around the time of my conception, but they were probably unconcerned about what a 17 year old marijuana dealer did and had more important things to focus on; to them, at last.
By 1971, he was ruggedly handsome and admirably defiant against teachers and anyone in authority, and, as per many young people in 1971, adamantly against the war in Vietnam that had escalated so quickly after Kennedy died. And then his father was suspected of killing America’s most decorated war hero, Audie Murphy, for reasons I’ll explain soon, and at the time he may have also had a slight nervous breakdown and met Wendy Anne Rothdram when she was distraught from loosing her boyfriend to the war and being abandoned by her father, and she smoked his stuff and their union led to me.
He proposed marriage when he learned, saying he didn’t want to be like his father, who had abandoned his first family, in a way, and who had been spending more time with Audie than his children, for reasons no one understands. My dad wanted to be a better man than his father and his grandfather, Grady Partin, who had abandoned Grandma Foster and her three childre and led Big Daddy to dropping out of school and doing what he thought he had to do to take care of them. My parents dropped out of high school and drove an hour away to Mississippi, near where Grandma Foster and Big Daddy had been born and he still had family to host them, and where state laws didn’t require parental consent for a 17 year old boy and a 16 year old girl to be married. States recognize each other’s marriage certificates, and they returned to Baton Rouge and lived in one of Big Daddy’s many houses near forested swamps.
In 1972, around the time of my birth, Big Daddy was arrested again, charged with stealing $450,000 from the Local #5 safe, and the only two witnesses were found beaten and bloody. The safe was recovered in a murky river near where Wendy was living in the rental house Big Daddy had let her and my dad use. His arrest made front page headlines, and around that time my dad left us and rode to Miami with his friends on motorcyles to travel to some island and buy drugs in bulk, and Wendy was left alone with me, without a car or job. As she said, she felt emotionally upset, alone, scared, and confused; and she felt she had no where to turn. I can’t imagine anyone feeling any less in her situation and with the Partin family. It probably left her feeling warped, and she fled Baton Rouge to straighten her self out.
The day Wendy abandoned me in 1972, the daycare center was closing and I was the last baby there and they didn’t know what to do. They called her emergency contacts, but Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob were too drunk to answer the phone and Wendy hadn’t left Granny’s number because they were still estranged. She had given the center Linda White’s name, and when she answered she told her father and he dropped what he was doing and rushed to the daycare center and picked me up, and the rest is history. It’s likely that he had to work during weekdays and couldn’t attend my custody trials, and it’s just as likely that early family court systems didn’t view the opinions of unrelated caregivers as relevant to family matters, but it’s rare to have a non-relative given custody of a minor child, especially one with an extensive family like I had. That was the ex-parte error Lottingger mentioned; a joke Wendy and I would pronounce as “ex-Partin,” and, though she never changed her name, she said that divorcing my dad made her an ex-Partin. As I mentioned, we grew to have our own, unique, insider jokes and humor that few people would understand, especially because it’s such as long story.
No one knows why Ed White was given so much authority of me as my legal guardian when both of my parents were fighting for custody. The first trial judge had “by ex parte order, awarded the temporary care, custody and control of the minor to Mr. and Mrs. James Ed White,” and after that judge’s presumed suicide another judge granted custody to my dad on paper; but, for some unknown reason that judge kept Mr. White as my guardian with physical custody. Whatever the reasons, I’m forever grateful, because Ed White was more than my guardian, he was my PawPaw, my father, my friend, and possibly the most influential person in my life despite only knowing him for a few years. My memories begin with him, and my perspective about life, the universe, and everything stems from him
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My Mother’s Story
/in Uncategorized /by jasonpartinWendy was born Wendy Anne Rothdram in 1955 in Richmond Hill, Ontario, an upper middle class suburb of Toronto, to Joyce Hicks and a man who’s last name was Rothdram and I met once but whose first name I don’t recall. Joyce was my Granny, and at the time she was 18 years old and the youngest of three daughters of my Great Grandpa Harold “Hal” Hicks and Grandma Hicks, French Canadians who settled in the English speaking metropolis of Toronto; he was relatively well known in Canada because he was a professional hockey player for the Montreal Maroons, Detroit Couars, and Detroit Falcons. Wikipedia says he played 90 professional games but omits his brief stints with the Toronto Mapleleafs and Boston Bruins; Aunt Mary kept one of his Bruins jerseys, and I trust her more than I trust Wikipedia. He would retire later in life as an upper manager for the Canadian railroad system, and local newspapers and coworkers mentioned him and his work respectfully in his 1960 obituary. Grandma Hicks was a homemaker and attended to her daughters, Joyce, Mary, and Lois; they wanted for nothing in their upper middle class home, in part because Grandma Hicks’s aunt, Edith Lang, was an elderly woman without children who enjoyed time with her nieces; she, too, was relatively well known as a socialite and philanthropist and former spinster who worked for one of Canada’s wealthiest men as his secretary for forty years and marrying him at 80 years old; he died soon after, and she inherited his fortune and the country’s largest private art collection and donated many valuable pieces of art to museums. Though somewhat aloof and cantankerous and ostentatious with her wealth, she didn’t have children of her own and ensured her nieces had a comfortable life and wanted for nothing. Granny and her sisters would all say they had a loving home and every opportunity imaginable.
Granny and Auntie Lo were partiers, embracing the post WWII prosperity of the 1950’s and enjoying Canadian rye whiskey on the rocks and an occasional splurge on Good Scotch. Aunt Mary was more of a homebody and, like her Aunt Edith, almost never drank alcohol except for wine with good meals. She married a young, mild mannered and family oriented man named John and they lived the rest of their lives in Toronto, raising their daughter without any events that would lead to Wikipedia pages. Lois was rarely sober, and she married a navy veteran and delightfully indulgent French Canadian named Robert, a middle manager of Montreal’s Bulk Stevedoring Company, and they accepted a transfer to manage the loading and unloading of America’s second largest shipping port in New Orleans and bought an upper middle class home an hour upriver in the smaller, more affordable river port and capital city of Baton Rouge. Joyce was the only daughter left at the Hicks’s home, and one night she stayed out too late and had too much to drink and became pregnant with Wendy and then married the father, a man who’s first name I don’t remember but who gave Wendy and Granny their last name, Rothdram, a man who claimed to be a cartoonist for Walt Disney. A few years later, Granny fled an abusive relationship with her husband and took Wendy to Baton Rouge to stay with Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob; they could never have their own children, and they had rooms to spare in their newly built home and they welcomed Granny and Wendy when Wendy was a five year old girl.
Granny was not one to sit idle, and though she was a single uneducated mother in the deeply ingrained culture of southern Louisiana that insisted women were homemakers and looked down upon unwed mothers, she persisted and exhibited confidence and found a job in the newly created “chemical alley” of industry north of Baton Rouge’s airport, a long rural road of chemical processing plants and oil refineries that processed oil from offshore oil rigs in Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. She was a secretary and taught herself to type and studied and learned the lingo CoPolymer’s processes, and in return CoPolymer allowed Granny health insurance – something that had been free in Canada and she had taken for granted until she was a single mother – and they increased her pay equitably, and soon Granny was able to save enough money to put a down payment on a small, 680 square foot home on a relatively large acre of land in a new housing development under the airport flight path. Her commute to work drastically reduced and Wendy had safe streets to play in and public schools and parks nearby. The home had three tiny bedrooms and two bathrooms and a modest kitchen, and Granny’s liquor cabinets rattled every ten to twenty minutes from jet airplane engines above her roof, but Granny was proud that despite her setbacks and obstacles, she had achieved what some people called “The American Dream” of home ownership as a single mother who immigrated to America without an education.
Granny would work for CoPolymer for almost 30 years. She was respected for being a self-driven learner, and for being polite but honest, and forthcoming with useful information, never shy, and she was recognized for never having come to work late or missed a day except except for a brief period in 1975 when she was coming home from work and was sidestruck by a careless driver who had likely been drinking. The accident shattered her right ankle and she was immobilized for a few weeks and couldn’t drive to work, and Wendy volunteered to move back home and care for her. They had been estranged ever since Wendy had eloped with my dad, but Wendy had been maturing and knew she should help her mother, especially because the driver that hit Granny was uninsured and CoPolymer’s health insurance policy wouldn’t cover at-home care until Granny could drive again.
Even before the accident, Granny had been adamant against any type of driving after having had a drink, and she drank every day without concern for what other people thought about it. She would come home from work and relax with a tall glass or two of the best Scotch on the rocks she could afford, and she so enjoyed her lifestyle that she rarely drove anywhere to socialize. Instead, she focused on being home as soon as she returned from work, which was only 20 minutes north of the airport, and she tried to be home when Wendy came home from Glenoaks Elementary and then Glenoaks Middle and then eventually GleanOaks High, and her routine was always to relax then cook dinner for her and Wendy. She was proud of her home she worked so hard to afford, and was happy simply reposing in her recliner with a bottle of Scotch and a carton of Kents and her monthly Reader’s Digest books, including a section of cookbooks, like Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Paul Prudhome’s Louisiana Kitchen and the ubiquitous Times Picayune Creole Cookbook. She was a self-taught chef, embracing the Cajun culture of making delicious food from scratch using frugally purchased ingredients and never shying away from adding extra sherry to her turtle soup or a splash or two of wine in her tomato sauce while enjoying a glass or two for herself.
Granny encouraged Wendy to be independent and to play with her friends on bike in their safe streets or explore her spacious yard with it’s large pecan trees and gumball trees and, typical to old Baton Rouge homes, at least one majestic stately oak tree with branches that reached out and bounced against the ground in heavy winds. Inside, Granny encouraged Wendy to read books from the copiously stocked bookshelf she kept with her other luxuries, an expensive collection of the Encyclopedia Britanica and a subscription to it’s yearly updates and several subscriptions to fiction and nonfiction books for a range of ages. Granny’s bookshelf was so well stocked that some of Wendy’s friends would use it for homework rather than Glen Oak Elementary’s library resources, just like I would, and Granny was generous with her time and would sit and learn with them, if they wanted, just like she would with me.
Wendy grew up playing with her best friends nearby, Linda White and the sisters Cindi and Debbie LeBoux, and they were what most people called Tom Boys, cheerful and playful but preferring jeans over dresses and bicycles over dolls, a rarity in the traditional southern culture where women wore dresses and didn’t get dirty often. They climbed the sprawling stately oak trees in Granny’s yard and caught minnows and crawfish in the drainage canal that wrapped around half of Granny’s yard, and rode bicycles for miles around the relatively sparsely populated subdivision with it’s meandering streets that navigated around waterways and oak grooves. As Wendy got older, she began swimming on Glen Oaks Middle School’s team and playing tennis and golf with Uncle Bob and Auntie Lo in the country club near their home thirty minutes south of the airport.
Wendy grew to be a beautiful young lady with hazel colored eyes that crinkled when she smiled, and long straight strawberry blonde hair that blew in the wind behind her when she rode her bicycle. She was petite, like Granny, and only 5’1” tall, but whereas Granny was thin as a twig, Wendy grew to be full figured and attracted the attention of boys at Glen Oaks High School. Like most of her friends and for reasons I don’t understand, she dated older boys and her first serious boyfriend was an 18 year old senior when she was a 15 year old sophomore. He graduated in the spring of 1971 and was immediately drafted and shipped to basic training and then to the conflict in Vietnam, where he was immediately shot and killed before Wendy would begin her junior year.
Wendy was devastated by his loss. He had faithfully written her letters, but she had procrastinated responding – a trait she would maintain all her life – because she had wanted to send him the perfect picture to remember her and had borrowed Uncle Bob’s fancy and rare color film camera and had Linda and Debbie take her photo dancing under one of Granny’s trees with the last of that season’s red azalea flowers tucked above her ear and augmenting the strawberry hints in her hair. Photos took a few weeks to develop back then, and Wendy enjoyed playing outside during the summer and forgot to pick up the film, and time passed and then she heard he had been shot and killed.
She had what I consider a minor nervous breakdown, and she rebelled against everyone and everything and told Granny she wanted to return to Canada, where there wasn’t a draft and the government didn’t make young boys go to war and die and people could live happily, she thought. But, she hadn’t told Granny she had been dating an older boy and that he had died, so she simply demanded to return to Canada and live with her father, a man she hadn’t seen in more than 10 years but had built up in her mind as a man who loved her more than Granny, and she imagined he would be more fun and supportive than her boring mother who just sat at home ever day and drank Scotch and cooked meals and read books.
Granny was a woman of action and preferred experiential learning over long lectures, and she forewent her good bottles of Scotch to buy Wendy a plane ticket to Toronto for Wendy to see her dad for the first time since they had immigrated to America eleven years prior. Wendy boarded the plane and she saw the trees in her yard from above after having spent her life looking up at them passing over their home, and she thought she’d never return to Louisiana. But, only a few days later she used the return ticket Granny had had the foresight to purchase and returned home, because her father wouldn’t even hug her and said he was happy with his new family and that Wendy was Granny’s problem now. He gave her a hastily drawn cartoon caricature of a drunkard with a 1940’s hobo hat, and Wendy returned to Baton Rouge even more distraught than before, and Granny resumed buying the good bottles of Scotch and, in her pragmatic way, encouraged Wendy to focus on being happy.
Wendy turned 16 a few weeks later and began her junior year at Glen Oaks High School, but was so depressed that she dreaded being stuck inside and all of the questions that permeate southern culture ostensibly to be friendly but usually only mindless of diverse households, like “Who’s your momma, and what church do y’all go to?” and “What’s your daddy do?” and, for those people who know a bit about you already, “Have you heard from your boyfriend?” She had always been friendly but shy, and in her junior year she became reticent and smiled less and less frequently. To tolerate the anxiety of going to school, she began smoking marijuana with her friends and relaxing in class, comfortably numb and passing time until she could go home and smoke again.
She met Edward Partin that fall, a 17 year old senior who was the Glen Oak’s main drug dealer.
He was tall and physically strong and ruggedly handsome, with long black hair and dark brown eyes so dark they seemed black. He rarely smiled in school, and usually frowned or scowled to express his discontent with the system and disdain for authority. He always had abundant marijuana and new cars that attracted attention, especially in the lower economic school district of Glen Oaks, and he had been arrested for selling drugs but somehow a judge set him free, and that added to his reputation as a “bad boy” and confident young man that seemed to attract 16 year old girls going through issues with their fathers. He told his friends that Wendy was “fine,” and soon they were skipping school to ride in his cars and sneaking out at night to meet; coincidentally, he had recently moved in with his grandmother, my Great Grandma Foster, who lived a few blocks away from Granny.
Wendy and my dad snuck out one night in January of 1972 and got high, and they listened to a new album that had just come out, Led Zepplin IV, and the song that was the most popular in America at that time and would become prophetic for Wendy, “Going to California,” and they sang the lyrics they knew well by then:
Spend my days with woman in kind
Smoked my stuff, and drank all my wine
Goin’ to California with an achin’ in my heart
Heard there’s a woman out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair
Wendy got high and felt good and lost her virginity to Edward and soon realized she was pregnant. She didn’t have enough money for an abortion and didn’t tell Granny for fear of judgement, and when she told my dad she was surprised by his insistence on getting married; his father had had several illegitimate families and, in my dad’s mind, had abandoned him and my dad wanted to be a better father and insisted they get married. Wendy agreed, and they dropped out of school and drove an hour and a half away to Woodville, Mississippi, where state laws didn’t require parental consent for a 16 year old girl to marry a 17 year old boy. They returned to Baton Rouge as Mr. and Mrs. Edward Partin and resided in one of his father’s many homes while my dad started growing marijuana in a dry patch of land in a nearby bayou. A few months later, as JJ Lottingger wrote, I was born; and Wendy soon abandoned me and left for California.
It’s interesting that Lottingger never mentioned my dad’s history. I was removed from both of their custody, and he was obviously at the trial, yet only Wendy was blamed for abandoning me. No one explained where my dad was when he left. I heard from many people that he had temporarily abandoned both of us as soon as I was born to buy drugs in bulk from some Carribbean island, leaving Wendy, as she mentioned, “emotionally upset, scared, very confused, and not knowing where to turn, without help with the situation at hand.”Go to the Table of Contents
My Dad’s Story
/in Uncategorized /by jasonpartinI assume Lottingger was a competent and honest judge, doing his due diligence and reviewing controversial or unusual Supreme Court verdicts, and that he read books and the daily newspapers, or that he would have somehow else recognized my dad’s name, if only for my grandfather, Edward Grady Partin Senior. But he still didn’t share their Partin history, so perhaps he wasn’t aware. Though any internet search today shows that my grandfather was nationally, if not internationally, famous then as the Baton Rouge Teamster leader who worked with Bobby Kennedy to send Jimmy Hoffa to prison; he was the surprise witness sent international Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa to prison for eight years in 1964, and in the years since, especially around the time the Warren Report on President Kennedy’s assassination was released in 1964, When Life did an expose on the newly recognized mafia in America throughout the mid 1960’s, when US Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, when Hoffa finally went to prison in 1969, and when national hero Audie Murphy died in 1971. In many of these times, he and my family, including my young dad, were showcased globally in the monthly Life magazine, on television interviews and newspaper photos weekly, and his name took up the vast majority of all references in books about Hoffa, including Hoffa’s authorized biography released that year, just before Hoffa famously vanished from a Detroit parking lot on July 30th, 1975, just as Lottinngger was assuming my case. My grandfather had even brought the attention of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was the only one of nine judges to vote against using Edward Partin’s testimony against Hoffa, and who wrote a three page missive about my grandfather in Hoffa vs The United States. The governor of Louisiana, John McKiethen, for whom Lottingger had been working, railed against “Partin and his ganster Teamsters” in the New Orleans and Baton Rouge newspapers frequently, making front page several times in response to widely publicized shoot-outs between the Baton Rouge Teamsters and concrete plants across the Mississippi Bridge that had, initially, refused to hire Teamster union labor, but somehow changed their minds after meeting my grandfather. McKiethen lost the election in 1972, just like newspaper had reported Big Daddy saying he would, and many people in the state said Big Daddy would have become governor if he only he had had a college degree.
Judge Lottingger either hadn’t heard the name Edward Grady Partin Senior, or he had heard it and didn’t mention it in Partin vs. Partin; either way, I think it’s remarkable.
My dad was born in 1954 as the third of five children to Norma Jean Partin and Edward Grady Partin. Norma Jean was a gorgeous, confident, well spoken redhead with dark brown eyes and a voluptuous figure. She was from Spring Hill, Louisiana, near Texarkana and the tri-state border of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. She was so stunning that people compared her to the famous model and actress Marilyn Monroe, whose real name was also Norma Jean, and by 18 years old the beautiful Norma Jean that would become my Mamma Jean was courted by almost every man who meet her. Her family was spread across the south, and when she visited her cousins in Woodville, Mississippi, she met my grandfather, a physically large and fit man who was remarkably handsome, with clear skin and rosy cheeks and bright blue eyes and wavy blonde hair with hints of red, and with a charming smile and slick southern accent and sweet words. He was a 26 year old up-and-coming labor union leader who ran unions for both the Woodville sawmill workers and the truckers that delivered raw lumber and carried away cut timber. Almost everyone in Louisiana and Mississippi called him Big Daddy. His Wikipedia page changes often due to its open source, and usually around the time a movie is made about Jimmy Hoffa and only once or twice with anything other than rewording his 1990 obituary, and because photographs were black and white back then, only a few of us remember the hints of red in his hair and slightly rosey cheeks and that’s never mentioned in any summary and, to me, not worth learning how to edit Wikipedia to mention it.
Men would recall his brute force, and that’s well documented in all books about Hoffa and in the movies that portray him. He had briefly been a marine during WWII and had boxed several semi professional matches, and part of his calm demeanor came from his confidence that he could take care of a room full of men with his bare hands, and if he needed more than his hands he always carried a folding knife he used for elk hunting in Flagstaff, and knew how to use it.
Everyone said he was charming. In the chapter about him in Hoffa’s 1975 book, Hoffa begins the chapter about Ed Partin by saying, “Edward Partin was a big, rough man who could charm a snake off a rock.” Mamma jean was smitten immediately.
As soon as Mamma Jean met Big Daddy, she wrote to her family that she had found a handsome, hard working man who she believed would make a good father. They were married six weeks later and began having children immediately. Aunt Janice was born first, followed by Cynthia, my dad, Theresa, and then Kieth. They outgrew Woodville, and moved to Baton Rouge, where Big Daddy took over the Teamsters Local #5 and forcibly installed one of Hoffa’s men into power in New Orleans. Hoffa was so impressed with Big Daddy’s tactics and that Big Daddy quickly became one of Hoffa’s most trusted lieutenants, a decision that would soon cost Hoffa his presidency and many years of his life, and then his life; or so I assume. To this day, even after the 2019 Scorcese film The Irishman, no one knows for sure what happened. I don’t.
In 1963 Mamma Jean fled Big Daddy and hid their five children from him and the Teamsters, placing them with different relatives throughout the south in hunting and fishing camps that were relatively undocumented and difficult to find. She had learned that her husband wasn’t the man she had assumed he was, though he had been a good father to all of his children except my dad – my aunts and uncle would say that Big Daddy was “rough” on him without explaining more – and that he had been married with another family when they met, and that she suspected him of being involved with the mafia and President Kennedy’s assassination, though she never had proof and didn’t discuss her suspicions with anyone out of self-doubt and fear for her children’s safety.
In 1964, Big Daddy helped Sydney Simpson, a 22 year old Local #5 Teamster, kidnap his two young children after losing them in a custody trial in the same East Baton Rouge Parish courthouse that my records would begin appearing a few years later; simultaneously, he was charged with manslaughter in Mississippi, and would have faced trials for both federal crimes, but President Kennedy’s little brother, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, had him freed and provided him immunity and cleared his criminal record in exchange for infiltrating Hoffa’s inner circle and reporting “any attempts at witness intimidation or tampering with the jury,” “anything illegal,” or “anything of interest.” Immediately after Big Daddy’s release from the Baton Rouge jailhouse, the director of the FBI’s Get Hoffa Task Force, Walter Sheridan, located Mamma Jean and her children and offered her a deal: if she remained silent and didn’t divorce Big Daddy until at least after they convicted Hoffa of something, the federal government would buy her a house big enough for her and her five children and pay her a monthly stipend equivalent to what she would have received in alimony. She agreed, and later that year Big Daddy became famous as the surprise witness that sent the world’s most powerful Teamster leader to prison; Jimmy Hoffa was said to be the most famous man in America, after John F. Kennedy. Big Daddy testified that Hoffa had asked him to bribe a juror in a relatively minor case against Hoffa using $20,000 from Hoffa’s petty cash safe, and though there were no witnesses or recordings, Hoffa was sentenced to eight years in prison based on Big Daddy’s testimony and the jury believing my handsome, smiling, charming, grandfather. Immediately after the trial, Big Daddy and his children were showcased across national media, without Mamma Jean but implying they were happy, and Big Daddy became was called an All American hero for helping Bobby Kennedy stop corruption in the Teamsters by putting Hoffa in prison.
Few Americans knew the truth about Big Daddy because Bobby Kennedy and Walter Sheridan had expunged his long history of criminal activity. But Walter kept many of his FBI records, and he listed some of Big Daddy’s history his 1972 book, “The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa,” published just after I was born and including dates right up until the events around my birth, coincidentally. Walter wrote:
“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. [That wasn’t true: he punched a captain and was discharged for assaulting an officer, though I heard he removed the unconscious captain’s watch, but the captain may have been embarrassed by how Big Daddy obtained it and told investigators otherwise. – JiP] 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. [That wasn’t true: my grandmother was from Spring Hill, near Texarkana, and she wasn’t quiet; she was vociferously opinionated among friends and family, and was disciplined enough to remain silent around FBI agents and reporters. She accepted the government payout in exchange for her silence around Waltler and the media to provide for her five children, never lying, and saying the Lord words in mysterious ways. – JiP] 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.”
Many crimes were omitted from Walter’s book and were being removed from court houses across America. But, even then, and with a quick search on today’s internet, you could see that he had been, and probably still was, a rapist, murderer, thief, lier, adulturer, bearer of false witness (Hoffa even knew that), who had begun skipping church on Sundays. And though, technically, rape isn’t a sin in the bible for reasons I don’t understand, I’m sure that if God met Big Daddy that would change.
Chief Justice Earl Warren was perplexed by my grandfather. More specifically, he was the only one of nine judges critical of my grandfather’s character, and the only one to dissent against Partin’s testimony in Hoffa vs. the United States, where he permanently recorded his thoughts on my grandfather for posterities sake, publicly available to anyone seeking it since 1966.
By then Warren was a household name, a respected bipartisan Supreme Court judge with almost a 40 year history, having overseen landmark cases such as Roe vs Wade, Brown vs the Board of Education, and the case that enforced Miranda rights, including the right to remain silent; and, most notably, the 888 page Warren Report on President Kennedy’s assassination that the world had waited for and famously but inaccurately concluded that “Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed President John F. Kennedy.” Of all people, Warren should have had access to all of the facts about my family, yet he was so confused by the situation surrounding Big Daddy and wrote a three page missive of this thought process to forever be preserved in Hoffa vs. The United States for posterity to ponder, not unlike Judge Lottingger had partially documented my family history in Partin vs. Partin for posterity, too.
“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. Shortly after Partin made contact with the federal authorities and told them of his position in the Baton Rouge Local of the Teamsters Union and of his acquaintance with Hoffa, his bail was suddenly reduced from $50,000 to $5,000 and he was released from jail,”
and,
“… Partin’s wife received four monthly installment payments of $300 from government funds, and the state and federal charges against Partin were either dropped or not actively pursued.”
Warren may have known of a few payments to Mamma Jean, but all of us knew about the home and many more payments; those are some of the details of my family history that I know to be true but are undocumented. But, per Mamma Jean’s agreement, no one in my family had ever shared that information publicly until now. Even with only a few payments offered, technically the Partin family is considered America’s first ‘paid informants,’ different than a witness program in which identities are hidden, in that we were paid before a testimony and then we weren’t hidden and our name was known publicly, though the details remained classified or hidden. As I mentioned, my family has a long history of keeping secrets, and we’re pretty good at it.
Earl Warren wasn’t the only person perplexed by Big Daddy’s vanishing criminal history. Jimmy Hoffa had hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal, and he hired the best lawyers possible to discredit Big Daddy, men who defended high profile cases and mafia bosses and knew how to find information and intimidate witnesses, yet even they found nothing in the years of appeals between Big Daddy’s 1964 testimony and Warren’s 1966 missive, where he wrote:
“Partin underwent cross-examination for an entire week. The defense was afforded wide latitude to probe Partin’s background, character, and ties to the authorities; it was permitted to explore matters that are normally excludable, for example, whether Partin had been charged with a crime in 1942, even though that charge had never been prosecuted.”
Warren concluded:
“I cannot agree that what happened in this case is in keeping with the standards of justice in our federal system, and I must, therefore, dissent.”
Despite Warren’s protests and for reasons I don’t understand, his one vote didn’t override Big Daddy’s testimony, and Hoffa went to prison based on Big Daddy’s word and my family remained silent for decades.
Understandably, after seeing behind the scenes of America’s justice system and having a man like Big Daddy be “rough” on him, my dad became a rebellious teenager with distrust of the government and authority, and he left Mamma Jean’s to live with Big Daddy’s mother, my great-Grandma Foster, who lived near the Baton Rouge airport a few blocks away from where Wendy was living with Granny. Walter’s book and a team of FBI agents and federal marshals were following my family around the time of my conception, but they were probably unconcerned about what a 17 year old marijuana dealer did and had more important things to focus on; to them, at last.
By 1971, he was ruggedly handsome and admirably defiant against teachers and anyone in authority, and, as per many young people in 1971, adamantly against the war in Vietnam that had escalated so quickly after Kennedy died. And then his father was suspected of killing America’s most decorated war hero, Audie Murphy, for reasons I’ll explain soon, and at the time he may have also had a slight nervous breakdown and met Wendy Anne Rothdram when she was distraught from loosing her boyfriend to the war and being abandoned by her father, and she smoked his stuff and their union led to me.
He proposed marriage when he learned, saying he didn’t want to be like his father, who had abandoned his first family, in a way, and who had been spending more time with Audie than his children, for reasons no one understands. My dad wanted to be a better man than his father and his grandfather, Grady Partin, who had abandoned Grandma Foster and her three childre and led Big Daddy to dropping out of school and doing what he thought he had to do to take care of them. My parents dropped out of high school and drove an hour away to Mississippi, near where Grandma Foster and Big Daddy had been born and he still had family to host them, and where state laws didn’t require parental consent for a 17 year old boy and a 16 year old girl to be married. States recognize each other’s marriage certificates, and they returned to Baton Rouge and lived in one of Big Daddy’s many houses near forested swamps.
In 1972, around the time of my birth, Big Daddy was arrested again, charged with stealing $450,000 from the Local #5 safe, and the only two witnesses were found beaten and bloody. The safe was recovered in a murky river near where Wendy was living in the rental house Big Daddy had let her and my dad use. His arrest made front page headlines, and around that time my dad left us and rode to Miami with his friends on motorcyles to travel to some island and buy drugs in bulk, and Wendy was left alone with me, without a car or job. As she said, she felt emotionally upset, alone, scared, and confused; and she felt she had no where to turn. I can’t imagine anyone feeling any less in her situation and with the Partin family. It probably left her feeling warped, and she fled Baton Rouge to straighten her self out.
The day Wendy abandoned me in 1972, the daycare center was closing and I was the last baby there and they didn’t know what to do. They called her emergency contacts, but Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob were too drunk to answer the phone and Wendy hadn’t left Granny’s number because they were still estranged. She had given the center Linda White’s name, and when she answered she told her father and he dropped what he was doing and rushed to the daycare center and picked me up, and the rest is history. It’s likely that he had to work during weekdays and couldn’t attend my custody trials, and it’s just as likely that early family court systems didn’t view the opinions of unrelated caregivers as relevant to family matters, but it’s rare to have a non-relative given custody of a minor child, especially one with an extensive family like I had. That was the ex-parte error Lottingger mentioned; a joke Wendy and I would pronounce as “ex-Partin,” and, though she never changed her name, she said that divorcing my dad made her an ex-Partin. As I mentioned, we grew to have our own, unique, insider jokes and humor that few people would understand, especially because it’s such as long story.
No one knows why Ed White was given so much authority of me as my legal guardian when both of my parents were fighting for custody. The first trial judge had “by ex parte order, awarded the temporary care, custody and control of the minor to Mr. and Mrs. James Ed White,” and after that judge’s presumed suicide another judge granted custody to my dad on paper; but, for some unknown reason that judge kept Mr. White as my guardian with physical custody. Whatever the reasons, I’m forever grateful, because Ed White was more than my guardian, he was my PawPaw, my father, my friend, and possibly the most influential person in my life despite only knowing him for a few years. My memories begin with him, and my perspective about life, the universe, and everything stems from him
Go to the Table of Contents
Wendy’s Story
/in Uncategorized /by jasonpartinWendy was born Wendy Anne Rothdram in 1955 in Richmond Hill, Ontario, an upper middle class suburb of Toronto, to Joyce Hicks and a man who’s last name was Rothdram and I met once but whose first name I don’t recall. Joyce was my Granny, and at the time she was 18 years old and the youngest of three daughters of my Great Grandpa Harold “Hal” Hicks and Grandma Hicks, French Canadians who settled in the English speaking metropolis of Toronto; he was relatively well known in Canada because he was a professional hockey player for the Montreal Maroons, Detroit Couars, and Detroit Falcons. Wikipedia says he played 90 professional games but omits his brief stints with the Toronto Mapleleafs and Boston Bruins; Aunt Mary kept one of his Bruins jerseys, and I trust her more than I trust Wikipedia. He would retire later in life as an upper manager for the Canadian railroad system, and local newspapers and coworkers mentioned him and his work respectfully in his 1960 obituary. Grandma Hicks was a homemaker and attended to her daughters, Joyce, Mary, and Lois; they wanted for nothing in their upper middle class home, in part because Grandma Hicks’s aunt, Edith Lang, was an elderly woman without children who enjoyed time with her nieces; she, too, was relatively well known as a socialite and philanthropist and former spinster who worked for one of Canada’s wealthiest men as his secretary for forty years and marrying him at 80 years old; he died soon after, and she inherited his fortune and the country’s largest private art collection and donated many valuable pieces of art to museums. Though somewhat aloof and cantankerous and ostentatious with her wealth, she didn’t have children of her own and ensured her nieces had a comfortable life and wanted for nothing. Granny and her sisters would all say they had a loving home and every opportunity imaginable.
Granny and Auntie Lo were partiers, embracing the post WWII prosperity of the 1950’s and enjoying Canadian rye whiskey on the rocks and an occasional splurge on Good Scotch. Aunt Mary was more of a homebody and, like her Aunt Edith, almost never drank alcohol except for wine with good meals. She married a young, mild mannered and family oriented man named John and they lived the rest of their lives in Toronto, raising their daughter without any events that would lead to Wikipedia pages. Lois was rarely sober, and she married a navy veteran and delightfully indulgent French Canadian named Robert, a middle manager of Montreal’s Bulk Stevedoring Company, and they accepted a transfer to manage the loading and unloading of America’s second largest shipping port in New Orleans and bought an upper middle class home an hour upriver in the smaller, more affordable river port and capital city of Baton Rouge. Joyce was the only daughter left at the Hicks’s home, and one night she stayed out too late and had too much to drink and became pregnant with Wendy and then married the father, a man who’s first name I don’t remember but who gave Wendy and Granny their last name, Rothdram, a man who claimed to be a cartoonist for Walt Disney. A few years later, Granny fled an abusive relationship with her husband and took Wendy to Baton Rouge to stay with Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob; they could never have their own children, and they had rooms to spare in their newly built home and they welcomed Granny and Wendy when Wendy was a five year old girl.
Granny was not one to sit idle, and though she was a single uneducated mother in the deeply ingrained culture of southern Louisiana that insisted women were homemakers and looked down upon unwed mothers, she persisted and exhibited confidence and found a job in the newly created “chemical alley” of industry north of Baton Rouge’s airport, a long rural road of chemical processing plants and oil refineries that processed oil from offshore oil rigs in Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. She was a secretary and taught herself to type and studied and learned the lingo CoPolymer’s processes, and in return CoPolymer allowed Granny health insurance – something that had been free in Canada and she had taken for granted until she was a single mother – and they increased her pay equitably, and soon Granny was able to save enough money to put a down payment on a small, 680 square foot home on a relatively large acre of land in a new housing development under the airport flight path. Her commute to work drastically reduced and Wendy had safe streets to play in and public schools and parks nearby. The home had three tiny bedrooms and two bathrooms and a modest kitchen, and Granny’s liquor cabinets rattled every ten to twenty minutes from jet airplane engines above her roof, but Granny was proud that despite her setbacks and obstacles, she had achieved what some people called “The American Dream” of home ownership as a single mother who immigrated to America without an education.
Granny would work for CoPolymer for almost 30 years. She was respected for being a self-driven learner, and for being polite but honest, and forthcoming with useful information, never shy, and she was recognized for never having come to work late or missed a day except except for a brief period in 1975 when she was coming home from work and was sidestruck by a careless driver who had likely been drinking. The accident shattered her right ankle and she was immobilized for a few weeks and couldn’t drive to work, and Wendy volunteered to move back home and care for her. They had been estranged ever since Wendy had eloped with my dad, but Wendy had been maturing and knew she should help her mother, especially because the driver that hit Granny was uninsured and CoPolymer’s health insurance policy wouldn’t cover at-home care until Granny could drive again.
Even before the accident, Granny had been adamant against any type of driving after having had a drink, and she drank every day without concern for what other people thought about it. She would come home from work and relax with a tall glass or two of the best Scotch on the rocks she could afford, and she so enjoyed her lifestyle that she rarely drove anywhere to socialize. Instead, she focused on being home as soon as she returned from work, which was only 20 minutes north of the airport, and she tried to be home when Wendy came home from Glenoaks Elementary and then Glenoaks Middle and then eventually GleanOaks High, and her routine was always to relax then cook dinner for her and Wendy. She was proud of her home she worked so hard to afford, and was happy simply reposing in her recliner with a bottle of Scotch and a carton of Kents and her monthly Reader’s Digest books, including a section of cookbooks, like Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Paul Prudhome’s Louisiana Kitchen and the ubiquitous Times Picayune Creole Cookbook. She was a self-taught chef, embracing the Cajun culture of making delicious food from scratch using frugally purchased ingredients and never shying away from adding extra sherry to her turtle soup or a splash or two of wine in her tomato sauce while enjoying a glass or two for herself.
Granny encouraged Wendy to be independent and to play with her friends on bike in their safe streets or explore her spacious yard with it’s large pecan trees and gumball trees and, typical to old Baton Rouge homes, at least one majestic stately oak tree with branches that reached out and bounced against the ground in heavy winds. Inside, Granny encouraged Wendy to read books from the copiously stocked bookshelf she kept with her other luxuries, an expensive collection of the Encyclopedia Britanica and a subscription to it’s yearly updates and several subscriptions to fiction and nonfiction books for a range of ages. Granny’s bookshelf was so well stocked that some of Wendy’s friends would use it for homework rather than Glen Oak Elementary’s library resources, just like I would, and Granny was generous with her time and would sit and learn with them, if they wanted, just like she would with me.
Wendy grew up playing with her best friends nearby, Linda White and the sisters Cindi and Debbie LeBoux, and they were what most people called Tom Boys, cheerful and playful but preferring jeans over dresses and bicycles over dolls, a rarity in the traditional southern culture where women wore dresses and didn’t get dirty often. They climbed the sprawling stately oak trees in Granny’s yard and caught minnows and crawfish in the drainage canal that wrapped around half of Granny’s yard, and rode bicycles for miles around the relatively sparsely populated subdivision with it’s meandering streets that navigated around waterways and oak grooves. As Wendy got older, she began swimming on Glen Oaks Middle School’s team and playing tennis and golf with Uncle Bob and Auntie Lo in the country club near their home thirty minutes south of the airport.
Wendy grew to be a beautiful young lady with hazel colored eyes that crinkled when she smiled, and long straight strawberry blonde hair that blew in the wind behind her when she rode her bicycle. She was petite, like Granny, and only 5’1” tall, but whereas Granny was thin as a twig, Wendy grew to be full figured and attracted the attention of boys at Glen Oaks High School. Like most of her friends and for reasons I don’t understand, she dated older boys and her first serious boyfriend was an 18 year old senior when she was a 15 year old sophomore. He graduated in the spring of 1971 and was immediately drafted and shipped to basic training and then to the conflict in Vietnam, where he was immediately shot and killed before Wendy would begin her junior year.
Wendy was devastated by his loss. He had faithfully written her letters, but she had procrastinated responding – a trait she would maintain all her life – because she had wanted to send him the perfect picture to remember her and had borrowed Uncle Bob’s fancy and rare color film camera and had Linda and Debbie take her photo dancing under one of Granny’s trees with the last of that season’s red azalea flowers tucked above her ear and augmenting the strawberry hints in her hair. Photos took a few weeks to develop back then, and Wendy enjoyed playing outside during the summer and forgot to pick up the film, and time passed and then she heard he had been shot and killed.
She had what I consider a minor nervous breakdown, and she rebelled against everyone and everything and told Granny she wanted to return to Canada, where there wasn’t a draft and the government didn’t make young boys go to war and die and people could live happily, she thought. But, she hadn’t told Granny she had been dating an older boy and that he had died, so she simply demanded to return to Canada and live with her father, a man she hadn’t seen in more than 10 years but had built up in her mind as a man who loved her more than Granny, and she imagined he would be more fun and supportive than her boring mother who just sat at home ever day and drank Scotch and cooked meals and read books.
Granny was a woman of action and preferred experiential learning over long lectures, and she forewent her good bottles of Scotch to buy Wendy a plane ticket to Toronto for Wendy to see her dad for the first time since they had immigrated to America eleven years prior. Wendy boarded the plane and she saw the trees in her yard from above after having spent her life looking up at them passing over their home, and she thought she’d never return to Louisiana. But, only a few days later she used the return ticket Granny had had the foresight to purchase and returned home, because her father wouldn’t even hug her and said he was happy with his new family and that Wendy was Granny’s problem now. He gave her a hastily drawn cartoon caricature of a drunkard with a 1940’s hobo hat, and Wendy returned to Baton Rouge even more distraught than before, and Granny resumed buying the good bottles of Scotch and, in her pragmatic way, encouraged Wendy to focus on being happy.
Wendy turned 16 a few weeks later and began her junior year at Glen Oaks High School, but was so depressed that she dreaded being stuck inside and all of the questions that permeate southern culture ostensibly to be friendly but usually only mindless of diverse households, like “Who’s your momma, and what church do y’all go to?” and “What’s your daddy do?” and, for those people who know a bit about you already, “Have you heard from your boyfriend?” She had always been friendly but shy, and in her junior year she became reticent and smiled less and less frequently. To tolerate the anxiety of going to school, she began smoking marijuana with her friends and relaxing in class, comfortably numb and passing time until she could go home and smoke again.
She met Edward Partin that fall, a 17 year old senior who was the Glen Oak’s main drug dealer.
He was tall and physically strong and ruggedly handsome, with long black hair and dark brown eyes so dark they seemed black. He rarely smiled in school, and usually frowned or scowled to express his discontent with the system and disdain for authority. He always had abundant marijuana and new cars that attracted attention, especially in the lower economic school district of Glen Oaks, and he had been arrested for selling drugs but somehow a judge set him free, and that added to his reputation as a “bad boy” and confident young man that seemed to attract 16 year old girls going through issues with their fathers. He told his friends that Wendy was “fine,” and soon they were skipping school to ride in his cars and sneaking out at night to meet; coincidentally, he had recently moved in with his grandmother, my Great Grandma Foster, who lived a few blocks away from Granny.
Wendy and my dad snuck out one night in January of 1972 and got high, and they listened to a new album that had just come out, Led Zepplin IV, and the song that was the most popular in America at that time and would become prophetic for Wendy, “Going to California,” and they sang the lyrics they knew well by then:
Spend my days with woman in kind
Smoked my stuff, and drank all my wine
Goin’ to California with an achin’ in my heart
Heard there’s a woman out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair
Wendy got high and felt good and lost her virginity to Edward and soon realized she was pregnant. She didn’t have enough money for an abortion and didn’t tell Granny for fear of judgement, and when she told my dad she was surprised by his insistence on getting married; his father had had several illegitimate families and, in my dad’s mind, had abandoned him and my dad wanted to be a better father and insisted they get married. Wendy agreed, and they dropped out of school and drove an hour and a half away to Woodville, Mississippi, where state laws didn’t require parental consent for a 16 year old girl to marry a 17 year old boy. They returned to Baton Rouge as Mr. and Mrs. Edward Partin and resided in one of his father’s many homes while my dad started growing marijuana in a dry patch of land in a nearby bayou. A few months later, as JJ Lottingger wrote, I was born; and Wendy soon abandoned me and left for California.
It’s interesting that Lottingger never mentioned my dad’s history. I was removed from both of their custody, and he was obviously at the trial, yet only Wendy was blamed for abandoning me. No one explained where my dad was when he left. I heard from many people that he had temporarily abandoned both of us as soon as I was born to buy drugs in bulk from some Carribbean island, leaving Wendy, as she mentioned, “emotionally upset, scared, very confused, and not knowing where to turn, without help with the situation at hand.”Go to the Table of Contents
James Ed White
/in Uncategorized /by jasonpartin“Hey, Ken,” I said as Cranky Ken approached with a book in his hand.
“Here,” he said, thrusting an old hardback book towards me; it was “The Fall and Rise of Hoffa,” by Walter Sheridan, published in 1972 and including stories about my Big Daddy and Mamma Jean around the time of my birth. I knew the book and Walter well enough already, I thought, but I was curious why Ken was thrusting it at me. But, I hadn’t read The Fall and Rise of Hoffa in probably twenty years, so accepted it and flipped through it while he talked for a while.
“Pages ___ through ___ are missing, the parts about your grandfather and Nixon and Audie Murphy. Cut out. I got it at the library downtown. Beautiful place. I can’t believe they spent that much on it. But it’s a good view of the bay, and they got a lot of books. I reread The Irishman after seeing the movie and wondered why they cut out the chapter about Nixon and Audie Murphy and your grandfather. That tells you more about Hoffa than anything – he was in prison and still funded Nixon and got him elected. What was it, 2.7 million Teamsters back then, doing whatever Hoffa told them. And he tells Nixon to pardon him and your grandfather. That’s power. If people thought about that instead of all the crap they talk about, this country would be a better place. And, I tell you…”
I stopped listening fully, but Ken was probably right about a few things. I flipped back and forth and reached for my copy and saw that my original copy still had those pages. Not only were the pages missing form the downtown library copy, there was practically no evidence that they had been removed, unless you were looking for those pages and noticed the page numbers; no torn edges of paper, no discernable reduced thickness, and, conveniently, a random chapter that seemed incongruent in an otherwise focused book, and most people probably could have kept reading and not noticed that chapter wasn’t missing. But, most people weren’t Ken, and didn’t have his free time and focus and access to a brand new library with a good view of the bay.
I kept listening to Cranky Ken, sort of, and I inspected the binding of the library book. It was remarkable. I double checked the back index, and the pages missing were a subcategory under “Partin, Edward Grady.” Pages 481-514 specifically cited with an italicized word I didn’t recognize: passim.
“Hold on, Ken,” I said. “Siri, what’s the definition of passim.”
She answered in an Indian accent and told me, “As an adjective, passive means accepting or allowing or what others do, without active response or resistance.”
I thought that was remarkable, considering my recent conversation with JoJo, but it didn’t help me understand the significance of Ken’s book, so I asked Siri again, enunciating passim more clearly, and I listened to Siri, sort of, as I focused the screen. This is what I saw:
Walter Sheridan was a thorough human being, and had documented his book well. He tried to show patterns by stating and restating some names throughout the text, as he had done all his life. He was a respected FBI veteran. Before that, he had worked with then senator John F. Kennedy’s labor union oversight committee, and helped Johnny’s successful presidential bid and the famous Checkers speech where the young and handsome Irish Catholic Kennedy defeated his opponent, Richard Nixon, in what’s considered the first major televised presidential debate. Johnny won, and then appointed his little brother, Harvard lawyer Bobby Kennedy, as United States Attorney General, and Walter became head of the FBI’s “Get Hoffa” Task Force, and Bobby funded millions of dollars to the program and that led to the infamous Blood Feud between Bobby and Jimmy. After Bobby, Walter, and Big Daddy found a way to send Hoffa to prison, Walter lead Senator Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign until Bobby’s 1968 assassination. He became a respected NBC news correspondent, and was very thorough in all his work; that book had been the basis for 1983’s film, The Blood Feud, with Robert Blake winning an accademy award for “channeling Hoffa’s rage,” ___ ___ portrayed Bobby, and Brian Dennehy portrayed Big Daddy, with Big Daddy watching the film on his big TV in the low security federal penitentiary when I used to visit him; Dennehy got his accent pretty close. I had only met Walter once, and for some reason I can’t explain, I trusted him and held on to his book; it’s difficult to modify analog copies of records.
Walter had died in 1991, a year after I think I recall meeting him in 1990, the year Big Daddy died. But, I could be mistaken; Walter looked like a lot of people from Ken’s generation, with slicked back hair and dark suits, and his book confusingly has an image of Hoffa on the front that looks remarkably like Walter’s photo on the back. All of that was on my mind as Ken talked and I flipped through my old copy of Walter’s book and remembered circling names and looking for patterns in 1992, and wondered why I had never looked up “passim” before then.
FBI agents had been following Audie and Big Daddy, and years later Audie’s plane crash was determined to be a pilot error. I read a lot about the events because, coincidentally, my dad had met Wendy the same month as Audie’s death in 1971, and Walter’s book was published the same month as my birth in 1972. Though probably not related, it’s those personal connections that led me to read a lot about Hoffa and the Kennedy’s growing up.
Walter’s book is huge. It’s thick and heavy and thoroughly researched. It’s not light reading. The back index of names is overwhelmingly about Hoffa, of course, but Big Daddy is one of the most cited people. The pages missing were all about Nixon sending Audie Murphy to propose a presidential pardon for perjury if Big Daddy recanted his 1964 testimony against Hoffa; because, if he did, Hoffa would be released from prison and be able to return to officially leading the Teamsters, officially. Audie and four passengers died in a 1971 plane crash in Virginia a few days after leaving the Baton Rouge airport, and Big Daddy was a suspect in his death.
To this day, the FBI maintains a “What Happened” team investigating Hoffa’s 1975 disappearance, and because it was almost 50 years old and still unsolved -the Irishman is probably pretty close – young FBI agents who were born twenty years after I left Louisiana call our family occassionally to ask questions, perhaps hoping to solve their first case and perhaps, hoping to get a lucrative book deal or film contract. But, I hadn’t seen The Irishman yet, nor had I paid much attention to the book, perhaps because of everything else that always seems to be going on. But, I began to wonder if I could write a book about how Kennedy was killed, and how, as Earl Warren said, Big Daddy represented a threat to the American justice system, and how Hoffa’s influence on who my dad had called The Big Dick is still a threat to democracy.
“You should right a book,” Ken said.
I told him I’d like to one day, but I didn’t feel like getting into it then. I had heard Ken’s thoughts on everything, it seemed, and I was looking forward to not thinking and enjoying the rest of my day. Besides, to me, the most important part in my story isn’t Big Daddy or Bobby or Jimmy or Johnny or The Big Dick, it was my PawPaw, the man Judge Lottingger called James “Ed” White. I said goodbye to Ken a few times, and he eventually left me standing on the balcony, lost in thought.
——
The evening after Wendy abandoned me, the daycare center was closing and I was the last baby there and they didn’t know what to do. They called her emergency contacts, but Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob were too drunk to answer the phone and Wendy hadn’t left Granny’s number because they were still estranged. She had given the center Linda White’s name, and when she answered she told her father and he dropped what he was doing and rushed to the daycare center and picked me up, and the rest is history. It’s likely that he had to work during weekdays and couldn’t attend my custody trials, and it’s just as likely that early family court systems didn’t view the opinions of unrelated caregivers as relevant to family matters, but it’s rare to have a non-relative given custody of a minor child, especially one with an extensive family like I had.
No one knows why Ed White was given so much authority of me as my legal guardian when both of my parents were fighting for custody. The first trial judge had “by ex parte order, awarded the temporary care, custody and control of the minor to Mr. and Mrs. James Ed White,” and after that judge’s presumed suicide another judge granted custody to my dad on paper; but, for some unknown reason that judge kept Mr. White as my guardian with physical custody.
James Edward “Ed” White was born some time in the late 1920’s in the pine tree forests of Mississippi, coincidently near Woodville, where Big Daddy had been born in 1926, though I never learned if they had met. Unlike Big Daddy, PawPaw was a physically small man, thin and wiry, but he was a cheerful force of nature with a heart bigger than anyone I’ve known since. He had slicked back black hair that smelled of inexpensive and common hair oil, and his clothes were humble and obviously well worn from physical labor. He laughed frequently, chain smoked unfiltered Camel cigarettes, sipped bottles of Miller beer, and never quite figured out why other people weren’t as happy as he was.
He had lost an eye as a sailor in WWII, and though his glass eye matched his other one perfectly, he never saw the world the same again. He choose to be happy. After the war, he moved to Louisiana to find work, though I never learned why he chose Baton Rouge, but I know he became the custodian at Glenoaks High School, where his daughter, Linda White, was best friends with Wendy, and that he’d show up to work early and stay late, cleaning up and repairing things as part of his job; and, on his own initiative, he also cared for the many stately oak trees that gave GlenOaks it’s name and made it so beautiful. PawPaw loved trees, and though my parent’s school may have been in a poor district, most people felt the campus was one of the most well cared for they had ever seen, with trees more majestic than in the fancy schools funded by wealthier neighborhoods, though few knew that PawPaw was behind the scenes. He often came home in the evenings with sawdust in his, by then, mussed up hair, and he would smell more like chainsaw oil than hair tonic at the end of a long day.
PawPaw was behind the scenes for many other things, and he had even organized a small statewide movement for public school custodians, cafeteria workers, and landscapers after a massive state teacher’s strike in the 1960’s led to higher salaries for teachers and administrators, but nothing for the invisible workers behind the scenes. Some newspapers reported the outcome of the strike and said that administrators could now afford steaks instead of hamburgers, but forgetting that invisible workers like PawPaw couldn’t afford even the hamburgers. A March 1964 Time Magazine feature article about Big Daddy being an All American Hero showed him walking the picket line with teacher’s, big and handsome and smiling and handing out cash from his pocket so that teachers could pay their bills while striking, and telling Governor McKiethen that Local #5 stood with teachers and implying that if McKiethen and the state legislature didn’t provide the teachers and administrators with healthcare and a raise to afford an occasional steak dinner, Big Daddy would call a Teamsters strike and shut down the state economy, which would be unable to ship anything along the new interstate system to other states or in or out of other countries via the port of New Orleans. My grandfather was given credit for the teacher raise and benefits, but Life didn’t mentioned PawPaw. But, elderly men around town who had been invisible to most would recall PawPaw’s slicked back black hair and best suit, loose and baggy around his small wiry frame, handing out hand-written fliers telling them that they were important and valuable to the kids getting an education. He was right.
Like Big Daddy, PawPaw served in the military during WWII. But, Big Daddy had only served two weeks, being dishonorably discharged after punching a captain and stealing his watch, PawPaw served honorably in the U.S. Navy for two years until he lost his eye working on a battleship and was honorably discharged. His former shipmates said he was always hard working and cheerful, but mischievous, and he would sneak into the officer’s quarters and steal their beer and give it to enlisted men, like Robin Hood on a battleship.
As a kid, I viewed PawPaw as Popeye the Sailor, a popular cartoon character who was a small man with big forearms and squinted with one eye and smoked a pipe and protected Olive Oil’s infant son from the big Brutus, possible because he ate his spinach and it made him strong. Like Popeye, PawPaw mumbled a bit. He pronounced his words with a southern accent that omitted sylables and blended ‘th’ sounds into d’s, like New Orleans Saints football fans that chant “Who d’at! Who d’at! Who d’at talkin’ ‘bout beatin’ d’em Saints? Who d’at!”
His son in law, Craig Black, didn’t watch football or cartoons but read a lot and had been in GlenOaks theater department, and he thought PawPaw was like Puck, the jestering hobgoblin ferry from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, a woodland ferry who adored trees and playing pranks on people. Puck’s pranks sparked the other characters into action; without him, there would be no Midsummer Nights Dream. That sentiment was echoed by anyone I spoke with who had met him.
Like Puck, PawPaw loved nature. As a side gig, he was a tree surgeon, and the most respected tree surgeon in all of Louisiana. His services were requested by families protecting the magnificent stately oak trees that had been planted by their great-great grandparents. He was called to be preventive in the spring, repairing damaged bark and limbs before insects or disease took root, and reactive in the winter, removing toppled trees after hurricane storms. There wasn’t a lot of work, so he had other entrepreneurial ventures, like running a franchise of the Kelley Girls, a national franchise designed to give young, uneducated women opportunities for employment with flexible schedules so they could attend school or attend school meetings for their children, and he had given Wendy her first job. Judge Lottingger mentioned Wendy’s job with Kelly’s Girls, but, like Life, didn’t mention Ed White. Considering that Lottingger knew PawPaw viewed me as a son and was hoping for custody, it’s remarkable that PawPaw had selflessly helped Wendy, and ironic that he couldn’t attend my custody hearing because he was working at GlenOaks during weekdays.
Craig would tell me that PawPaw never made money from his side gigs of Kelly’s Girls and as an arborist, which is what people call tree surgeons now, because instead of taking a percentage of pay for himself as an administrator he gave all of the money to the people he hired. For Wendy, that was $516 per month, a lot of money back then, especially considering that Mamma Jean was paid $300 per month only a decade before to care for her five children. And he used his tree surgery business to hire and train men recently released from jail when no one else would give ex-cons an opportunity, and those ex-cons became, in a way, his competition. Craig himself would work for 40 years as the landscaper for Houmas Plantation, a tourist destination among the many former slave plantations in and around Baton Rouge, where he also sold his paintings that were fanciful and centered around ferries and elves in Louisiana’s swamps and forests. After Wendy would pass, Craig pointed to a majestic stately oak tree that PawPaw had planted before I was born, and say that hundreds of thousands of people saw its beauty each year and received shade from it’s long undulating branches, and he’d humbly admit that even his best paintings only brought joy to a few people who purchased them and kept them in their homes.
All Judge Lottingger had to say about PawPaw was that, “The Whites came to regard Jason as their own,” and though I appreciate his phrasing, it’s an understatement. I know that PawPaw loved me as a son. He passed away before I could thank him or tell him how I felt or ask his version of this story, and whenever I struggled with how to honor my mother and father, I also struggled with what defines a mother or a father. But now I can’t imagine sharing my family history without beginning PawPaw. Just like there would be no midsummer night’s dream without Puck, I wouldn’t be who I am without the seed planted when he saved me, and I hope whatever I write about him brings as much joy or hope to people who read it as the trees he planted have given to people who rest in their shade or climb in their branches.
——
“What’s pawsterity?” she asked later that evening, clarifying that she understood what I had said. I never did that at her age. I think I learn more from her than she from me, and that awareness is probably why I mention her passim, scattered here and there, throughout this book; she’s important, and shouldn’t be overlooked.
“Posterity,” I said, emphasizing the ‘oh’ sound, “means it’s for someone’s children, and those children’s children, and their children’s children’s children. It means someone’s family.”
“So you’re Big Daddy’s pawsterity?”
“Yes.”
“Am I?”
I chose my words carefully.
“No, sweetheart, posterity means people born from one person. In my case, I’m Big Daddy’s posterity, and so are all the children of his children.” I dind’t tell her how many children he had from the several wives he had kept, or that he had been an adulterer, too, and that he had a lot of posterity. “But I think all kids are just as important as my own.”
But I had lied to her; if you consider speaking ignorantly lying. I asked Siri what posterity meant, and checked Wikipedia and the two dictionaries on my shelf, and all of them slightly contradicted each other. Words mean different things to different people, and therefore different things to different editors, bloggers, or whomever chooses to edit Wikipedia. Words mean what we want them to mean, and I made a mental note to discuss that with Hope and to tell her that, to me, she is just as much Big Daddy’s family as I am; and, as far as I’m concerned, all kids born since him are his pawsterity, too.
Next Chapter
Table of Contents
Hillary Clinton
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