April 6, 2007
Disease May Be Behind Hatfield-McCoy Feud
Von Hippel-Lindau Produces "Fight Or Flight" Hormones, Hair-Trigger Rage And Outbursts
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William Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield (AP)
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Rita Reynolds holds up a family photo of herself, her brothers, and her stepfather from the early 1950s, at her home, April 5, 2007, in Bristol, Tenn. She and her brothers all have Von Hippel-Lindau disease. (AP)
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Jerry Hatfield, left, and Ron McCoy pose for a photo at the Hatfield-McCoy feud marker in Pikeville, Ky., on June 7, 2001. They were attending the annual Hatfield-McCoy Reunion Festival. (AP)
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Affected family members have long been known to be combative, even with their families. Reynolds recalled her grandfather, "Smallwood" McCoy.
"When he would come to visit, everyone would run and hide. They acted like they were scared to death of him. He had a really bad temper," she said.
Her adopted daughter, another McCoy descendant, 11-year-old Winnter Reynolds, just had an adrenal tumor removed at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital. Teachers thought the girl had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Now, Winnter says, "my parents are thinking it may be the tumor" that caused the behavior. "I've been feeling great since they took it out."
Dr. Nuzhet Atuk at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and geneticists at the University of Pennsylvania studied the family for more than 30 years, Rita Reynolds said.
"They went back on the genealogy and all of that stuff," she said. "They called it madness disease. They said that it had to be coming from the VHL. Our family would just go off, even on the doctors."
Now 85 and retired, Atuk said he could not talk about his work because of medical confidentiality.
Rita Reynolds had two adrenal tumors removed a few years ago. Her mother and three brothers also had them. So do McCoy descendants in Oregon, Michigan and Indiana, she said.
Still, many are dubious that this condition had much of a role in the bitter feud with the Hatfields, which played out in the hill country of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia for decades.
Some say the feud dates to Civil War days, when some members of the families took opposite sides. It grew into disputes over timber rights and land in the 1870s, and gained more notoriety in 1878, when Randolph or "Old Randal" McCoy accused a Hatfield of stealing one of his pigs. The hostilities left at least a dozen dead.
"The McCoy temperament is legendary. Whether or not we can blame it on genes, I don't know," said Ron McCoy, 43, of Durham, North Carolina, one of the organizers of the annual Hatfield-McCoy reunion. "There are a lot of underpinnings that are probably a more legitimate source of conflict."
"There was a lot of inter-marrying" that could have played havoc with the gene pool, he conceded.
These days, the "feud" has taken a far more civil tone and all but disappeared, members of both families say. The last time it surfaced was in January 2003. McCoy descendants sued Hatfield descendants over visitation rights to a small cemetery on an Appalachian hillside in eastern Kentucky. It holds the remains of six McCoys, some allegedly killed by the Hatfields.
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Maybe this theory explains the current Bushit administration.
-L. McCoy
You are correct in your first statement.
What was your point with your second????
Besides belonging in the "strange news" category, doesn't the Hatfield/McCoy fued also qualify for the OLD NEWS category?
CBS must have sent most of its staff home for the weekend Thursday afternoon instead of Friday afternoon.
Ah, wait, that's right, they're probably all away celebrating Passover (which started Tuesday.) ;)