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 with a grin so wide it could have been seen from 30,000 feet. But a thought came to mind, and my grin suddenly vanished. I whipped my head around and stared up the airplane stairs.

“Fuck!” I exclaimed so loudly that an elderly Cuban couple walking past heard me over the engine’s roar. I smiled apologetically, and took another breath, though less deeply this time. I had forgotten my yoga mat on the plane.

People were piling out and Cuban officials were directing us towards customs, and I new it was too late to go back on board. I muttered “Fuck” again, took another breath, and forced a subtle smile as I stared up at people struggling to get all of their baggage out of the narrow airplane door, and pondered how I had forgotten something in the overhead bin.

I wasn’t concerned about the mat itself. I could stretch without it, get another one, or use a towel. I was concerned about why I forgot it after carrying it from plane to plane all day, looking forward to using it to relieve the aches and pains my body inevitably feels after sitting too long. I was worried that the mat was a tangible sign of early-stage dementia.

Ten months before, just after I returned from my 2018 sabbatical, Doc, my primary care physician at the Veterans Administration Hospital, began testing my memory to establish a baseline and monitor possible degeneration. He 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, as if the mind were a spectator watching an old VHS movie with parts that had become blurry. In other words, he believed that the mind wasn’t thoughts or memories, it was what sensed thoughts and memories. Our memories were a collection of neural links that, like an aging VHS tape, could degrade over time or after undergoing trauma. To monitor degeneration, an outside observer needed to peer into your current memory using standardized tests that could be repeated in the future.

Doc had been my primary care physician for eleven years, and he thought I was a more cheerful person than I am. He hadn’t noticed my mood changes, and there was no test for it, but I had seen my smile becoming more and more forced each year. He didn’t notice because we always met in his office, a well lit room with windows overlooking the trees and small stream flowing through Penosquitos Canyon regional park, and in a way I looked forward to seeing him and visiting the area around Sorento Valley every six months to a year. I’d bring my mountain bike and ride the canyon after our visit, and after biking I’d visit a small neighborhood nano-brewery for a West Coast Style IPA, sometimes called a San Diego IPA; one of the most famous San Diego IPA’s had been Sculpin, a flagship beer of Ballast Point, which had just sold to an international alcohol brand for $1.1 Billion. The founder, who had earned his PhD in microbiology from UCSD but preferred brewing to working in San Diego’s renowned biotech industry, became an instant multi-millionaire, yet maintained his small home-brew shop and still brewed with local nano-brewers who catered to biotech engineers like me, who got off work and wanted to relax with a beer or two at happy hour before repeating the cycle again the next day.

Doc and I had a transparent doctor-patient relationship that was mostly truthful. His notes included that I consumed marijuana – my urine tests showed it, and I expounded on the homegrown stains I was developing – and he added to his notes that I requested the VA and all subsequent physicians if Doc ever departed to never, under any circumstances, no matter what I said in the future, ever prescribe opiods to me again. The irony of canibis being federally illegal in the pot-friendly state of California, yet opiods being handed out like candy on Halloween, was something I wanted cited on my record, if only as a meek social cometary.

Though I always answered Doc honestly, I wasn’t always truthful. I answered the mandatory VA question about how many beers I drank a day honestly, but without full disclosure. I said two, sometimes three, beers, which was true; but I knew that Doc’s questionnaire was based on archaic assumptions dating back to Vietnam vets returning, drinking too many ubiquitous canned beers and destroying their livers. The questionnaire didn’t ask which type of beers, and since President Carter’s oft-forgotten 1979 craft beer act, the micro brewery industry exploded, especially in San Diego, which claims to have more breweries per capita than any other city in the world, including Portland or Prague; that’s saying a lot, given that we have around 4 million people in San Diego County. Almost all have a version of the San Diego IPA. Two 12 ounce cans of 4.5% beer was under the radar, but two to three 16 ounce pints of 7.2% or greater IPA’s was equivalent to six to seven beers on the outdated questionnaire.

Other than that nuance that slipped by Doc because he didn’t drink alcohol, we had an open and transparent relationship. The January before my 2018 springtime sabbatical, I told Doc 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. The Dali Lama had just been in San Diego and Doc had gone to see him at the University of San Diego’s new Kroc center for peace studies, a stunning piece of domed architecture overlooking Mission Bay and paid for with a $51 Million grant by the widow of Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonalds and former owner of the San Diego Padres. It was a prestigious event. I had missed him speaking in 2017 because I was busy with some of my students, who were helping me build Donald’s Garage in the newly renamed Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering after the widow of Donald Shiley, Ms. Marcos, donated $21 Million for a hands-on, glass-enclosed innovation space named for her late husband’s home workshop; he was a mechanical engineer who made his fortune inventing the Shiley-Bjork heart valve in his garage, which was scooped up by Pzier in the 1980’s for around $800 Million. If only subconsciously, USD was seeing that together, innovation and peace can unite the world. USD is one of 18 private Catholic universities in America, but the only one not under the dioscese, and we’re lucky to have diverse religions discussed with a simple goal of service to the poor, which is a lofty ideal coming from an institution that costs $56,000 a year to attend. I was so focused on my part in that mission that I missed The Dali Lama speaking in the Kroc center. But, I scored an invitation to a more intimate event in India that coincided with a Buddhist pilgrimage to historical sites linked to Siddhartha Gautama and his first teachings in Deer Park, which was as close to the new Tibetan University as Mission Bay was to USD. Their goal is unequivocally peace of mind for all sentient beings, and The Dali Lama, a famous tinkerer who said he may have become an engineer had he not been a simple monk, knew that science could be a key that helped us unlock the mind.

I was looking forward to the trip, and spoke to Doc about it because he was born near that region in what he joked was a small Indian village of 900,000 people. Because he knew the area so well, he pumped me full of vaccines and accepted my request for a gammu globulin shot, and three weeks later I was on an airplane headed to Nepal to slowly work my way to the conference.

I spent almost 30 hours on planes getting from San Diego to Khatmandu. I planned ahead by allocating two weeks to unwind, do yoga, and acclimate to altitude. To pass time and learn a bit of Nepali, I took yoga classes and performed magic at middle schools; it wasn’t just magic, I linked the routines to math and science, and planned to use their burgeoning internet access to show them how to find solutions to what seemed impossible when I performed, and to verify anything I said before believing me. Instead of my usual half dollars, I wanted to use old local coins – more for my enjoyment than for a history lesson for the kids – so after an hour or so of yoga my first day, I strolled through markets looking for someone selling coins big enough to fit my hands.

Khatmandhu was still recovering from an earthquake the year before, and a ten year civil war before that, so tourism was at a long-time low. Poverty and failing infrastructure was everywhere, and I attracted attention and calls in the crowded and chaotic street markets. I briskly walked past them andused my Lonely Planet guide to find a more quiet spot to shop. Near a fallen temple and adjacent to the middle school I would eventually perform for, I stooped over a wrinkled elderly vendor sitting cross-legged among the rubble. He was smiling, but seemed tired and hungry, and the area around him smelled of old food scraps and accumulated rubbish unable to be picked up by the struggling government. I was happy to share a few dollars in exchange for coins. He told me a price, but my Nepali wasn’t good and I wasn’t used to their currency yet, so I paused to convert rupees to dollars using the outdated exchange rate in my guide book that would be close enough. I rounded everything to simple numbers to make mental math easier, and at some point 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 could see six times six, maybe because 36 sounds right, and six times eight for the same reason. But I couldn’t see 42. It was almost exactly like staring at the blurry spot in a worn VHS, not as visual, but with the same mental focus of trying to squint through the blur and make out a shape. I saw a clear memory of me in the second grade writing and rewriting my multiplication tables to learn them through wrote memorization; I was wearing a bluejean jacket with an extra #2 pencil in the inner pocket that stabbed me when writing my numbers, leaving a small dark grey tattoo under my right nipple that I still have today; I was seated in the third row from the chalkboard, slightly stage-left, able to see the poster of multiplication tables on the wall even though I didn’t wear glasses back then. Even in that memory, 42 was blurred.

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 the fake antique coins. I added six to 36 and realized it was 42, then I saw 42 filling in the blurry spots and forming patches rather than the blurry spots opening up. I was scared for the fourth time in my life. Fear was quickly replaced by worry, and worry subsided to concern, and by the time I returned to San Diego it was a memory of being concerned. Though the poignancy was lost, it was remarkable to be scared, and I ruminated on the memory of that moment in the market. I was surprised at how I felt embarrassed to be scared as a 45 year old person, especially because of a background that should have made me immune to fear. But I didn’t want to hide it from Doc. I may have been under-exaggerating the amount of alcohol I drank, but otherwise our relationship was based on trust and transparency, and I wanted my memory documented in my medical records so that future physicians wouldn’t have to rely on me telling stories to see my history.

I brought the coins to my appointment, but before I could use them Doc reacted to the almost twenty pounds I had lost. The Anapurna trail is a remote ardrous multi-week trek through the Himalaya Mountains that made me lean, and the parasites from the poor sewage infrastructure and lack of clean water in India were still stealing calories from every meal. I joked that my worms ate better than people on the streets of Varanase, the holy city on the banks of the Ganges.

He said he had read my travel blog while I was gone, and agreed with my synopsis. I was trying to link my trip to the recent best-selling novel about entrepreneurship in India, The White Tiger, and I wrote:

The Lonely Planet guide to India, the gold-standard of travel guides, a bible for budget backpackers, and usually a kind voice encouraging you to travel without judgement, said this about Varanasi India: “Brace yourself. You’re about to enter one of the most blindingly colorful, unrelentingly chaotic and unapologetically indiscreet places on earth. Varanasi takes no prisoners.“

I thought I was used to traveling in rough regions of countries that took no prisoners, but Varanasi humbled me more than any team of soldiers ever had. I’m pretty sure I was transporting a few souvineers inside my intestines that wouldn’t be inspected by customs. Varnanasi sits on the banks of the Ganges River, and The World Health Organization found that Ganga water is polluted from:

• Domestic and industrial wastes.
• Animal carcasses and half-burned and unburned human corpses thrown into the river.
• Defecation on the banks by the low-income people.
• Mass bathing and ritualistic practices.

The protagonist of the novel White Tiger said this about the Ganga:

“I urge you not to dip in the Ganga, unless you want your mouth full of feces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of industrial acids.”

In the blog, I went on to explain the protagonist’s brutal version of entrepreneurship, which also took no prisoners, and link it to American-based companies that exploit India’s lax environmental codes to make cheap cleaning products for us, and then link that to the recent acquisition of Method cleaning supplies that were more environmentally friendly. It was a feeble attempts at social commentary, but Doc thought my descriptions of street life and the consequences of poor urban infrastructure were accurate. We chatted about intestinal parasites for a while, and he scheduled a follow-up with a specialist in City Heights, a cramped neighborhood of around 90,000 refugees and immigrants that had more third-world medical needs than a typical San Diego patients. 82 languages – a coincidental number cited by academic researchers – and around 168 dialects are packed into a mile and a half radius, along with an assortment of doctors who grew up in places similar to Varanasi and knew a thing or two about how to get rid of whatever had snuck through customs safely tucked inside my bowels.

When his concern for my physical appearance dissipated, I did a quick coin trick to make the story of my arrival in Nepal more real. It was simple coins from hand-to-hand that hopefully emphasized the specificity of that day, though in truth what I had done was more involved and took longer to set up, David Roth’s “hanging coins” from his 1985 book, Expert Coin Magic, published by Kaufman and Greenberg. Doc’s never been impressed by magic, so I wanted to do something faster than hanging coins to recreate the scene in Nepal. And I knew that he knew me well enough to know that when I discuss anything serious, I camouflage my concern by making jokes and animating my body.

We focused on my being stumped by six times seven, and the number 42. I admitted the math behind my alcohol consumption, just to be fully transparent. He updated his notes, then we talked about a book we had spoken about a few times over the years, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He knew that 42 was the answer to Life the Universe and Everything. and, like me, he was enthralled that Elon Musk had just plastered his red Tesla convertible with Hitchiker’s bumper stickers and launched it into space atop a Space-X rocket. Doc didn’t know that Pat Tillaman’s Arizona Cardinals football jersey had been 42, though he, like most people back then, knew that Pat had quit his multi-million dollar NFL gig to join the army Rangers as an E2 private earning under a grand a month, and over a couple of years earn his E4 specialist, which was his rank was then killed by fratricide in Afghanistan. Senior officers in the army intentionally hid that embarrassment because of Pat’s celebrity status, and when the truth came out the scandal rocked all sides of the political spectrum, even with the softened phrase “friendly fire” downplaying how throughout our history, we kill more of ourselves than the opponent does. (Desert Storm had the distinction of being the first American war to not loose more of us to us than to them, unless you count the long history of deaths and suicides that follow any armed conflict.) And though Doc knew I had invented several medical devices, and that a few were bone healing implants still carried by the VA, he didn’t know that the San Diego company where I managed R&D and marketing had been acquired by Integra Life Sciences for $42 Million in 2005. I didn’t see much of that, and the official payout was reduced to around $26 Million when sales milestones weren’t met, but the original acquisition price stood out in 2005 and was part of my concern in 2018. After our chat, which went over our allotted appointment time and caused a backlog of cases that day, he agreed that for me to not see the answer to six times seven was, indeed, remarkable.

He updated his notes much more concisely than I had communicated, then 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. After almost thirty years of studies comparing symptoms in soldiers with the general population, including several double-blinded randomized clinical studies, the VA had concluded that around 60,000 soldiers were affected by what they still call Desert Storm Syndrome, even as fewer and fewer people alive remember what Desert Storm was; that’s not surprising given that Desert Storm Syndrome was overseen by the Office of Agent Orange, a Vietnam era toxin sprayed across jungles to kill vegetation and expose Vietnamese strongholds. The consequences of Agent Orange plagues American soldiers to this day; I don’t know all of the effects on Vietnamese people. I do know that the frail cancer-ridden survivors who sat in line with me wished the VA had begun treating them sooner. I probably learned from them, which may be why I paid so much attention to what Doc told me, and why I continued to dig into the research on Desert Storm syndrome myself.

There were three criteria shown to correlate with the 60,000 people exhibiting symptoms attributed to the first Gulf war: having a naturally occurring protein that is detected in about 40% of the population, having taken Pyridostigmine Bromide – the experimental anti-serin nerve agent pills – during Desert Shield, and being within 100 miles of the Khamiyah Airport explosion that released serin. I hand’t been tested for the protein, but my medical records show me being given Pyridostigmine Bromide, and my platoon, AT4 of Delta Company, 1st Battallion of 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. AT stands for the Anti-Tank platoons, and we were the 4th platoon out of 8, each having around 20 soldiers.

AT4 was among the first few troops across the border to begin the ground war, and we led the capture of Khamisiyah airport to use as a launching pad for a parachute drop into Baghdad. After Saddam surrendered, the allied commander, General Stormin’ Norman Scwartzcoff, wanted to prevent Iraqis from using the airbase, and all of Delta Company circled Khamisiyah as security when the US dropped two 15,000 pound bombs on it. The shock wave shook our HUMVEE and covered AT4 with dust, and the mushroom cloud blocked our view of the sky. No one knew until then that Khamisiyah was also a chemical weapons stockpile, and that we inadvertently released serin into the air. I was confident that I met the 100-mile radius criteria, and my VA records verify that. In the decades since, I had been a part of three congressional studies into the long-term effects of Khamisiya, yet always as a control group because I had never filed for VA benefits. I just liked using the VA because they kept detailed records of my body and blood tests dating back to 1990, which is an invaluable asset usually overlooked when people pontificate about national healthcare.

Doc had all of my medical history on his computer screen, and was right to be concerned. He began scheduling regular memory assessments beyond my regular annual exam. And, per VA requirements, he began checking in on my mental health, especially after updating my records to show how much alcohol I actually consumed.

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 and the often confused UCSD, where I was an advisor for their entrepreneurship program, and the nearby SDSU, where I attended their basketball games with friends who were alumni and reminded me of my friends at LSU more than alumni from so-called elite universities. The academic researchers often focus on veteran health because of it’s relevance to San Diego’s economy and culture, and because the VA funds them to. San Diego employs around 250,000 people to support thousands of soldiers at a vast array of bases, including the Navy’s Top Gun school, submarine base, ship building facilities; a few Air Force bases, and the mega Marine base of Camp Pendelton. Not too long before Doc was alarmed about me, a San Diego military base made national headlines when President Obama authorized SEAL Team 6 to kill Osama Bin Ladin, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attack, and sneak his body out of Pakistan for burial at sea. For decades before that, 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. Even local corporations donate, because they make billions manufacturing the new drones that had quickly become ubiquitous over the skies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Because of all of that. and because of his personality and Hinduism’s culture of during your duty diligently, 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 don’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.² He was the strongest man I’ve ever known, and if it could happen to him it could happen to anyone.

President Reagan succumbed to Alzheimer’s in 2004, and though I didn’t know him personally I assume that he had the best healthcare possible yet still deteriorated and stopped public appearances because of that. 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; he stopped being funny in his final days, and doubted all of his life’s work. 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 so trapped by depression, paranoia, and rumination about his deteriorating memory and eyesight that even a Nobel laurate in literature couldn’t put pen to paper in his final days. Only Reagan had daily checkups with his mental health, which may be why he didn’t take his own life.

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, though Doc didn’t see it, I knew that had been growing more and more grumpy over the years, seeing my mind want to be abrupt yet overriding it with what I knew was socially acceptable, hiding behind jokes and magic tricks to avoid answering based on how I felt; though even today, after all that has happened since this story began, I still attribute any grumpiness to aches and pains of a body that has had a disproportionate number of rough miles on it compared to most people who sit still on long airplane flights and engage in small talk, or sit behind desks all day then rush to happy hour.

In Havana, I stood still on the tarmac with an aching body and a lot on my mind, whatever that is – even after the conference in India and listening to The Dali Lama for a few days and Doc all year I wasn’t sure. 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; there’s not a written test that tells someone what that feels like, but it’s not unlike having a tooth pulled without anasthesia and touching your tongue to both terminals of a 9 volt battery all day, every day. It’s worse after a long flights. My right side dominates, probably because I performed parachute landing falls, the bread and butter of paratroopers, on my right side. We drilled them daily in Airborne school, and before each jump to ensure muscle memory when our minds would be distracted, crumpling our bodies from “the balls of our feet” to our thighs and across our “push up muscle” on the same side every time. It’s an accepted part of life for 18 to 20-something year old paratroopers, but a lot of us feel aches and pains in our 30’s and 40’s. In my case, my body screams from sitting, and whatever my mind is, it dislikes sitting as much as my body does.

And, though not diagnosed by the VA, I’ve been slightly claustrophobic since 1983, and that affects how my mind reacts to being inside an airplane all day. I realized that in the 82nd, after being crammed into the bellies of C141’s and a few older and more cramped C130’s with 64 ‘troopers on a one-way trip and a hundred pounds of gear strapped to our bodies, layered across each others laps for 18 hours. I never had clear thoughts on those flights, and as soon as I hit the ground I saw how badly my mind resisted being trapped in small spaces; that realization led me to becoming an entrepreneur, never wanting to sit at a desk inside an office building, and never wanting to feel I had to do something that my mind and body resisted. My body was much stronger back then, but my mind wanted to jump out so badly that I would have leaped without carrying anything not dummy-corded to me. I never thought clearly until I was on the ground, standing outside, and happy to be free no matter how I got there or who was shooting at me.

Forgetting the mat probably wasn’t dementia, I told myself. It had just been a long day, and my mat wasn’t strapped to my backpack like my fins were. I smiled at remembering myself following guidelines for a mass attack, tying every loose object to my body with 550 parachute chord. We didn’t use overhead bins, and that’s where my mat sat on the plane as I stood on the tarmac.

I was still feeling agitation, so I paused on the tarmac before entering the building to relax. 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 scratchy 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 going without bleeding as much. Since then, the Santa Ana winds of San Diego irritated my asthma, just like the air conditioners on long flights, and I breathed the moist Havana deeply to appreciate the soothing effect I felt inside my body. Pleasure is often just a balanced contrast against discomfort, and I felt good.

I kept my smile and 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. I strolled up to two customs officials sitting at a simple folding table. It had taken 25 years to get to Havannah legally, now all I had to do was get through customs.

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Footnotes:

1. To “paint houses” was mafia lingo meaning to spatter someone’s blood across a wall. 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 13 years in prison for racketeering on behalf of the Teamsters. Frank spent a 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 behalf of the mafia, putting a gun to his head after other men picked Hoffa up in the parking lot of the Red Fox dinner on 30 July 1975 using a car that Hoffa’s adopted son of sorts, Chuckie O’Brien, borrowed often and still stank of fish from delivering lunch to mafia families. 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 like Frank. Every book by those men mentions something about Big Daddy being brutal, even by their standards.
   
   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. According to fifteen years of reaearch after The Warren Report, they were the three with the “means, motive, and method” to orchestrate Kennedy’s assassination. It was interesting for me to read that Frank phrased his book as if Marcello had Big Daddy in his back pocket instead of considering it could have been the other way around. ↩︎
2. 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 Big Daddy’s stories, Coach was the yin to his yang, a man so honorable he balanced being a part in the Teamsters.
   
   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. I missed his funeral that March because I was on sabbatical for something less important than seeing Mrs. K in her time of grief, which is probably another reason he had been on my mind so much in March of 2019. ↩︎