Read moreAn enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. Self-government is not possible unless the citizens are educated sufficiently to enable them to exercise oversight. It is therefore imperative that the nation see to it that a suitable education be provided for all its citizens.
Thomas Jefferson, likely
Read more“When written in Chinese, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters: one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.”
– President John F. Kennedy, on the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to a google answer I copied
Read more“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
You spend your life looking for the Friend
When you find him
If you find him
Will you get that time back?
Rumi
Read moreI hear you paint houses.
Jimmy Hoffa
Read moreLike a heartbeat, drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost
And what you had
And what you lostFleetwood Mac, “Dreams”
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
Puck
“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:
pas-sim pas-sim |’pas,im|
adverb
(allusions or references in a published work) to be found at various places throughout the text.
ORIGIN Latin, from passus ‘scattered,’ from the verb pandere.
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.
Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’ and ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.‘
Matthew 15:3-4
Any internet search today shows that my grandfather was then nationally famous. He was the Baton Rouge Teamster leader who worked with Bobby Kennedy to send Jimmy Hoffa to prison, and he had been showcased nationally for almost a decade ever since he had been the surprise witness who sent international Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa to prison in 1964. His media exposure fluctuated based on the whims of reporters and the FBI, but was mentioned around key dates relevant to his story:
In addition to state and national media coverage around key dates, Edward Partin’s Name name took up the vast majority of references in all the books about Hoffa that had already been published. And Chief Justice Earl Warren, a forty year veteran of the Supreme Court, had expounded on the threat of Ed Partin to the justice system in 1964; Louisiana Governor McKiethen railed against Ed Partin “and his ganster hoodlums” in almost every weekly newspaper in New Orleans and Baton Rouge throughout the 60’s and 70’s, perplexed at why Bobby Kennedy was protecting him. And of course there were the LSU Tiger football players, the Titans and Giants and Gods of Baton Rouge who were recognized everywhere, especially Billy Cannon after his Heismann Trophy award, and Billy and a small army of Tiger Football palyers had inexplicably become my grandfather’s enteroge and followed him everywhere in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s; and the media highlighted that, too, as well as the Hollywood movies, racecar stadiums, and chemical plants that Ed Partin brought to Louisiana. He was a state version of Jimmy Hoffa, and a big, handsome, charming man that everyone called Big Daddy.
Less is written about Edward Grady Partin Junior.
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, and many made the comparison to Marilyn Monroe in efforts to flatter her.
Her family was spread across the south, and when she visited her cousins in Woodville, Mississippi, she met my grandfather, Edward Grady Partin, 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; the moniker stuck, and that’s what all of my cousins and I called him, and how my mind sees his name to this day.
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. He knew how to use a knife, and he often went hunting in the woods of Mississippi and the bayous of Louisiana.
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 had thought that too, and she was smitten immediately when she met him that summer of 1953.
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. She said that he adored his mother and took care of her, and had ever since his father had run out on them. She said he was a good man.
They were married six weeks after they met, and they began having children nine months later. 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; if only by cause and effect of many choices his in life, and trusting Big Daddy was just one of them.
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 he was good at keeping secretes and because Bobby Kennedy and Walter Sheridan had expunged his long history of criminal activity from court houses and newspaper archives across the country. But Walter kept many of his FBI records, and he listed some of Big Daddy’s history his 1972 book, 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.One month later he was charged in Roseburg, Oregon, for car theft. The case was dismissed with the stipulation that Partin return to his home in Natchez, Mississippi. Two years later Partin was back on the West Coast where he pleaded guilty to second degree burglary. He served three yeas in the Washington State Reformatory and was parolled in February, 1947. One year later, back in Mississippi, Partin was again in trouble and served ninety days on a plea to a charge of petit larceny. Then he decided to settle down. He joined the Teamsters Union, went to work, and married a quiet, attractive Baton Rouge girl. In 1952 he was elected to the top post in Local 5 in Baton Rouge. When Hoffa pushed his sphere of influence into Louisiana, Partin joined forces and helped to forcibly install Hoffa’s man, Chuck Winters from Chicago, as the head of the Teamsters in New Orleans.”
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. But, in fairness, he loved and honored his momma, and honor, my great Grandma Foster, and I never heard him say anything bad about his father, Grady Partin, which is probably why no one put him to death for ignoring what the bible says about honoring your mother and father.
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.
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.”
Look! and Life magazines focused their monthly investigative issues on Big Daddy and Momma Jean and my dad and his siblings, showcasing them as an All American family and omitting their hiding from the FBI, and disproving claims from Hoffa’s lawyers that Big Daddy had been a criminal; they whitewashed his 1940’s rape of a black girl in Mississippi and his dishonorable discharge after only two weeks in the marines.
It was no secret who Big Daddy really was to people who looked, and I assume the United States Supreme Court looked. Yet, and also despite Warren’s protests, two judges abstained and six voted to accept Big Daddy’s testimony, and Warren’s single vote didn’t matter, the opposite effect of the one juror’s vote that had kept Big Daddy from being convicted of rape, and Hoffa went to prison based on Big Daddy’s word.
My family has remained silent for decades. Now that you know Big Daddy’s part in history, or at least that part, it may be easier to imagine what my 17 year old dad was going through. I’m biased, because I knew all of the people involved, but the simple internet search on my dad’s name told me enough to know that any kid being abandoned must be terrifying, and that sometimes you have to become that which you loath to escape a rough situation, and you become angry and intense because that’s how you learn to take care of things. And I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have Big Daddy be ‘rough’ on anyone if he were upset. His nice side was bad enough; just ask Hoffa.
By 1971, my dad 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 a famous actor, Audie Murphy, and at the time my dad may have had a slight nervous breakdown, just like my mom had, and that’s when he was living with Grandma Foster and only a few blocks away from Granny’s house and a 16 year old that he said was “fine,” and she smoked his stuff and had a good time 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 poloticians and movie stars than his family. My dad wanted to be a better man than his father, and he and my mom dropped out of Glen Oaks High School and drove an hour away to Mississippi, where state laws didn’t require parental consent for a 17 year old boy and a 16 year old girl to be married, and my dad still had family with room to spare. 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 and tree lined murky rivers, where they could hunt with privacy.
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 river near where my my was living, and his arrest made front page headlines. And that was 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 my mom was left alone with me, without a car or job. As she said and Lottingger documented, 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. For the rest of her life, she’d joke that she had been born Wendy Anne Rothdram, WAR, and that marrying Ed Partin WARP’ed her; I probably inherited her sense of humor, centered around puns and coincidences, and I quipped that I had JiP’ed her of her youth. She never denied it.
The day my mom 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 my mom 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 a man named, coincidentally, Ed White, became my first foster father.
Read more“Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.”
Jimmy Hoffa
Read moreI can do all this through him who gives me strength.
Philliipians 4:13
Read moreI can do all this through him who gives me strength.
Philliipians 4:13
