Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part II
“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.“
Chief Justice Earl Warren in Hoffa versus The United States, 1966
I was 16 years old when I became a legal adult.
I couldn’t buy beer like Hillary Clinton could, and I couldn’t vote in elections like people over 18 and without a felony on their record; but, I could sign legally binding contracts without parental consent, and I be tried as an adult in a court of Louisiana law.
A Louisiana judge named Robert Downing emancipated from both sides of my family the morning of 20 August 1989, the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. Later that day, I used the emancipation paperwork he signed to join the United States army.
I woke up that morning the living room couch at Ben and Todd’s house, and was picked up in their driveway by my girlfriend, Lea, who had been driving me around for exactly three years.
She had turned 19 the week before, and had already graduated from Scottlandville Magnet High School for the Engineering Professions, a new program attached to the 100% African American school in Scotlandville, a town shoved between former slave plantations at the end of I-110, past the airport and Zachary and the smokestacks of Chemical Alley. The idea was to battle segregation by getting white kids to commute into an all African American town.
The program worked, and Baton Rouge began seeing Louisiana alumni invent newfangled computer technologies; the SIM City, SIM Planet, and SIM Universe computer game series are a great example. The word got out, and parents of Scotlandville Magnet students encouraged their kids to attend by giving them driver’s licenses as soon as they turned 16, which reduced the hour and a half bus ride down to a thirty minute drive.
I had been riding around town with Lea since the day she turned 16 on 08 August 1987, and she still drove her dad’s rusty and dented Chevy work van. I heard it’s eight cylinder rumble before I saw her put into the Abrams’s driveway.
She was a night owl who worked at The Gold Club and jokingly – I hoped – murmured a sleepy complaint about having to set her alarm for 8 am to get me to court for my 9am appointment. She rarely got out of bed by 10, and instead of talking she blared Van Halen’s 1984 album and patiently navigated through the stop signs of the Abrams’s sprawling suburban neighborhood.
Panama! was playing as we turned on Florida boulevard and headed towards the downtown court building. She stared at the road as if driving in a dream, her eyes languid and her hands barely touching the steering wheel; I tapped along to David Lee Roth singing: “I reach down between my legs, and ease the seat back…”
The passenger seat had enough room to hide floorboard, but I reached down and leaned the seat back, anyway. It was going to be a silent ride. I looked around the van and smiled; I was used to riding with Lea and listening to music instead of chattering, and and I always smiled happily in her van; I had lost my virginity in the back of it almost exactly a year before, three weeks before the 1988-1989 wrestling season began and a week after I turned 16, when she was 18 and a legal adult, and I was, technically, a minor.
Though the back of her van still had a pile of blankets and enough space to lie down, it was now cluttered with a small mountain of her work outfits. That pile was a work in progress, and always more interesting than the miles of strip malls along Florida Boulevard.
As always with Lea, the songs she chose for each outfit had metaphors buried between the lines of lyrics. Her nickname was Princess Lea, like in Star Wars, and she had a handmade outfit that matched Carrie Fischer’s skimpy slave garb from when she was chained to Jabba The Hut in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Of all songs, she chose Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.”
Lea included a metal chain that was, subtly and proudly pointed out by Lea, cut open at the end with an obvious gap, like a closed letter C, but duct-taped to the adjacent link with matching silver tape; she said it represented cutting the chains of oppression. She slowly danced in the outfit and drug the chain across the stage as Bob Marley softly spoke the words: “emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds.”
For a faster dance, she played Quiet Riot’s “Cum on Feel the Noise,” but only because she hadn’t found a more subtle song yet. She was new at the job, and figuring things out as she went along.
The pile of outfits included a skimpy Cheshire Cat bikini with a fluffy tail she had sewn on so she could drag it like her Princess Lea chain. Another was a handmade chain-mail bikini made from tiny hoops of thin metal she had painstakingly coiled and then weaved into an outfit, and it had a tail that was a small link of chains with the same open ended final link. She sewed and coiled metal during her down-time at the Gold Club, where she said it was too dark for her to read, so she fidgeted with her hands like the cute little old ladies who sat in the Goodwood Public Library and knitted scarves and beanies for anyone who wanted one, which is where she picked up sewing as a hobby. I hadn’t seen her dance in those outfits yet, so I don’t know what music she played when wearing them.
Scotlandville Magnet for the Engineering Professions was a boon to Baton Rouge’s homegrown talent, and Lea was one of the first examples I remember. She generously lent her outfits out to other workers, and she was good with computers from her time at Scotlandville; owners of the Gold Club would eventually ask her to create spreadsheets for tracking hours and manage the girls, and by age 24 she would be their general manager.
Like many kids, I would keep track of high school alumni who became famous and showed up in the news long after I left Louisiana. One that always jumps to mind is Stormy Daniels, who in 2018 would be world-famous as the Scotlandville Magnet graduate, Baton Rouge Gold Club dancer, and international porn star who received $160,000 to remain silent about an affair she had with President Donald Trump. But, because of how long legal battles drag out, it wouldn’t be until 2024 that Trump would be charged with, according to Wikipedia in 2025, Trump was “charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal payments made to Daniels, and was convicted on May 30, 2024.” Despite those felony convictions, he would be elected for the second time later that year, and in 2025 he would release the final part of the surprisingly still classified 1976 John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report, though nothing more was in it about my grandfather’s role. Stormy would go on a lecture circuit, and Lea and I would laugh about what a small world we live in, and we’d reminisce about the day she drove me to become an adult and join the army.
Van Halen’s Girls Gone Bad was – and I’m not making this up to match the Gold Club theme – playing when Lea parked the van in the court parking lot. Lea shifted the gear into park and turned the power to parking lights so the radio would still play. She wished me good luck, and I hoped out with my backback full of evidence bulging from a manilla folder and strode inside.
My mom, who had always been an early riser, was waiting beside the clerk’s check-in counter.
“Hey, Jason” she said solemnly.
“Hey, Wendy,” I said stoically.
I was prepared for a fight; I led us to Judge Bob’s office without seeing if Wendy followed.
I had called my mother Wendy as long as I could remember, and when I was born she learned more about the Partin family than anyone reading about us in the news.
My mother was born Wendy Anne Rothdram and met my father, Edward Grady Partin Junior, when he was a 17 year old senior and she was a 16 year old junior at Glen Oaks High School. Wendy lost her virginity to my dad around New Years of 1972, and learned about me two weeks later.
She couldn’t afford the $120 for an abortion, and though my dad could easily have paid for it she accepted his marriage proposal and they dropped out of school and eloped to Woodville, Mississippi, where Big Daddy had been born and everyone knew his name; my dad would have places to stay, and, most importantly, Mississippi state laws didn’t require parental approval or a blood test for a 16 year old girl to marry a 17 year old boy.
They returned to Baton Rouge as Mr. and Mrs. Edward Partin and moved into one of Big Daddy’s houses in a new subdivision near the Amite River Bridge and surrounded by the thick forests. The Amite River Bridge had been on the news not long before I was born, because Big Daddy was charged with stealing $450,000 in cash from the Baton Rouge Teamster safe, and the empty, refrigerator sized, thick steel safe that looked to heavy to lift was found in the opaque waters under the bridge near our house. The two Baton Rouge Teamsters who told the sheriff where to look were soon found bloody and beaten, and the survivor refused to testify. Big Daddy was still famous then, and newspeople followed him daily to see if he’d be convicted, and conspiracy theorists said the federal government was protecting the Partin family from being convicted of anything as long as Hoffa was in jail, which was true.
When I was born in 1972, Big Daddy had no more uses for that house, and he let my dad and Wendy stay for free. Conveniently, it already had all the utilities paid, and not even the phone number needed to be changed in the phone book, because it was still listed under Edward G. Partin. There were around ten Partins in the phone book then: Big Daddy’s little brothers, my great-uncles Doug and Joe, one of my second cousins, Don, another second cousin, Douglas; and a handful of other cousins I never go to know well. The ones I would grow to know have always visited my dad to pick up dime bags of weed, and that’s how Wendy, a petite girl who was by then bulging with me inside her, got to know the big Partin family.
My dad was gone most nights, planting patches of marijuana on high ground in the basin. During days, he used the convenient phone listed in his father’s name to negotiating buying and sell drugs, and to find out where the best concerts were playing. The summer of 1973, when I was around eight months old, my dad received a phone call and left Louisiana on a motorcycle and with a few of his friends to buy opioids in bulk. He didn’t tell Wendy where they were going or when they would be back, but, because of court records, we learned they went to Miami, where Big Daddy knew people who could help, and then to Puerto Rico and then to Jamaica, where Bob Marley was playing a concert in Kingston.
Like a lot of my family history, the details behind court records are obscured by legal jargon. I have to guess about some events, like my dad’s role in abandoning me and the help he probably received, and I believe the Teamster president of Puerto Rico helped him navigate the Carribbean. I don’t recall his name, but I remember his predecessor, Frank Chavez, if only because he made national news and became a staple in books about The Teamsters of that time period, the guys like Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran who would write about them for the next few decades, so for most of my adult life I’d see both Franks’s names and read what they had to say about my grandfather before I knew him.
After Hoffa went to prison based on Big Daddy’s testimony, Frank Chavez publicly said, “I’m going to fucking kill Ed Partin.” Chavez was shot dead in his office by his bodyguard soon after, and a new president was put in place. That new guy, whose name I can never recall, never said anything negative about a Partin, and my dad probably found that a lot of people in Latin America who would gladly help anyone named Ed Partin.
My dad and his friends left their motorcycles in Miami and took a boat from there. Cuba and Puerto Rico were quick boat jaunts away, and Jamaica was a skip from there. He didn’t tell Wendy when he’d return from island-hopping, and she was running out of the couple of hundred dollars in cash he had left her to care for me. She had two nervous breakdowns and left both times; the second time, she left me at a daycare center down the street from Glen Oaks and fled to California with a stranger she had met that morning and who needed cash for gas to make the three-day drive.
The state placed me in foster care. My dad returned and was arrested for carrying saddlebags filled with prescription opioids that I now assume were being manufactured in Peurto Rico for American pharmaceutical companies just tapping into the small island’s tax shelter back then, a blatant attempt to bolster Puerto Rico against Fidel Castro’s Cuba and soviet influence in the Caribbean. The opioids would have been transported to ships using Teamster trucks and overseen by the new Teamster president and, though I don’t know for sure, trafficked all over America by the mafia via Miamia’s crime boss, Todos Traficante Junior, who amusingly had a name that was Spanish for trafficker, a point that was lampooned in media that mentioned his connections to my Hoffa and the Teamsters; puns on names like Todos Traficante Junior is another reason some people stick out in my mind today.
Though opioids were much more harmful than weed, and despite President Nixon declaring war on drugs and skyrocketing jail sentences for drug dealers, my dad was inexplicably released from jail and the case wasn’t mentioned in my custody hearings. By then, Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover were both dead, but Hoffa was still alive and still wanted Big Daddy to recant his testimony, and my family was still receiving federal protection from people I don’t know; someone freed my dad from jail, and he turned his intense focus towards my custody battle.
Though he didn’t have a job, my dad always seemed to have plenty of cash for cars, drugs, motorcycles, concerts, and lawyers to fight for custody of me. Wendy returned and was outgunned by my dad, but she and an unnamed attorney who did pro-bono work for single parents fought the Partins for custody for seven years. We saw each other only once a month, and she was ashamed of her age and for having abandoned me; she taught me to call her Wendy so people would think I was her little brother.
Old habits are hard to break, and I still called my mother Wendy.
Wendy and I sat down in a chairs facing Judge Bob’s desk. Judge Bob had pulled my records from seven years of court battles, and they told a shortened, polished version of what I just told you, and added a lot of legal jargon about predicate cases and other things that could be argued against by a silver-tongued lawyer. But I was still ready for battle, and I clenched my old custody court records, ready to whip out a newspaper clipping or letter from one of the older guys in my magic club if necessary to plead my case if Wendy contested anything I had said.
She didn’t.
She sat silently and listened to Judge Bob describe the Louisiana legal process of emancipating a minor without saying anything.
“In all my years,” he said, “I’ve only seen parents request an emancipation.”
“Do you understand,” he said, looking directly at Wendy. “That this is permanent. Jason will no longer be your responsibility. For practical purposes, he will be an adult and can do what he wishes.”
Wendy wasn’t looking at Judge Bob, she was staring down at her hands, which were clasped on her lap.
“Yes,” she said.
Then, almost to herself, but perhaps to Judge Bob, she mumbled, “He’s just like his dad.”
“That’s not true!” I interjected.
I said I had evidence to prove it. My dad had failed practically every class before dropping out to marry Wendy. To prove I was different, I brought a copy of last semester’s report card, showing a C average.
And Wendy never even got her GED! I said too harshly, in hindsight. But it was true. The General Equivalency Diploma was straight-forward; I had taken a practice one when I considered dropping out early in my junior year, which is when I read that you had to be 16 to drop out without the sheriff looking for you, and then I rejoined wrestling and never thought about a GED again. I would never learn why she didn’t take it; maybe she never took the practice exam and therefore assumed it was harder than it was.
I emphasized that I had to maintain at least a C to wrestle varsity, so I was motivated to stay in school and keep my grades up. It was true that my overall high school average was failing, but that was mostly from my ninth grade year after I was with my dad in Arkansas and he was arrested. I returned to Baton Rouge and bounced around a few homes, and Judge Bob admitted it would have been hard to focus on school then and that yes, the system was unfair to kids whose parents are in jail. I said that wrestling helped me focus on school, if only because school was necessary to wrestling.
“And,” I told Judge Bob, “Coach checks to make sure we have at least a C average.”
Judge Bob knew of Coach Ketelsen from Coach’s time heading LSU wrestling and serving on the committees that brought other LSU legends like Skip Bergman to town, so he had no doubt that I would be monitored by the best man imaginable. (I didn’t tell Judge Bob that I had long ago learned to change my report card by making a Zerox copy, pasting letters from one over letters of the other to look like all C’s or better; I had failed geometry and chemistry two years in a row despite always having C’s on my report card, but not even Coach had noticed that detail.)
I finished explaining how I needed a C average to graduate. Judge Bob waited patiently for Wendy to say something. He waited for ten or fifteen seconds, about the longest amount of time a wrestler could get away with when trying to catch their breath between rounds. But she remained silent and kept staring at her knuckles, which had become white against her otherwise pinkish skin.
“All that is necessary,” Judge Bob finally said, “Is for you to not contest the emancipation.”
Wendy remained silent.
A few seconds later, Judge Bob leaned back in his chair and added “We don’t need the father to be here.”
He used the indefinite article, “the” father, though when we spoke he aways said, “your father,” as if he knew him. We looked so much alike that that no one disputed I was his son.
I had carried in a series of postcards he sent me every two months or so, beginning when he had gotten out of prison a year and a half before. He had swung through Baton Rouge once and bought me the jumprope and extra-large, extra-strong coil-spring handgrips I carried in my backpack, but then he drove off and I hadn’t spoken to him since, but the cards and what he wrote told where he had been, and that he wasn’t coming back to Louisiana to help me get a driver’s license and finish my senior year of high school.
He sent postcards from different border states the year after he was released from prison. His land and cabin were confiscated by local sheriff, and he was homeless so he hitchhiked around looking for a new home and letting me know how he was doing. Each postcard showed nature scene on one side, and had a remarkably long letter written in his meticulously aligned and eloquent script handwriting; though a high school dropout, he was surprisingly organized and literate, though he cursed in writing like he did in person.
Big Bend, Texas, showed a sunset over the big bend in the Rio Grande river, and the towering Chipas Mountains behind it; his note expounded on what an asshole Reagan was, and what bullshit the war on drugs was.
San Diego, California, showed a beach with surfers riding the waves; he wrote that’s where Audie Murphy flew Big Daddy (he called his father Big Daddy, just like I did) to meet with Nixon, another rich asshole in power, in his mansion overlooking the ocean; he wrote that Nixon the asshole who started the war on drugs, and that Reagan was just a puppet of the military industrial complex who escalated it. Oddly and offhandedly but very truthfully, he then scribbled that Nixon was the only republican ever endorsed by the Teamster union.
Northern California showed The Lost Coast and a Russian fort; he wrote that we once lived together peacefully, until Reagan fucked it up by taking on Gorbachev and escalating the cold war (he used the word “escalating” about almost everything republicans did); and, unsurprisingly my dad wrote that Reagan was an asshole.
Washington State showed either a moose or an elk in front of the snow capped mountains of Olympic National Park; he wrote how Vancouver, Canada, was visible across the border, and they were smart enough to let people smoke pot in public. Reagan was still an asshole.
The only postcard not ranting against Reagan was the most recent one from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, a photo of an elk in front of the jagged and snow capped Rockies; he wrote that he’d be happy as a mountain man living off the land, and that he was sorry he lost our land in Arkansas and would try to make it up to me one day. His small and immaculate handwriting added that he planned on going to law school to help other men – he specified men – trapped in the system, and he finished the note just like he had all the others: “Love, Your Old Man.”
He didn’t mention Reagan in that final card, but I knew he thought about it daily and couldn’t seem to stop talking about the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower had warned us about. I told Judge Bob that my dad had schizophrenia, and he said he didn’t doubt that.
I had said all I needed to say, but I must have been nervous and I began speaking hurriedly again, hoping they’d see what I knew to be true, that my dad was angry and Wendy was depressed and I could do a better job taking care of myself than they had. I looked at Judge Bob without glancing at Wendy and said that she said I had to move out the day I graduated high school. I’d only be 17, I reiterated, without a driver’s license because she wouldn’t sign for one, I said. I’d be trapped, I said.
I said that though my grades had improved, they were still below a D on average because of Scotlandville and my first semester at Belaire; I couldn’t even get into Southeastern College much less LSU, and without a car I’d have no where to go.
I told Judge Bob that my great-uncle, Doug Partin, was running the Teamsters now and had said he could get me a job apprenticing under a truck driver, and my uncle, Keith Partin was a Teamster and liaison among the labor unions, and he said that better than a Teamster was a job as an apprentice pipe-fitter servicing Chemical Alley, which started at around $4.50 an hour but would reach $9 as a journeyman and $19 as a master pipe-fitter. But even with that, I would have six months of being 17 after I graduated, and couldn’t get a driver’s license until then without either my dad or Wendy signing for me.
But, I told Judge Bob, I wanted to be different than my family. He said he could see that.
I reiterated all of that with Wendy there. I concluded be reminding everyone that When Uncle Bob was dying, she burst out that she had grow up fast at 16, so I would have to, too. She didn’t deny it. Judge Bob began to ask why.
I interrupted and reminded him that she said it would add $50 a month to her car insurance even if I didn’t drive it, just because I was 16 and that’s what her Exxon policy said would happen when she looked into it. I kept saying “she said” and kept my gaze focused on him, as if she weren’t sitting beside me.
“Miss Partin,” he said, leaning forward and cutting me off with the only strong tone I had heard him use in two months. I stopped ranting like my dad and began practicing my Miranda Rights.
He looked only at Wendy.
“Would you like to say anything?”
She kept staring at her hands and said no and mumbled, again, that I was just like my dad.
“Well, then,” he said. “The petition for emancipation is granted.”
He looked at me and said, “Jason, I commend you for taking the initiative to improve your situation.”
Perhaps as a nod to Wendy, he reminded me that I could be tried as an adult if I did commit any crimes, and that if that happened even he couldn’t help me. Or, though neither Judge Bob or I knew the statistics then, he probably knew enough anecdotal evidence about emancipated kids to warrant warning me.
83% of emancipated kids end up in jail; 30% before they turn 21. Only 15% go to college, and only 3% to graduate school. Those who end up in jail would join the 1 out of 120 Americans incarcerated, many for victimless crimes like possessing marijuana, and almost all have a history of parents and family members who also served time in jail. Judge Bob was prophetic; given that I’d eventually complete college and graduate school with degrees in engineering, his gavel must have given him the foresight of a wizard’s crystal ball. Though I never spoke with him again, if I did I’d thank him and let him know that I’d float to the top 3% of emancipated foster youths and graduate graduate school as valadictorian, and that I’d be the first male in my family to not serve time in jail or prison; except, to be exact, for a brief two week stent in a simulated prisoner of war camp as part of SERE – survival, evasion, resistance, and escape – school attached to the Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the 82nd Airborne. I doubt Judge Bob would consider that real jail time, though for me that two weeks was enough for me to be glad I hadn’t served in prison as long as my dad, Big Daddy, or Great-Grandpa Grady had.
I had no doubt I’d turn out fine. But Judge Bob knew that I’d face an uphill battle. He leaned back in his big leather chair and looked at me in the eyes and slowly, sincerely, and in a way that said the meeting was over: “I wish you well in the army.”
Wendy didn’t move or change expressions. She didn’t know I wanted to join the army, and I don’t think she heard what he said, but it was the first thing I told Judge Bob to justify why I was petitioning for emancipation.
Judge Bob’s hand lifted a bulbous inked stamp and brought it down with a thud on my emancipation petition, which was ironically longer than a legal sized piece of paper with only one sentence that said:
“Jason Ian Partin is hereby emancipated and entitled to all the privledges thereof.”
The stamp left a raised seal that matched Louisiana’s state flag, a large mother pelican in a nest with three baby pelicans staring up at her and the words: “Union, Justice, and Confidence,” and Judge Bob took a fancy fountain pen from a stand on his desk and scribbled his name and the date across the seal and I transformed into an adult.
He slid the ridiculously long piece of across the desk. I picked it up and glanced at the seal and the pelican I knew so well from the flag flown in the family courthouse I had grown up in, and was now leaving for the final time.
I beamed. I had won a battle.
Judge Bob stood up and then so did Wendy and I. He shook my hand and wished me good luck. He told Wendy he was glad to have met her and that she should be proud of her son, but he respected her space and allowed her hands to keep clinging to each other, as if holding herself together by squeezing so hard the the blood had drained from her white knuckles.
Her upper lip quivered and she didn’t look at him to acknowledge what he said, but she slowly looked at me and said she was. Unfazed, I turned to leave and we met up again at the clerk’s counter.
As Judge Bob had suggested, I asked the clerk to file a certified copy of my emancipation paperwork for court records, which would eventually be available online, just like the paperwork from when I was first taken into custody by the state of Louisiana. I folded my copy and tucked it inside of my manila folder and put the growing packet into my backpack.
Wendy held her gaze into my eyes for a moment. She took a deep breath as if to say more, but all that came out was: “I love you, Jason.”
I didn’t reply, but something moved us to hug each other. I heard her sniff from beside my ear, a sound as subtle as the b in subtle. We parted and I walked toward Lea’s van, my mind already on the future. I wouldn’t see my mom for a few more months.
That following Saturday, the Baton Rouge advocate would print my name in their weekly court summaries. It would summarize 17 years of my life in a short sentence:
“Jason Ian Partin was emancipated on August 20th by Judge Robert Downing.”
I would cut it out and add it to my manila folder, which by then would include my army contract and a copy of my driver’s license. It would also have the copy of my 1976 custody report I which is also available online for reasons I don’t understand.
In my 1976 record, inexplicably available today printed and available online with other cases deemed too far distant to affect the people involved today, Judge JJ mentions “the trial judge,” who was the judge who sat in the same office where I stood with Wendy and who had first removed me from Partin custody. Judge Pughe, a creole name pronounced like describing a bad smell, Puh-Yew, died by alleged suicide soon after, and many people in the court system assumed that Big Daddy, who was already known for kidnapping kids and murder without being able to be prosecuted because of his federal protection, had orchestrated Judge Pughe’s death for challenging a Partin.
Judge JJ stepped in after Pughe’s death in 1975, the same year Hoffa vanished and my family lost its federal protection. He transferred to family court from his 30 year career in legislative law, where he served under three governors who had tried to rid Louisiana of Big Daddy the same way the Kennedy’s tried to rid America of Hoffa. He was one of the team trying to convict Big Daddy of stealing that $450,000. I don’t know why he stepped into family court and filled the void left by Judge Pughe’s death.
Even with the legal jargon, Judge JJ’s notes in my custody case tells the story of Wendy and me from an outsider’s perspective, which is more detailed than the once sentence Judge Bob stamped. Together, those two legal documents are bookends of our mere ten years as legal mother and son. When Wendy lay dying from liver failure from excessive use of alcohol in 2019, the same year Martin Scorcese’s The Irishman would be released with Big Daddy as Big Eddie. For many reasons, when Wendy lay dying from alcohol abuse, I’d recall Judge JJ’s version of how Wendy abandoned me more than the one I just told you, probably becauseJudge JJ specifically comments on Wendy not drinking alcohol.
He wrote:
This is a suit by Edward Partin, Jr., plaintiff, seeking a divorce from his wife, Wendy Rothdram Partin, defendant, after having lived separate and apart for more than one year following a judgment of separation from bed and board. Plaintiff also seeks custody of the minor child, Jason Ian Partin, and the defendant reconvened asking that she be granted the permanent care, custody and control of the minor child.
The Trial Court had previously, by ex parte order, awarded the temporary care, custody and control of the minor to Mr. and Mrs. James Ed White. Following trial on the merits, plaintiff was awarded a divorce as well as the permanent care, custody and control of the minor child, with the temporary physical custody of the minor child to remain with Mr. and Mrs. James Ed White. The defendant has appealed this judgment as it regards the custody of the child.
This couple was married when plaintiff was 17 and the defendant was 16 years of age. Nine months following the marriage, they gave birth to young Jason. While we are not concerned with the facts surrounding the separation and divorce, it was apparently one of incompatibility as defendant testified that at the age of 17 she found herself married to a man who did not love her and so she left. Her testimony was as follows:
“As I say I was emotionally upset. I was receiving little support from Edward. I was scared, very confused. I didn’t know exactly which way to turn. I felt I had no one to listen and help with the situation at hand.”
Several weeks later she returned and lived with her husband again. She found that the situation hadn’t changed, and felt she had to get away again. She heard of a man who wanted someone to share expenses on a trip to California, so she quit her job and with her last wages left with him. She testified that she had no sexual relations with this man, and plaintiff does not accuse her of such. Following this trip she returned to Baton Rouge still emotionally upset. Her husband was suing her for separation and told her he was going to take custody of Jason. She went to live with her aunt and uncle, got a full time job with Kelly Girls paying $512.00 per month.
In February, 1975, the defendant’s mother was injured in an accident and she moved in with her to care for her. In September, 1975, following the recuperation of the mother she returned to live with her aunt and uncle.
During these above periods of time, the minor child lived with Mr. and Mrs. White. The Whites came to regard Jason as their own and, although the separation judgment awarded custody to the plaintiff with reasonable visitation privileges to the defendant, the Whites decided the defendant-mother could only see the child two days a month and that she could never keep the child over night. The reason the defendant did not contest custody at the separation trial was because at the time she felt unable emotionally and financially to care for her son.
We note that the petition for separation was grounded on habitual intemperance, as well as abandonment of the husband and the minor child. There are no other grounds listed for the separation nor for custody. The petition for the separation and custody of the minor child was not contested by the defendant, and a default judgment was granted. Defendant testified in the instant proceedings that the reason she did not contest custody in the separation proceeding was that she was not financially or emotionally capable of caring for the minor, and that knowing the Whites were going to be caring for him, she knew he would be in good hands.
Though the petition for separation had as one of its allegations “habitual intemperance”, the plaintiff in the instant proceeding testified that he had never accused his wife of drinking, nor had he ever seen her drink.
The welfare of the child is the main issue that the Court is concerned with. This issue is more important than any wishes or wants the parents may have. Fulco v. Fulco, 259 La. 1122, 254 So.2d 603 (1971), rehearing denied (1971). As a general rule, and in particular where children of young age are involved, preference is given to the mother in custody cases. This preference is very simply explained, the mother is normally better able to care for the child and look after the education, rearing, and training necessary. Estes v. Estes, 261 La. 20, 258 So.2d 857 (1972), rehearing denied (1972).
No argument is made that the mother is not now morally or emotionally fit to care for the child, or that the house in which she lives is not a proper place to rear a child. In fact, the Trial Judge admitted that it was a fine home.
The Trial Judge has not favored us with written reasons for judgment, however, we must conclude from various statements by the Trial Judge that appear in the record that he could find no fault with the defendant, nor was there anything wrong with the house in which she lived. It thus becomes apparent to this Court that the Trial Judge applied the “double burden” rule to the defendant. We have already ruled that the “double burden” rule does not apply in this situation, and thus, under the established jurisprudential rules, we can see no reason why the defendant-mother should not be granted the permanent care, custody and control of the minor child with reasonable visitation privileges granted to the father.
In consideration of our above opinion, there is no need to discuss the specification of error as to the ex parte granting of custody to the Whites.
Therefore, for the above and foregoing reasons, the judgment of the Trial Court is reversed, and IT IS ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that the defendant-appellant, Wendy Rothdram Partin, be and she is hereby granted the permanent care, custody and control of the minor, Jason Ian Partin, and IT IS FURTHER ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that this matter be and it is hereby remanded to the Trial Court for the purpose of fixing specific visitation privileges on behalf of plaintiff-appellee Edward Partin, Jr. All costs of the appeal are to be paid by plaintiff-appellee.
Judge JJ was being kind; “nine months later” is legal code for a shotgun marriage, meaning the parents knew they were expecting and were either forced to marry or rushed the ceremony so that they could say their child was a honeymooon baby; gestation takes ten months, not nine like society continues to propagate, probably for the same reasons Judge JJ added “nine months later” to my court records.
There is another mistake or exaggeration by Judge Pughe that Judge JJ didn’t investigate. Everyone’s busy, and few people dig into details of every court report or verbal claim by a trial judge. Wendy did not live in a “fine home” like Pughe said. It was a shithole across from Little Saigon that I’ll talk about later in this story. But, it had the state-mandated separate bedroom for me, and was cheap enough for Wendy to pay rent despite earning only $512 a month delivering phone books and doing temporary typing jobs for the Kelly Girls job placement organization; those skills would eventually get her a job at Exxon Plastics making enough money to move us to a less shitty part of town. Maybe Judge JJ, or the unnamed trial judge who was Judge Pughe, was just being polite.
Judge Bob, like Judge JJ and probably Judge Pughe, made the best decision he could based on the information he knew at the time, and documented his logic for posterity to read and learn and compare what is known now to what was known then, just like Chief Justice wrote a three page missive about Big Daddy and attached it to 1966’s Hoffa versus The United States for posterity to ponder.
Judge Bob had been a lawyer like every other judge, and he had studied Hoffa versus The United States like every other lawyer in America’s law schools, because it was a landmark case that would be used as a predicate to weaken the 4th Amendment forever, which, since it was penned in 1796 and until Big Daddy’s ambiougous monitoring of Hoffa, had required every search and seizure to have a warrant signed by a judge that specified what was to be searched, where it was, and why it was necessary.
Hoffa versus the United States wasn’t, and isn’t, as well known as Warren’s other landmark cases that are so well known they aren’t harped on in law school. He was a 40 year veteran, and like all justices was appointed by a president for life to interpret and clarify ambiguity in the U.S. Constitution.
Warren is known for landmark rulings like Roe versus Wade, which led to women having right to have abortions (though that would be reversed during President Trumps second term); Brown versus the Board of Education, which led to desegregation of public schools by rejecting the “separate but equal” (though, as shown by Capital High and Scotlandville Magnet High School for The Engineering Professions, laws don’t always equate to results); and the rape case that allowed someone to go free, because when they confessed they were unaware that they had the right to remain silent and the right to a free public defense attorney, and now every kid watching television police sees them reading the Miranda Rights, and now we all know we have the right to remain silent (though many Americans say that not enough people practice that right).
But Warren interpreted the constitution, and was a flawed human. He was vilified for supporting America’s Manzanar detention camp and several others that illegally imprisoned a quarter of a million Japanese Americans during WWII. No one is perfect.
Of all things Warren was most famous for the hastily assembled and mistaken 1964 Warren Report, led by a committee but overseen by Earl Warren at President Johnson’s request, that erroneously claimed Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed Kennedy, and that Jack Ruby acted alone two days later when he shot and killed Oswald in front of the Dallas police station and on live television. That report coincided with Big Daddy’s testimony against Hoffa, only ten months after President Kennedy’s assassination, and was part of why 1966’s Hoffa versus the United States was followed so closely by practically everyone in the world; many people suspected Hoffa was involved, and the congressional report that President Bill Clinton would partially release in 1992 would admit that more than one shooter was likely involved in killing Kennedy, and that the three main suspects in orchestrating his murder were Jimmy Hoffa, New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Miami mafia boss and Cuban exile Todos Traficante Junior.
Warren is still famous, but more as a historical note than a living person people follow like during Hoffa and my grandfather’s time. Hoffa versus The United States is still taught for many reasons. Breaking the 4th Amendment is obvious, but so is the fact that only Warren voted against using Big Daddy’s testimony despite the overwhelming evidence that he was personally incentivized, and had spent two years violating the 4th amendment under guidance from Harvard lawyer and U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. If they don’t know better, who would?
Six justices voted to use Big Daddy’s word to convict Hoffa, and two abstained; it’s as if the most important court in America is as susceptible to influence as the jury that Hoffa allegedly asked Big Daddy to sway. What do we do about judges appointed for life but are still only partially informed, flawed humans who are susceptible to influence?
Big Daddy’s infiltration into Hoffa’s inner circle, which Chief Justice said was more like “a walking bugging device” that was never issued by a warrant, and that’s why he ranted so much against using my grandfather’s testimony to sentence Hoffa. Warren was obviously irritated by Big Daddy – his three page missive mentions my grandfather’s name 148 times – but in the end he writes that was never about whether or not Big Daddy actually said, it was always about the process used to monitor him, and the consequences of using that process in an American system of justice based on predicate cases.
Hoffa versus The United States saw a resurgence in law school lectures when it was cited in 2001, immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attack that took down New York’s twin towers, and President George W. Bush Junior and U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft used Hoffa versus The United States and my grandfather’s ambiguous monitoring as the legal foundation that justified the controversial 2001 PATRIOT Act; it allowed the federal government to monitor the cell phones of hundreds of millions of Americans without warrants, a concept unfathonable to Earl Warren when he wrote that using Big Daddy to monitor Hoffa was a slippery slope that would harm the American system of justice.
But not even Warren or the kids who graduated from Scotlandville Magnet High School for The Engineering Professions foresaw the computer technology possible by 2001, so none of us suspected that it would one day be possible to bug practically everyone on earth without a warrant; that’s that insightful ignorance of the future will hold is what I believe Warren meant when he said that using Big Daddy’s word was a slippery slope that would pollute the waters of justice.
The distant future wasn’t on my mind when I walked I walked out of the courthouse on 20 August 1989 as an adult ready join the army in the next few minutes. Conveniently, the army kept a recruiting office down the street from the East Baton Rouge Parish courthouse. I didn’t have time to ponder what posterity would think, like Warren did in his missive about my grandfather.
It wasn’t 10am yet, and I skipped down the steps and chuckled at the cheesy 1980’s army slogan that said they did more by 9am than most people do all day. Army slogans were written by people who didn’t wrestle in high school, or who didn’t have the future manager of Baton Rouge’s Gold Club waiting for them in her dad’s old work van.
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