Family Feud

SAN DIEGO -- This apple -- not at all green, but somewhat sour -- did not fall far from the tree. Jerry Crawford, president of the Major League Umpires Association, their union, has been a National League umpire since 1977, two years after his father, Shag Crawford, ended his 20-year umpiring career.Mr. Crawford, unlike about two dozen colleagues, will keep his job, partly because it would be unseemly for Major League Baseball to accept the rescinded resignation of the union's head, but primarily because he is good.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman said yesterday that he is moving forward with plans to call Baltimore's Krongard brothers before his committee next month - despite attempts by Howard "Cookie" Krongard during the weekend to cancel the hearing. "There is no legitimate legislative purpose to be gained by publicly pitting two brothers against each other," Cookie Krongard's lawyer, Barbara Van Gelder, wrote to Waxman, chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Van Gelder wrote, "I would ask that this committee not hold any additional hearings into this matter."

For almost 200 years, the Bosleys lived at Conclusion Farm. Four generations were born in its stone house and toiled in its fields, and many were laid to rest beneath its earth.But last month, a long-smoldering family quarrel brought an end to one of the oldest family farms in Baltimore County's northern valleys -- and devastation to a family whose name graces a major thoroughfare in Towson and a Methodist Church in Sparks.The Bosleys blame the loss of their 200-acre farm -- valued at $1.35 million -- on a decades-old sibling rivalry, a disliked in-law, and a conspiracy devised by lawyers, judges and neighbors.

A scuffle at a Howard County high school between adults and teens from two feuding families led to six arrests, police and school officials said. Four students and two adults were charged with disorderly conduct in the incident Tuesday at Reservoir High in Fulton, police said. The members of the two families - students ages 15 to 17 and two female adults - encountered one another in the front office during the school day and began to bicker, said school system spokeswoman Patti Caplan.

The mud has started to fly in East Baltimore's 1st District.An advertisement in the East Baltimore Guide, a weekly community newspaper, bashed incumbent Nicholas J. D'Adamo, implying that he has acted unethically by employing his father as an administrative aide and by maintaining a district office in his family hardware store in Highlandtown."

WASHINGTON -- Ronald Haft says his father Herbert, chairman of retailing conglomerate Dart Group Corp., is trying to remove him from the presidency of Crown Books, a Dart unit, and also may be trying to bounce him from the presidency of Dart.The younger Haft, meanwhile, is orchestrating an attempt to topple his father from control of the family's real estate holdings.At a Sept. 7 Crown board meeting, Herbert Haft plans to propose that Ronald Marshall be named the new president of Crown Books, which is 51 percent owned by Dart, according to a declaration filed in the District of Columbia Superior Court by Ronald Haft.

Malcolm I. Glazer may be Baltimore's best hope for regaining professional football.The Palm Beach, Fla., businessman is smart. He's scandal-free. And most of all, he's rich.Just don't ask his sisters for character references.For 12 years, Mr. Glazer has fought with his four older sisters in a bitter legal dispute over their mother's will. On paper, the dispute is over their mother's estate -- an estimated $1 million, a paltry sum for him. Under the surface, he says, is old-fashioned sibling rivalry.

To hear the neighborhood tell it, what happened to Keisha Brown on Saturday night began as a fight between two families -- one involved in the drug trafficking at East Baltimore's Bonaparte Street and Garrett Avenue and another living at the rough-and-tumble intersection.The feud is not about the drugs -- drugs are business as usual there -- but about bad blood between families, neighborhood residents say. It goes back to the beginning of summer, when words were spoken and one woman took a bat to another woman's child, whose cousin then scuffled with an older boy. There has been fighting for months now, and Saturday, punches were thrown again.

The feud among members of the Haft family over the control of their holdings in the Dart Group could well be a plot for the kinds of books Robert M. Haft promotes in television and newspapers advertisements for Crown Books, one of Dart's companies.Mr. Haft, 40, founded the Crown Books chain in 1977 and made it the nation's third-largest bookseller after Waldenbooks and Barnes & Noble, with reported sales of about $241 million. He was expected soon to succeed his 72-year-old father, Herbert H. Haft, as chairman and chief executive of the Dart Group.

Bernard M. Cox and his cousins are asking a judge to settle their family feud over alleged zoning violations and harassment that both sides say has gone on for years in their rural neighborhood just south of Crofton.Cox and his wife, Irene, have sued his cousins and their neighbors on Cox Road, Joannie Coleman-Casey and Jody Jallepalli, for $15 million. They said the relatives made false accusations against the Coxes for years that hurt them and their plant and shrub-growing business. Jallepalli's husband, Tirumal Jallepalli, was named as a defendant.