My goal is to publish a narrative memoir that crosses genres and demographics, and can become other forms of media, like film, to facilitate a global conversation. I’m using feedback to write and rewrite a query letter to literary agents, but I don’t yet have a quick elevator-pitch, a summary delivered in the time it takes to go up or down one floor with someone you just met, because the story encompasses more than a quick pitch. The first person who tried to tell this story was Jimmy Hoffa in his first autobiography, written from prison, where he wrote that the characters behind his imprisonment were so complex that not even Hollywood could simplify his story into a film; he spent five years in his cell simplifying it for his second autobiography, written after he was free again and released shortly after he vanished from a Detroit parking lot in 1975, but even then it was too complex for Hollywood to simplify into a few hours of film.
In short: my grandfather was Edward Grady Partin Senior, the Baton Rouge Teamster leader famous for being pulled from jail by Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover in exchange for infiltrating Hoffa’s inner circle and sending Bobby’s long-time nemesis to prison. He was portrayed by Brian Dennehy in 1983’s “Blood Feud,” and by Craig Vincent in Martin Scorcese’s 2019 gangster opus, “The Irishman,” about Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan’s claims of killing Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa said my grandfather – whom everyone I knew in Baton Rouge called Big Daddy – was “a rough, rugged man who could charm a snake off a rock,” and even The Irishman was intimidated by him, just like most of the New Orleans mafia and the Teamsters who remained loyal to Hoffa.
National media in the 1960’s and 70’s showcased Big Daddy defying mafia leaders like New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello, and I grew up hearing names like Santos Traficante Junior, Fidel Castro, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, Richard Nixon, and Audie Murphy as if they were distant family members. My dad is Edward Grady Partin Junior, the high school drug dealer who met my mom, Wendy Anne Rothdram Partin, and led to two teenagers having me, Jason Ian Partin, Big Daddy’s oldest grandchild and one of a few people left alive who remembers his stories.
In 1992, President Clinton finally released part of the classified 1979 John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report, and it reversed the hastily assembled 1964 Warren Report that said Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed Kennedy, and that Jack Ruby acted alone when he shot and killed Oswald two days later; after 15 years of research, the government concluded that the three main suspects for orchestrating President Kennedy’s murder were Jimmy Hoffa, Carlos Marcello, and Santos Traficante Junior. Oswald was born in New Orleans and, under the alias Harvey Lee, trained in the Baton Rouge civil air force four miles from my grandmother’s home near the airport. Jack Ruby was a former associate of Hoffa who allegedly met with Big Daddy and Oswald a few months before Kennedy was shot and killed on 23 November 1963, and most of Big Daddy’s criminal records and FBI files of his dealings with Castro vanished in exchange for Big Daddy testifying against Hoffa in 1964 and exposing my family to extortion and violence from Hoffa’s mafia connections, mostly Carlos Marcello if only because Marcello lived an hour from us and owed Hoffa $21 Million. Big Daddy went to prison soon after Hoffa vanished, but was released in 1986 due to declining health. He died during my senior year of high school, just before I left to serve in the first Gulf war of 1990-1991, and his final words were, “No one will ever know my part in history.”
This memoir is my attempt to share my part in his story, developing the characters behind the news and court records, but from my perspective as a kid growing up not knowing that what I saw and heard was remarkable. In that sense, it’s a narrative memoir, a coming-of-age story centered around Big Daddy’s funeral and my subsequent war story as a 17 year old kid who happened to become a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne and serve on President Bill Clinton’s quick-reaction force from 1992 to 1994. That was when I first read the JFK Assassination Report, and over the years I began to slowly see pieces of a puzzle slide into place and illuminate a bigger picture about who killed Kennedy and why.
Hoffa was right, and it’s no wonder that every book and film leaves Big Daddy role in history untouched, as if no one can make sense of how a Baton Rouge teamster leader could have been behind Hoffa’s imprisonment and Kennedy’s murder. It’s a complex story, hence me focusing only on what I remember, and letting people see the pieces of the puzzle assemble for themselves.
Because this is a memoir, certain puns can’t be omitted but sound funny when spoken out loud, like Edward Partin saying no one will ever know his part in history; or that I’m Jason Partin, a small part in his story; or how my mom, a petite blonde southern girl who looked like a diminutive Dolly Partin, always quipped that she was born WAR, but that marrying a Partin WARP’ed her. From my perspective, to understand Big Daddy’s part in history, you’d have to immerse yourself in our lives during the 70’s and 80’s, learn about my dad and Wendy and grandparents, and lean into the puns and jokes that I made about us when I was growing up in Baton Rouge.
It’s a work in progress, an interest and a goal rather than a rigid stance, and how I tell the story evolves with every iteration. For the current version, Go To The Table of Contents
