William Dufty

William Francis Dufty (February 2, 1916 – June 28, 2002) was an American writer, musician, and activist.

Dufty was a supporter of trade unionism and was an organizer for the United Auto Workers, wrote speeches for former UAW President Walter Reuther, edited Michigan Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) News and handled publicity for Americans for Democratic Action.

Biography

Dufty was born near Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Youth Dufty produced some autobiographical notes in the first chapter, "It is necessary to be personal", of his book Sugar Blues (1975): We spent our summers at Crystal Lake until I was twelve or thirteen. By that time I was making $75 a week in the wintertime season – an undreamed of fortune in those days – as a prodigal jazz pianist on the radio...The day my voice began to change was the beginning of the end of my radio career. If my voice didn't sound childlike any more, there was nothing remarkable about the way I played the piano.

College In the twenties, I had been so rich I never carried a cent on me. In the thirties – mooching my way through college holding a job or two on the side – I was so poor I put every cent on my back where it would show…I took to collegiate journalism as a kind of lark. There I discovered that the cigarette companies virtually subsidized the university paper with their advertising.

Dufty had one son, Bevan Dufty, with first wife Maely Bartholomew, who had arrived in New York City during World War II after losing most of her family in the Nazi concentration camps. She settled near Harlem where she met her best friend and Bevan's godmother, Billie Holiday. They later divorced and Maely raised Bevan as a single mother.

Dufty took Billie Holiday's oral history and wrote Lady Sings the Blues in 1956, which in turn was made into a 1972 movie starring Diana Ross in the title role.

Macrobiotic diet Dufty credits the death of John F. Kennedy and an article by Tom Wolfe in New York Magazine with starting him on the way to good health.

Dufty practiced and promoted macrobiotic nutrition, advocating a low-fat, high-fiber diet of whole grains, vegetables, sea vegetables, nuts and seeds, combined in accordance with the principles of yin and yang, said to optimize digestion by attention to nature.

Dufty had struggled with the symptoms of hypoglycemia and had sought the help of physicians. Describing the frustrating search similarly pursued by Dr. Steven Gyland, Dufty wrote,

Marriage and death Dufty and Swanson were married, she for the sixth time, he for the second time, in 1976. He helped Swanson write her autobiography, Swanson on Swanson, in 1981.

After Swanson's death in 1983, he returned to his home state of Michigan, settling in Metro Detroit. From there he continued to lecture, write newspaper and magazine articles and teach macrobiotics to a new generation. Dufty died at age 86 on June 28, 2002, at his home in Birmingham, Michigan.

Books 1956: Lady Sings the Blues, Billie Holiday with William Dufty 1958: My Father- My Son, by Edward G. Robinson Jr. with William Dufty, via HathiTrust 1965: You Are All Sanpaku, Sakurazawa Nyoiti with William Dufty 1966: Spoiled Priest: the Autobiography of an Ex-Priest, Gabriel Longo, University Books 1969: Mannequin My Life as a Model, Carolyn Kenmore, Bartholomew House Press 1975: Sugar Blues 1980: Swanson on Swanson, Gloria Swanson, Random House