Like a heartbeat, drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost
And what you had
And what you lost

Fleetwood Mac, “Dreams”

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:

• The 888 page Warren Report on President Kennedy’s assassination in 1964
• Multiple monthly Life Magazine monthly feature investigations on the Kennedy assassination and the growing threat of organized crime, aka the mafia, throughout the mid to late 1960’s (my dad and his siblings were part of the focus on Big Daddy in 1964, shared with the newly appointed first family of President Johnsons)
• Several highly publicized Teachers strikes
• New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s nationally followed trial against Clay Shaw, the only trial for someone charged in President Kennedy’s assassination in 1967
• Presidential candidate General Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in 1968
• Jimmy Hoffa’s final appeal to the Supreme Court and imprisonment in 1968
• President Nixon’s election after Hoffa endorsed him from prison in 1971
• National hero Audie Murphy’s death in 1971
• Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975
• Although classified until 1992, the 1976 formation on the Congressional Committee and their collection of files on JFK after the Warren Report

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.

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I can do all this through him who gives me strength.

Philliipians 4:13

Your feet are in the mud; to me the mud has become roses. You have mourning; I have feasting and drums.

Rumi

I searched Wendy’s home for anything I’d like to bring to San Diego, and in my search I stumbled upon a small wooden box engraved “Angel,” the tiny little fluffy dog Wendy had rescued and fostered, her first one with the Humane Society. As she fostered more dogs, she had searched for a permanent home for her Angel; but, in fourteen years she never found a home that would love her Angel as much as she did, and Angel had died in her lap the year before.

I opened the box and saw a tiny black velvet bag filled with Angel’s ashes and embroidered in eloquent gold thread with Wendy’s final thoughts of her Angel: “Until we meet at the Rainbow Bridge.” She had once told me that the Rainbow Bridge was a mythical place where humans and their pets reunite in the afterlife. In Angel’s box, Wendy had carefully placded two tiny purple and gold hair ribbons that Angel wore when they watched LSU football on television together. Wendy had priorities, and had recently mentioned that the 2019 drafts would make LSU a top ranked team that fall, and I knew she would have liked to watch them with her Angel again. I put the bag with Angel’s ashes beside Wendy’s and continued searching to take home.

I had packed hastily and only had a small, carry-on backpack full of clothes. I would leave the clothes if I found something worthwhile, or pack whatever I found in a larger bag or have it shipped. But, in Wendy’s jewelry bow I found something small that spoke to me and that I could carry it in my pocket, Granny’s gold retirement watch, a battery powered Seiko engraved by her employer. It was tiny, because Granny had also been petite, and the gold band would barely fit around the wrist of an eight year old girl. It was so small that the inscription had to be abbreviated. Instead of her full name, Joyce Hicks Rothdram, her employer had said: “To J. Rothdram, 25 yrs service. CoPolymer.”

She had been proud of that watch and her service at CoPolymer, a chemical plant adjacent to where Wendy worked at Exxon along chemical alley between the airport and Saint Francisville. I put it in my bag and glanced around again, and then I remembered the war medals near the photos in her office, but I didn’t smile at the war pun as I put them in my bag with Granny’s gold watch. I felt I had seured the things I most cherished from Wendy’s home. As Uncle Bob had told us near his end, you can’t take it with you. But, at least I’d try to take home Granny’s watch and my medals from Desert Storm that she had cherished, proud of her son; they, and my photo, had been on her desk at Exxon for almost 20 years.

I slept restlessly on the floor of her office that night, sad for the two young boys sent off to fight old men’s wars; and for the people who had hoped they’d return home and were sad that they never would.

Early the next morning we stood on the tallest bluffs of Thompson Creek, a meager 10 foot slope but remarkable in the otherwise flat areas marked by swamps and bayous draining into the nearby Mississippi River and near Wendy’s home. The slight elevation drop makes it a clear stream compared to the murky and slow moving waters of southern Louisiana. Mike and I helped each other walk down the slippery, muddy bank, both of us old men now and mindfully taking steps down what we had practically skipped down decades ago. He rested his hand on my shoulder as I knelt in the mud beside the water and slowly poured Wendy and Angel’s ashes into the clear stream, mindlessly mumbling to Mike something about “mud” being a Sufi word that means you and I, two things joined, and that Wendy and Angel would become mud. But I was crying so much he didn’t understand what I was saying, or he thought I was talking about the muddy bank at the base of the bluffs, where Wendy and Angel were slowly becoming a part of what they had loved so much.

Thompson Creek is wide but shallow, and it’s water flows slowly. The ashes settled onto the smooth clay bottom and gradually began to break apart and drift towards the center of the stream, where water flows more quickly. We watched pieces of Wendy and Angel break away and mix into a muddy and meandering serpintine stream in the center of the creek and move towards Saint Francisville and its small port on the Mississippi, where they would join the world’s fourth largest river and drift past Baton Rouge and New Orleans and reach the Gulf of Mexico, and then pieces of them would mix with the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and eventually make their way all over the world. Wendy would finally travel with her Angel, and they would meet at the Rainbow Bridge and be together happily ever after.

Tears too thick to leave my eyes clogged my vision, and my body bent over and my chest clutched tightly and my asthma wheezed from the pollen of azeleas and pine trees and my body’s inflammation from lack of rest, and I gasped for breath as Mike gently held my shoulder and patiently waited for me to lift myself up from the mud. When I finally stood, we rested our hands on each others shoulders and silently watched the stream of Wendy and Angel a few more moments, then helped each other scramble back up the slippery slope and joined the others to say our final words. I dind’t know what to say, and I collapsed on my knees again and cried almost intelligibly between sobs and gasps for breath and asked, again and again, why Wendy hadn’t told me. “I tried!” I cried. “Honor thy mother and father,” I bawled. “How?” I asked. “Just be happy,” I replied, seeing the words spoken but not the speaker. I cried some things I don’t recall, and then it was time to leave.

Mike dropped me off at the Baton Rouge Airport, and as the plane left the runway I saw Granny’s house directly under the flight path. It was a small, 680 square foot house that was modest by almost anyone’s standards, but it had a large yard with majestic stately oak trees that both Wendy and I had climbed as children, and a small, murky stream where we had played and caught crawfish and minnows. Granny had been able to afford it in the 1960’s because of it’s undesirable location under the flight path and the loud jet engines that passed overhead. But, despite it’s location and size, she had been proud of it, like her watch, because she had earned it.

The plane continued to ascend and I saw my dad’s grandmother’s house a few block’s from Granny’s, and in my mind’s eye I saw the path between them that my parents met as teenagers and where my life began half a century before. In the distance, I saw the mighty Mississippi flowing by the Baton Rouge Centroplex and LSU’s Tiger Stadium, and my mind knew that Wendy and Angel were just now passing under the Mississippi Bridge connecting Baton Rouge to Plaquemine. I shuddered, and said goodbye again and closed my eyes and lowered my LSU baseball cap and allowed my tears to flow silently on the long flight home.

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