The Blue People ©Walt Spitzmiller
Most stories about the blue people of Kentucky include an eerie, compelling drawing of a family, with the stark faces of 5 of the 9 members a striking bluish-gray, due to an inherited disease. Most stories also borrow heavily from a terrific article by Cathy Frost from Science 82, a long-gone magazine that I quite liked. Frost’s piece, “The Blue People of Troublesome Creek,” is usually credited, but the painting not, or misattributed to
ABC News, various newspapers, or simply deemed “unknown.”
The artist Walt Spitzmiller in fact painted the portrait of the Fugate family (see Walt Spitzmiller Fine Art). A Science 82 editor asked him in 1982 to draw a family, who lived in rural Kentucky, in which the father and some of the children had blue skin. “That’s all I knew about it. I did research on the period they talked about and took old photos and put them together. I added the hunting dog in the lower right, the rooster, that type of thing to add authenticity,” Walt told me.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FUGATES
The blue people of Troublesome Creek had methemoglobinemia, a metabolic condition affecting hemoglobin, the four-part protein that carries oxygen bound to an iron atom at each subunit’s core. Read More
ABC News, various newspapers, or simply deemed “unknown.”
The artist Walt Spitzmiller in fact painted the portrait of the Fugate family (see Walt Spitzmiller Fine Art). A Science 82 editor asked him in 1982 to draw a family, who lived in rural Kentucky, in which the father and some of the children had blue skin. “That’s all I knew about it. I did research on the period they talked about and took old photos and put them together. I added the hunting dog in the lower right, the rooster, that type of thing to add authenticity,” Walt told me.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FUGATES
The blue people of Troublesome Creek had methemoglobinemia, a metabolic condition affecting hemoglobin, the four-part protein that carries oxygen bound to an iron atom at each subunit’s core. Read More