Havana 2
“Partin was a big tough-looking man with an extensive criminal record as a youth. Hoffa misjudged the man and thought that because he was big and tough and had a criminal record and was out on bail and was from Louisiana, the home states of Carlos Marcello, the man must have been a guy who paints houses.”1
Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran in “I Heard You Paint Houses,” 2014
I stepped onto the tarmac and took a deep breath, inadvertently inhaling a lung full of JP-4 jetfuel. I choked and resisted an urge to vomit, exhaled and leaned over and breathed slowly until the feeling passed. I stood up straight and smiled. Any day you land with the plane is a good day. After Big Daddy’s funeral in 1990, I graduated Belaire High School and left for the army and was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne just in time for the first Gulf war, and I had sucked up more than my share of JP-4 before returning to LSU. I was happy to be on the ground in Havana, but suddenly I realized I had left my yoga mat on the plane and my smile vanished faster than Jimmy Hoffa. I whipped my head around and up the airplane stairs at people piling out, and exclaimed “Fuck!” so loud that a couple walking past me heard it over the engine’s roar.
I smiled at them apologetically and took another slow breath – though less deeply this time – and thought about the mat. It was too late to go back and get it. People piling out so quickly that returning would be like a salmon swimming upstream, and Cuban officials were on the tarmac directing us to customs. I wasn’t concerned about the mat itself, because I could stretch without it, get another one, or use a towel. I concerned about why I left it. I stared up at the plane, trying to retrace my steps and see how I had forgotten it. For almost a year, the biggest concern popping in and out of my mind was my failing memory. It’s what was driving my interest in researching my grandfather’s history, a way to close gaps in understanding before they became gaps in memory. The mat made me remember that my memory may be deteriorating.
Ten months before, just after I returned from my 2018 sabbatical to Nepal and India, my primary care physician at the Veterans Administration Hospital, whom I called Doc, began testing my memory to establish a baseline and monitor possible degeneration. Doc was a cheerful and physically unremarkable person for someone born in southern India, and he believed that the mind sensed thoughts and could become confused or frustrated when gaps in memory appeared, like watching an old VHS movie with parts demagnetized and blurry. The more parts blur or skip, like in a DVD, the more frustrating it is to make sense of the plot or keep track of characters, and that can be frustrating if you don’t notice and are confused at plot jumps. I’m lucky I noticed, but I was unsure if it had gone unnoticed for a while and contributed to my growing grumpiness. Doc had been my primary care physician for eleven years, and though he didn’t notice my mood changes I had. I assumed it was like my weight, more noticeable to me as a wrestler fixated on weight every day for 16 years than to others, and my gradual decline went unnoticed by people who saw me frequently but stood out to those who saw me less than once a year or two.
Before the trip, I told him that was on my way to northern India for the first international conference on philosophy of the mind and modern science, hosted by His Holliness The Dali Lama at the Tibetan University’s 50th anniversary after their exile into India. Doc knew the area well, and we talked about what to expect for culture, cuisine, and, of course, my health. I planned to take a long route there, via the Anapurna trail in Nepal’s Himalayas, and Doc ordered vaccines including an updated yellow fever for my visa and a tetnis shot since it had been ten years since my last one, and I talked him into a adding gamugobulin shot to boost my immune system for the arduous trek in remote areas far from healthcare. (The GG shot was an old trick the 82nd did to us like clockwork every six months because we deployed all over the world on two hour notice, and psychologically it put me at ease.) He asked me to follow up when I returned three months later.
I spent almost 30 hours on planes getting to Asia, and planned ahead by allocating two weeks in Khatmandu to unwind and acclimate. To pass time and practice Nepali, I volunteered to perform magic at middle schools and link the effects to math and science. I wanted to use old local coins for tricks, so I strolled through markets looking for some. Khatmandhu was still recovering from an earthquake the year before (and a ten year civil war), and tourism was at a long-time low, so poverty was obvious and I attracted attention and calls in the crowded and chaotic street markets, so I kept walking until I found a more quiet spot to shop. Near a fallen temple away from main markets, I stooped over a wrinkled elderly vendor sitting cross-legged among the rubble. He was smiling, but seemed tired and hungry. My Nepali isn’t good and I wasn’t used to their currency yet, so I was converting the price he gave in Nepali rupees to U.S. dollars and back again before agreeing to buy them. At some point in my math I needed to multiply six times seven. I stood there for almost two minutes – the length of a round of wrestling – struggling to see the answer and wondering why I couldn’t.
I was alarmed when the answer finally popped into my mind. 42 is the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything. Only a few weeks before, Elon Musk made international news when he plastered his red convertible Tesla with references to 42 and the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and launched it into space on his Space-X rocket, with a prominent “Don’t Panic” bumper sticker and rocket parts labeled “Made on Earth, by humans.” And 42 was the jersey number of Pat Tillaman, the Arizona Cardinals football player who left his lucrative career to join the army and become a ranger and fight in Afghanistan, only to be killed by friendly fire in 2004, in what became a scandalous cover-up of a celebrity’s death in the second Gulf war. In 2006, my first San Diego medical device company, Kinetikos Medical Inc., a small company focused on bone healing devices for wrists and ankles, was acquired by the international corporation Integra Life Sciences for an overpriced $42 million in what was a craze for “small bone” companies. All of that and more swirled around my head when I realized that I didn’t immediately see the answer to six times seven. It was as if a blurry spot was on my VHS tape, and no matter how many times I rewound it and tried to peer through the static I couldn’t see what was on the screen. I could see six times six (36, which sounded right in my mind’s ear) and six times eight (48, which also sounds right), and six times nine (the question posed by cavemen playing Scrabble at the end of The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and is 54, which explained a lot to the main characters). I saw myself in second grade, sitting in the third chair from the chalkboard in the middle row, writing and rewriting multiplications tables to learn them through rote memorization. But I couldn’t see behind the blurry spot in my mind, even when I peered onto my second grade notebook. I stared at the cross-legged elderly man, wondering what was happening, just like how I was stared at the airplane wondering how I had forgotten my yoga mat.
The vendor mistook my stare as hesitation at the price, and impatiently lowered his request. He probably needed money for food, and was less interested in haggling than making a sale to probably the only person who would walk by looking for old Nepali coins. I quickly did the new math and paid him and walked away with my fake antique coins. I added six to 38 and saw it was 42, then I saw 42 filling in the blurry spots, forming a patch with a new memory rather than seeing the old. I was more than worried – I was scared for the first time I could recall since I was a little kid. Fear subsided and worry settled, and I took that worry back to San Diego when I had my annual VA physical exam.
I brought the coins to my appointment and did a quick trick to make the story more real for Doc. He’s never been impressed by magic, but he knew I was joking around to bely my worry, so he let me finish it and then ramble about my lapse with vendor and then the food and then conference with the Dali Lama. After about ten minutes, he circled back to the lapses and I admitted there had been a few more. He leaned forward and in an uncharacteristically tense tone said my lapses could be progression of what the VA called Desert Storm Syndrome, a collection of symptoms we still don’t understand but is linked to the Khamisiyah serin nerve agent explosion on 03 March 1991. He began scheduling regular memory assessments. And, per VA requirements, he began checking in on my mental health.
Several academic studies had just come out that veterans have 4 times the suicide rate of civilians, and those studies were spearheaded in San Diego, which has several renowned universities, like USD (I was teaching there and led their innovation laboratory), UCSD (I was an advisor for their entrepreneurship program), SDSU (I attended their basketball games), and there’s a focus on veteran health because San Diego employs around 250,000 people to support thousands of soldiers at the Navy’s Top Gun school, submarine base, ship building facilities; a few Air Force bases, and the mega Marine base of Camp Pendelton. For decades, San Diego has been a major out-processing center for the military that was concerned about the growing population of homeless veterans becoming statistics for suicide. Doc was on the forefront of understanding how mind, memory, trauma, and healthcare overlap.
Neural links break bit by bit, so slowly that most people son’t notice. They grow frustrated at plot jumps and unusual behavior in characters other than themselves. I knew older friends and mentors who entered dementia so slowly that not only did they not notice, neither did anyone else. We assumed that their increasing grumpiness and forgetfulness was just getting older. Coach was one of them, and his 2015 passing was still fresh in my mind. He was the strongest man I’ve ever known, and if it could happen to him it could happen to anyone.2 President Reagan succumbed to Alzheimer’s in 2004. Robin Williams hung himself in 2014 after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which is similar to Alzheimer’s and leads to confusion, anxiety, and depression. Earnest Hemmingway probably experienced the same thing when he put a 10 gage double-barrel shotgun barrel in his mouth in 1961, shortly after being asked to scribble a few words in tribute of President Kennedy, but succumbing to depression, paranoia, and rumination about his deteriorating memory and eyesight. And of course there’s the irony of Kenenedy’s final bill signed into law, the Community Healthcare Act of 1963, three weeks before he was presumably shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a veteran with a long history of untreated mental illness, who was shot and killed two days later by Jack Ruby, another veteran with an equally long history of untreated mental illness. Who knows how history would be different if any one of those people had a Doc with access to a lifetime of medical history and a vested interest in your future.
I had VA medical records and psychological exams for security clearances dating back to 1990 (I joined the army’s delayed entry program in 1989, at age 16, but my medical records began a year later, just before basic training, when I was 17). But the army never tested my memory, so I had no baseline from which to measure and therefore my physician started anew in 2018. I passed all preliminary memory exams – they were simple tests designed for gross losses and couldn’t compare to what I had been like – but I remained mindful of the possibility of gradual and almost imperceivable memory degradation. And, in fairness to Doc, I had been growing more and more grumpy over the years, though I still attribute that to aches and pains of a body with a disproportionate number of rough miles on it. Regardless of the cause, Doc was right to be concerned. In a way, he was my friend as well as my physician, and he was concerned for me, so I begrudgingly agreed to sit in tiny rooms and boring take memory tests, and repeat to inconsistent psychiatrists assigned to me again and again that I was fine, but wanted to get out of the small windowless rooms as quickly as possible; their notes said I seemed impatient and agitated, and that I should come in more often. They asked me to take a test for PTSD, nine simple questions. I barely crossed the threshold, and was diagnosed as a veteran with PTSD, which required more checkups with new psychiatrists who seemed younger each time and read the notes and sometimes looked up at me when they asked the same questions the previous one had. I couldn’t imagine myself spiraling into suicide, but I’m sure neither did Williams or Hemmingway. They probably became lost in their minds and were not themselves. Robin stopped joking, Hemmingway stopped writing. I probably revived my interest in magic because I knew that.
Between the boring and unreliable VA tests, I tried to be mindful of my memory and mood, and looked for patterns of forgetfulness. I also dusted off the magician and memory expert Harry Lorayne’s books, and began exercising my mind, hoping to avert or at least slow down any possible decline. The mind needs exercise, just like the body, and I decided to exercise mine by performing at Hollywood’s Magic Castle every few weeks and writing a memoir, simultaneously verifying childhood memories with news events and court records available online. Books like The Irishman were full of references I overheard as a kid, providing a wealth of history to verify my memories. My 88 year old great-uncle Doug Partin had recently done the same from his Mississippi Veterans convalescent home, and he did it for for similar reasons. He self-published his autobiography – a glorified blog – in 2017 before his memory slipped into oblivion. He would pass away in 2020, during the pandemic, and could bot verify his intentions, but most of us recalled him saying he wanted to write things down before forgetting them. He was a Teamster under Big Daddy, then ran the Baton Rouge Local #5 for 30 years after Big Daddy went to prison in 1980. Doug’s book is “From my Brother’s Shadow: Teamster Douglas Wesley Partin Tells His Side of the Story.” He made mistakes in chronology and didn’t check his facts or reassess old assumptions, but his stories were exactly as I recalled him telling me when I was a teenager in the 80’s. Whether accurate or not, at least Doug was consistent, and by writing down my memories I could begin to check consistency before I ended up as an 88 year old with nothing but those memories to keep me company in my retirement home.
I stood still on the tarmac for a few more moments and concluded that my body had been fatigued from fighting muscle spasms all day, and that my mind had been agitated from cramped spaces and a screaming headache radiating from old cervical spine injuries. (My xrays and MRI’s show a wood-rasp of bone spurs along most of my spinal chord, which is why sitting for too long sends spikes of pain radiating to my head, right arm, and right leg.) Forgetting the mat probably wasn’t dementia. I snapped my head back and forth to loosen neck muscles, then shifted my gaze to follow the official’s finger. I tightened my hip belt and slowly walked towards customs, willing my stiff hips to move as smoothly as possible. Getting old sucks as much as sitting in cramped seats inside narrow airplanes all day, and almost as much as sitting in small windowless rooms with young psychiatrists who probably don’t know who Hoffa was.
I was feeling impatient and agitated, so I paused on the tarmac before entering the building. I took a deep breath that was blissfully free of JP-4 and full of moist, coastal air that soaked into lungs dried out by a long day of airplane air conditioners. It was March, so Havana was a pleasant 70-something degrees, only slightly warmer than the dry coastal air of San Diego but much more pleasant to my lungs. Of all the Desert Storm syndromes that could be anything else, I distinctly recall my asthma and sinusitus beginning just after the Khamisiyah explosion and worsening after surviving Iraqis ignited the Kuwaity oil fields and we inhaled black, greasy air for two months. I was perched behind a .50 cal machine gun atop a Humvee and wheezing for the first time after a firefight, and a medic, whom everyone called Doc, cauterized my nostrils so I could keep fighting without bleeding as much. Since then, the Santa Ana winds of San Diego irritated my asthma, just like the air conditioners on long flights, but the moist Havana air calmed it. I enjoyed a few breaths that reminded me of when I was 17 and healthier, smiled with a genuine smile, and strolled up to two customs officials sitting at a simple folding table.
They stopped joking with each other to greet me. I took off my backpack, pulled out a money belt from the front of my pants, and handed them my passport and round-trip plane ticket. I smiled broadly to say that all was good, and they smiled back. They looked at my passport and asked my name, and I said “Jason Partin,” pronouncing my last name a bit like Spanish, Par-teen, to help them verify it was me; I had lost 35 pounds since the photo was taken, and ironically I looked younger, especially because I was the clean shaven in the photo and was sporting a grey beard in Havana. It’s possible that I subconsciously wanted to look like Papa Hemmingway when I arrived, because I knew I would shave it off so my scuba mask would seal.
The older and presumably senior official checked my travel insurance and return flight more thoroughly than my visa. I was on the first day of a three month sabbatical using a loophole to allow me into Cuba for 30 days without illegally routing through Mexico City or Toronto, an “entrepreneurship visa” pioloted by the Obama administration but already being removed by the Trump administration; I was likely the last cohort. My flight back was on March 28th to provide a safety window for delayed flights or anything unexpected, but they didn’t seem to notice. The senior official was more interested in the Force Fins strapped to my backpack. He ran his finger along the thick polypropolene and flicked one of the tips with a curious countenance. With all of the tourists flocking to Cuba’s beautiful Carribbean dive sites, he had never seen fins like mine.
Force Fins are different than most SCUBA fins. They’re thick, short, black, duck-feet-looking fins modeled after a dolphin’s tail, invented by a guy in the 1980’s whose name I can never recall and used by SEALS and Rangers in the 80’s and 90’s for long-distance underwater missions. The patents had long since expired (back then, patents expired 20 years after issue, now they become public domain 17 years after filing). But, the market was so small that no new companies invested in manufacturing processes: Force Fins were still the originals. Conveniently, the stubby shape fits in a carryon bag, and I stuck them there in lieu of the Frisbee I usually carried.
I was prepared to answer any questions about my atypical visa. Had I had my Frisbee, I could toss it around while discussing the Frisbee Pie Company near Yale university and the students who tossed empty pie tins around until someone had the idea to patent the shape as a flying disc. At the time, it was an innovative toy. Patents expired after 20 years back then, and now flying discs are ubiquitous because that anyone can copy the design. Saying Frisbee is like saying Kleenex, Zerox, Band-Aide, Q-Tip, and Super Glue for tissues, photocopies, adhesive bandages, cotton swabs, and whatever other people call superglue. I didn’t know if Cuba had similar brands or concepts, but I was ready to show examples of the differences between trademarks and patents and brands if anyone asked. Force Fins patents expired, too, but the niche market and expensive injection molding methods prevent them from becoming as ubiquitous as flying discs. Innovation, patents, trademarks, manufacturing, distribution, and market need could all be delved into, should someone ask. Force Fins are much harder to toss back and forth than a Frisbee, but they can still be made into a fun learning lesson in the right context.
The senior official laughed politely and said something to the other, and he laughed too. My Spanish was rusty and I didn’t understand, but I smiled as if I had. The first put his hand through the open-toed fins and spread his fingers wide. He moved his hand in and out, and laughed and made a joke I didn’t understand, but I surmised that he was either being vulgar or joking about my feet. I was used to both. I’m the runt of my family, only 5’11” in the morning (we all shrink about 1.5-2.5 cm by the end of the day because our spinal discs compress, ironically more from sitting than from standing or walking), but I inherited Partin-sized feet and hands that are disproportionately big for my height. It’s like having natural fins and flippers, though I still use Force Fins to dive. I chuckled back and shrugged ambiguously, as if to imply any one of the following: “What’s one to do?” or “I don’t know, I just work here.” or “That’s what she said!” They both laughed at whatever they imagined.
The senior official asked where I would be diving. I said Playa de Giron, which was true. Americans call it the Bay of Pigs; President Kennedy was dealing with that while Bobby juggled getting Big Daddy out of jail and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover put my family under federal marshal protection. Apparently, Jimmy Hoffa’s defense team tried to show evidence that Big Daddy had been supplying Fidel Castro with guns and ships for his revolution and the defense of Playa de Giron using Baton Rouge Teamster trucks and ships docked the port of New Orleans. Either the letter from a Cuban general was fake, or Bobby and Hoover successfully erased all records.3 I thought it was wise to not mention that part of my plan to the officials.
There are a few sunken ships there that I’d like to explore, I said.
He said it was beautiful there, and the younger official agreed. They rummaged through my carryon bag. I had a scuba mask and snorkel that fit me well and was worth packing even though most rentals were good enough. I had a pair of size 14 leather rock climbing shoes stretched over two seasons in Joshua Tree that fit me well, a compact harness, and a worn but servicable caribbeener and UTC that they ignored. I had 14W Chaco’s that could double as beach shoes or hiking shoes. Long ago, I learned to travel with extra shoes; rental shops rarely have my size, and if I loose one it’s hard to find 14W outside of the United States.
My clothing was minimal, swimming trunks, six pair of underwear and two pairs of socks, two pairs of zip-off convertible pants, four quick-dry and compressible long sleeve shirts; one of the shirt brands was Patagonia, founded by the rock climber who became a billionaire and started California’s first Benefit-Corporation, called a B-Corp, and who recently bought a patch of mountains the size of Rhode Island and donated it as a national park in Patagonia – I use it to discuss socially responsible entrepreneurship. I had an iPhone 8 – already considered old by then – and of course could discuss Steve Jobs, an adopted kid who founded Macintosh computers with a few teammates. I had a bright yellow semi-rigid sunglass case with a custom first aide kit, a handful of Band-Aides and a small tube of antiseptic cream, climbing tape that could double as first aide tape; alcohol wipes that could double as hand sanitizer or to clean sunscreen off a scuba mask; an average sized aspirin bottle with a mix of aspirin and chalky white 600mg ibuprofen pills prescribed by the VA that, as SSRI’s, double as mild antidepressants and are useful on many levels after a long flight; an expensive brand of superglue that used pure cyanoacrylate, because cyanoacrylate was originally intended to be a wound-closure glue, and quality brands can still do that and also make quick repairs on coffee-mug handles at guest houses.
I had my copy of The Irishman and a Lonely Planet guide to Cuba; the British husband and wife founders of Lonely Planet had just sold their business to a mega-publisher for something like $50 Million pounds or Euros or whatever they were using back then, about $70 Million dollars and a big enough number to let people know that two hippies with a stapled guide to traveling across Asia could create something remarkable. There were two Cliff Bars and a Lara Bar remaining as snacks; Cliff was the founder’s father, and they had recently consolidated money to re-buy their company for something like $260 Million instead of giving up ownership, so that they could continue doing the work they loved, and Lara Bar was a simple two-ingredient fruit bar that the founder, Lara, spent a year and a half iterating until she was stocked by Whole Foods, her employer for a minimum wage job, and was quickly acquired for around $1.5 Million. (I had bought them from Amazon, which was founded by Jeff Bezos, another adopted kid and the world’s richest person, who led Amazon to recently acquire Whole Foods for obscene amounts of money and still stocked Lara Bars.) I had the pull-sting cylinder bag from a Benchmade knife with a handfull of Kennedy half dollars and a few old copper English pennies that were the conveniently the same size as Kennedy halves, two decks of Bicycle playing cards in metal clip cases to keep them flat in humid areas, and a Zip-Lock baggie full of flesh colored plastic thump tips stuffed with small red handkerchiefs that surprisingly didn’t gather a second glance from the officials.
My tolietries kit included the usual toothbrush and toothpaste, a German safety razor with a blade that had made it through airport security unnoticed (the pack of replacement blades had been confiscated, along with my Victorionox keychain and Leatherman multitool), a tube of peppermint scented Dr. Broner’s soap that made decent shaving cream in a pinch, and a square plastic container of dental floss with a few extra hefty sewing needles taped to outside (I rarely floss, but the nylon thread makes a durable and water-resistant repair kit). The rest of my baggage included my reading glasses, sunglasses, an extra Bic pen, etc., and was unremarkable.
The senior official handed back my passport. I put it away in my money belt among a stack of U.S. bills – my visa wouldn’t allow credit card transactions – and closed my backpack, then straightened my posture and hoisted the pack onto my shoulders and tightened the hip strap. I paused for a moment and smiled. They both smiled back, waved goodbye, and said buen viaje. I said gracias, turned around, and strolled out of the building, still ruminating about my mat, but smiling and strolling through the terminal like a duck moving slowly across a murky pond without anyone noticing that its feet are frantically paddling under the surface; I was still thinking about the mat, and worried that I was still thinking about it, which was creating a vicious cycle. I wanted to take a few ibuprofens, if only for the placebo effect that would probably break the cycle.
At least I was through customs, I thought to myself, if only to take control of thoughts. I said to myself myself that I had been cramped up all day, and had probably forgotten the mat because of an agitated mind and nothing else.
I steered my thoughts to the adventure awaiting me. I had envisioned going to Cuba ever since my grandfather’s funeral almost 29 years to the day, when I was a senior in high school and had just read Hemmingway’s Old Man and the Sea and was told he wrote it from his house in Cuba, a house he dedicated to the people when he had to leave because of Kennedy’s embargo. Not even a lost yoga mat or lung full of JP-4 could have removed the smile on my face. I breathed moist island air deeply, and let the trip begin.
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Footnotes:
- Teamsters make remarkable business associates and grandfathers, especially if you understand mafia lingo. To paint houses means to paint walls red with splattered blood. When Hoffa first called Frank Sheenan on what could have been a tapped phone line, he said, “I heard you paint houses,” implying Hoffa was looking for assistance and seeking men he could trust. Frank, who would spend time with Hoffa’s family and earn a spot leading Teamster Local #326 (and spend 13 years of a 32 year sentence in priso.n for racketeering on behalf of the Teamsters), spent the next decade saying he’d “be a Hoffa man until the day he died,” but in his 2004 memoir he claims to have accepted a mafia request to paint a Detroit house red with Hoffa’s blood on 30 July 1975.
Frank, like every other Teamster in America, knew of my grandfather, president of Teamsters Local #5 and Hoffa’s trusted confidant, a man so brutal Hoffa asked him to guard his hotel room against squads of FBI agents and mafia strongmen. Big Daddy’s Wikipedia page includes this summary:
“Partin was the business manager of the five local IBT branches in Baton Rouge for 30 years. In 1961, he was charged by the union with embezzlement as union money was stolen from a safe. Two key witnesses in the grand jury died. He was indicted on June 27, 1962, for 26 counts of embezzlement and falsification and released on bail. On August 14, 1962, Partin was sued for his role in a traffic accident injuring two passengers and killing a third. He was also indicted for first-degree manslaughter and leaving the scene of an accident. He also surrendered himself for aggravated kidnapping.
He was finally convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice through witness tampering and perjury in March 1979.[2] Partin pled no contest to numerous other corruption charges in the union, including embezzlement, and was released in 1986.
As for mentioning Marcello, Frank knew that Hoffa worked with all the mafia family heads, and that New Orlean’s Carlos Marcello was a primary partner, along with Miami’s Cuban exile, Santos Trafacante Junior. Contrary to the hastily assembled 1964 Warren Report that said Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed Kennedy, those three men – Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante – are, the suspects identified by the classified 1979 congressional JFK Assassination Report as prime suspects in orchestrating the president’s murder. ↩︎ - Coach’s family, specifically Craig Ketelsen and Mrs. K, Coach’s wife, graciously gave me permission to publish anything about him. When I was a teenager listening to Doug and Big Daddy’s stories, Coach was the yin to their yang, a man so honorable he balanced being a part in the Teamsters. I choose his obituary for this part in the story, because it summarizes his life and alludes to how he passed from Alzheimer’s, and saves me the time of building up the consistency in which Coach led his life for 78 years.
Dale Glenn Ketelsen, 78, Retired Teacher and Coach, passed away March 22, 2014 at Ollie Steele Burden Manor with his wife by his side. A Memorial service will be held Saturday, March 29 at University United Methodist Church, 3350 Dalrymple Drive. Visitation will begin at 10 am with a service to follow at 12 pm conducted by Rev. Larry Miller. Dale is survived by his wife of 52 years, Pat Ballard Ketelsen, 2 sons: Craig (Emily) Ketelsen of Covington, La; Erik (Bonnie) Ketelsen, Atlanta, Ga and one daughter, Penny (Lee) Kelly, Nashville, TN; 5 grandchildren: Katie, Abby, Brian and Michael Ketelsen and Graham Kelly; a Sister-in-Law, Karen Ketelsen of Osage, Iowa, and numerous neices and nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents, 2 sisters and a brother. Dale was born in Osage, Iowa where he attended High School, lettering in 4 sports. Upon graduation, he attended Iowa State University as a member of the wrestling team where he was a 2 time All American and won 2nd and 3rd in the NCAA finals in Wrestling. He was a finalist in the Olympic Trials for the 1960 Olympics. After graduation, he joined the US Marine Reserves and returned to ISU as an Asst. Wrestling Coach. In 1961, he took a job as Teacher/Coach at Riverside-Brookfield High School in Suburban Chicago, Ill. While there, he also earned a Masters Degree from Northern Illinois University. In 1968, he was hired to start a Wrestling program at LSU in Baton Rouge, La. He was on the Executive Board of the National Wrestling Coaches Association and a founding member of USA Wrestling. He was the wrestling host for the National Sports Festival in 1985, He was instrumental in promoting wrestling in the High Schools in Louisiana. He was head Wrestling Coach at Belaire High School for 20 years and Assistant Wrestling coach at The St. Paul’s School in Covington, La. He was devoted to Faith, Family, Farm and the sport of Wrestling. Among his many honors were induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and being named Master of Wrestling (Man of the Year) for Wrestling USA magazine. He was a long time member and Usher of University United Methodist Church. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Alzheimer’s Services, 3772 North Blvd., Baton Rouge, La. 70806.
What’s not included in Coach’s obituary is that he was an amateur magician. He was only around 5’4″ and wrestled at a modest 135 or so pounds, and his hands were so small that he couldn’t hide a standard-sized Bicycle card in back palm, yet he began every season with a smile and his hand held high in the air with a playing card poking between his fingers, snapping it into his fingertips as if he was Cardini. ↩︎ - In the trial where Big Daddy testified, Hoffa railed about Big Daddy’s connections to Castro and supporting the communist revolution, but no evidence was found. He was so adamant that he detailed the Partin-Castro connection in his first autobiography, dictated from his New Jersey prison cell in 1971, but without evidence he removed those rants when he dictated his second autobiography as a free man in 1975, and focused on what was still available in courts about the “all-American hero” who testified against him in 1964. All of that evidence disappearing is what Chief Justice Earl Warren meant in his missive about Big Daddy: “In the four years since [Edward Partin] 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.” It’s as if Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover were the most talented yet unrecognized magicians on Earth back then, though I don’t know if theycould back palm better than Coach. ↩︎