Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part IV

McKeithen is Warned to ‘Lay Off’ Partin

“Gov. John J. McKeithen reportedly received suggestions last month during a trip to Washington not to press the state Labor-Management Commission’s investigation of Baton Rouge Teamster Boss Edward G. Partin.”

“McKeithen said he met with [Walter] Sheridan, who is now an investigator for the National Broadcasting Company, to allay any suspicion that his motives in pressing the Baton Rouge labor investigation were to get Hoffa Free.

The governor said that the meeting was pre-arranged on a mutual basis, with each desiring to talk with the other. He said that Sheridan was a focal point of persons in the Justice Department and “national magazines” interested in seeing that Hoffa is not released.”

“The governor said he felt the recent series of Life Magazine articles on organized crime in Louisiana and the alleged bribe offers to free Hoffa were promoted by Partin. Since then, he said, Life Magazine has placed full confidence in him.”

New Orleans State Times, 08 March 1968

Lea picked me up at the Abrams’s house the next day and drove us to Granny’s.

Granny lived in Baker and under a flight path of the Baton Rouge International Airport, which was only two miles away. She was five blocks from Big Daddy’s mother, my great-Grandma Foster, which is how Wendy had met my dad and how I spent so much time with both sides of my biologic family. We pulled into her driveway behind her sensible car parked under the carport, I tapped the carport door gently and opened it and poked my head into her washroom and peered past it to her four-person kitchen table.

“Granny?” I said. “It’s us.”

She called out from the living room that she was there and we stepped inside.

Granny set down her Reader’s Digest novel and struggled to raise herself from her weathered brown Lazy-Boy recliner. Lea and I waited patiently; she was stubborn, and neither of us wanted her kind but sharp tongue reminding us that she still wanted to do things herself. She stood up, adjusted her robe and her glasses, and picked up the Kent from her ashtray by her chair. She took a drag and exhaled and then opened her arms for a hug with her cigarette held as secure as a magician’s wand between her two right forefingers.

I shot in low and scored a double-arm hug. She was only 5’1″ before radiation and chemotherapy made her hunched over, and now she was an emancipated and chain-smoking little Yoda.

Lea reached down and hugged her and gave her a kiss on the cheek and said, “I’m glad to see you, Miss Joyce.”

“I’m glad to see you, too,” Granny croaked in a voice that sounded like metal rasp drug across an echo tube. She took a deep drag from her cigarette, coughed, and whipped a Klenex tissue from her sleeve like a magician producing a silk handkerchief. She wiped phlegm from the corners of her mouth and tucked the Kleenex back into her sleeve and looked up at us and smiled.

A jet airplane roared overhead and every cabinet shook, and Granny’s liquor bottles rattled against each other.

“I wanted to pick up some clothes,” I told her. You got used to the planes after a while. They came like clockwork every twenty minutesr and flew so low that when I climbed the big stately oak tree in her front yard I could look up and see faces peering down at me from the row of windows.

“I left a bag here before I started staying with the Abrams,” I said.

She looked like she was about to say something, then smiled again and said of course, she had left them on my bed.

I walked back to what was once Wendy’s bedroom and that I had used on and off over the years and picked up a small duffle bag full of school clothes and a pair of size 11 running shoes that I also wore during school. I could hear Granny and Lea laughing about something, and Granny’s fits of coughing between laughs, dand I stood in the open door and paused to let them catch up and talk about things I already knew well.

Granny was born Phyllis Joyce Hicks Rothdram, though everyone in her home town of Toronto called her Joyce, Jo, or Joy. In 1960 she fled an unemployed husband who wore a thick leather belt and took Wendy, her four year old daughter, to live with Auntie Lo, Lois Hicks Desico, and Uncle Bob Desico. Granny quickly got a job typing at CoPolymer and saved enough to put a down payment her small home in the Glen Oaks school district and only a twenty minute commute to Chemical Alley for $36,800, a huge sum of money for a single mother back then.

Granny retired from CoPolymer in 1988, but had to live off of meager savings because she had invested most of her retirement into an IRA that was doing better than professional fund managers could do and had grown at around 10.75% annually since the late 1960’s, but federal laws said it couldn’t be withdrawn without hefty penalty taxes of around 45% until Granny turned 64, which was when she’d also began withdrawing her small pension and monthly social security checks. By 1989, she was 60 years old and not expected to see 61.

For as long as I had known her, she worked hard all day and came home to make what most people would consider a gourmet dinner for two, ate with Wendy for years and then with me on and off for years, washed dishes, then poured her first tallboy of Scotch on the rocks and reposed in that chair with a book and a pack of Kents. Like Johnny Walker was for booze, Kents were the cigarette of the upper middle class, which was above Granny’s pay grade but she always said life was too short for cheap booze and cigarettes.

She woke up every morning and repeated her routine for 25 years, retired, and three weeks later discovered that she had throat cancer.

After her first bout with chemo and radiation, her doctors at Our Lady of the Lake’s Mary Bird Cancer Center said she had a 50% chance of surviving. She responded by quoting Uncle Bob, saying she wanted to live without regrets. He was just beginning his radiation, and she probably assumed he’d pull through like she had, and she rounded up three chain-smoking and job-free girlfriends who felt the same way. They were all in their late 50’s and early 60’s and ready for the next chapter in their lives; they loaded up Granny’s car with a month’s worth of clothes and Kents and drove from Baker to Texas and crossed the Rio Grande and went on a tequila and taco binge in every town between Juarez and Mexico City.

She called Auntie Lo from a long distance phone center in Mexico City to say hello, and that’s when she learned about Uncle Bob’s rapid decline and hurried back; but, they could only drive a few hours a day before craving booze and stopping for the night, and it took a week to get home. She missed his funeral, but welcomed me into her home and got to know Lea when she picked me up and took me around to prepare for my emancipation.

Her second fight against cancer began the week after Uncle Bob died.

I walked back into the living room and was ignored by what seemed like two kindred spirits having the best time ever. Lea was telling Granny about Southeastern, and how she’d study both physics and theater and wanted to do stage design and special effects for movies like Star Wars. She said the future of film was in special effects. They seemed oblivious to me.

I glanced at the photo of Grandpa Hicks on Granny’s living room bookshelf. I hadn’t told Judge Bob about my other grandfather, who had been a famous hockey player in Canadian named Harold “Hal” Hicks, but I had thought about him when Judge Bob and I discussed nature versus nurture. The photo was a small black and white snapshot of him in what I grew up thinking was a Canadian Maple Leafs hockey jersey; it had an M, but that was for the Montreal Maroons; Wikipedia lists the teams he played for as the Maroons, Boston Bruins, and a few teams that have since been shuttered, but not the Maple Leafs so I was probably mistaken. The newspaper articles about his death listed the same teams as Wikipedia, but focused more on his 30 year career heading Canada’s eastern railway system.

I scrolled down from the photo of Grandpa Hicks and absorbed all the books.

It was chest-high and had four shelves. The top shelf had her Reader’s Digest book club and constantly evolved as she finished books and donated them to the nearby public library.

It also had a row of books she wanted to re-read or used as references. Granny kept a Reader’s Digest version of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Mark Twain’s Life on The Mississippi, Herman Neville’s Moby Dick, and Cervantes’s Don Quixote; a marked-up copy of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor (the one with an introduction by Warren Buffet); a gravy-stained and tattered copy of The Joy of Cooking that may have been a first edition from the 1930’s, and a roux-stained copy of Paul Prudhome’s 1986 Louisiana Cooking; Walter Sheridan’s 1972 opus, “The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa,” and both versions of Jimmy Hoffa’s autobiography, the first penned from prison immediately after Big Daddy sent him there and published as an unpolished rant soon after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, and the second published by Stein and Day and edited by Sol Stein himself the month before Hoffa vanished in 1975.

The next two shelves were dedicated to her complete Encyclopedia Britanica set, which she bought from a door-to-door salesman and had cost her $2,000; she still paid something like $200 a year for annual updates and iterations. The lower shelf also had two English dictionaries, a Webster and – I think – an Oxford or some other competing version, and a lone thesaurus whose publisher I’ve long since forgotten.

The bottom shelf was mine. It had been Wendy’s and it still had some of her favorite pink-colored Nancy Drew mysteries; I had added my favorite blue Hardy Boys detective stories when I was in middle school, and Granny kept them around for her nostalgia.

She also kept old copies of books I had said I wanted to reread or use for reference: Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, My Side of the Mountain by a guy I can’t recall, and Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Wilderness Survival. I once had a few magic books there, but I had consolidated all of them in my room at Wendy’s and didn’t have my own bookshelf at the Abrams’s yet.

Granny saw me looking at her bookshelf and she picked up Grandpa Hicks’s photograph.

“He was a good man,” she croaked.

She stared at the cigarette-box sized framed photo in her left hand, took a drag from her cigarette, and replaced the photo next to her box of tissues. A plane roared overhead, bottles of booze rattled, and the photo of Grandpa Hicks danced a little jig.

“He never got to meet Wendy,” she said as she exhaled. She coughed and whipped out the Klennex and tucked it back in and asked what we were up to.

“The judge granted my emancipation,” I told her. “I can get a driver’s license now, so Lea’s going to let me practice in her van for a while.”

“Hmm!” Granny said. She was familiar with emancipation; when Wendy became Mrs. Ed Partin at 16, she had, in effect, become emancipated, and Granny knew what that meant.

“You need wheels!” She exclaimed in her raspy voice. “To get you to that coach and wrestling practice.”

That exclamation must have cost her a lot of energy. She struggled through another bout of coughing, and collapsed into her recliner and raised her foot. A drunk driver had crashed into her car and broken her ankle when I was an infant with my foster parents, and it healed awkwardly and still bothered her sometimes. She sat and thought for a moment and said, “I can give you $2,000 to buy a car.”

My eyes widened and Lea’s eyebrows raised in surprise. That was as much as a set of Britanica encyclopedias and my braces.

I hugged her and she said she had to sit back down and we sat on the couch across from her and discussed details of how to buy a car.

“I won’t continue treatments,” she said. “I don’t know what Robert would have done if he had survived, but this second round is too much.”

She coughed and wiped and took a breath and said: “I want to die like he did, without regrets.”

An airplane roared again and the bottles rattled and, out of habit, we didn’t talk until the roar dwindled to a mumble.

She locked eye contact and said: “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you more, Jason.”

I quickly got off the couch and low shot to kneeling beside her Lazy-Boy and hugged her and thanked her. I didn’t tell her that it was okay she missed my three months living with Uncle Bob and his funeral, because I’m sure she already knew that.

She straightened her arms so she could have some space and coughed again and dabbed the corners of her mouth again. She dropped the stained Klennex into a basket beside the small table that held her ashtray and current book, and now had another box of Klennex that had become staples in every room. She was buying them in bulk, just like she had pragmatically bought her Johnny Walker Scotch and Canadian Whiskey in the biggest bottles possible, and her cartons of Kents by the case.

Granny managed to walk us to her living room door and wait until we drove away to wave a final time, cough again, and reloaded her sleeve with that stained Kleenex before waving a final goodbye and shutting her door.

I’d pick up her check for $2,000 a few weeks later, and that would be the last time I’d see her; she would pass away while I was preparing for war and focused on fighting Saddam Hussein. I missed her funeral. Wendy would mail me a clipping of her obituary from the Baton Rouge Advocate, and I would add it to my manilla folder of evidence for emancipation when I returned. It said:

Rothdram, Joyce

Died 2:40 p.m. Monday, December 10th, 1990, at Woman’s Hospital. She was 61, a resident of Baton Rouge and native of Canada. She was a retired Copolymer Rubber and Chemical Co. employee. Visiting at Rabenhorst Funeral Home, 825 Government St., 9 a.m. until religious services at 10 a.m. Wednesday, conducted by the Rev. Henry E. Pickette. Burial in Hillcrest Memorial Gardens, Baker. Survived by a daughter, Wendy R. Partin, Baton Rouge; two sisters, Lois Desico, Baton Rouge, and Mary Ward, Candada; an aunt, Edith Lang, Canada; and a grandson, Jason Partin, Baton Rouge. Memorial donations can be made to the Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, 4959 Essen Lane, Baton Rouge, 70809.

Doctors were wrong: I must have inherited my tenacity from Granny, because she clung to life long enough to see 61 years. Her obituary wasn’t completely accurate because no one knew was sure where I was so they listed me as still living in Baton Rouge.

I don’t know what the religious service would have said, because Granny had never gone to church and had no bibles on her bookshelf, and I never once heard her mention religion or any other guiding force that helped her live the best life possible, except for a few comments about Benjamin Grahmm’s The Intelligent Investor and Paul Prudhome’s Louisiana Kitchen were the most used books on her bookshelf.

Though I can’t know for sure, I believe that no matter what she believed, Granny died without regrets.

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