William Dufty


William Francis Dufty was an American writer, musician, and activist.
Dufty was a supporter of trade unionism. "Dufty was an organizer for the United Auto Workers, wrote speeches for former UAW President Walter Reuther, edited Michigan Congress of Industrial Organizations 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 :

College

After suffering through two years of college, I finally dropped out. It took daring in those days to dream of facing life without a degree. But I could sniff another war in the offing...I was drafted in 1942…

Army

New York

After the war he moved to New York and began a newspaper career. His columns and exposés for the New York Post drew acclaim, including one that charged that the FBI bungled cases under J. Edgar Hoover's leadership. He was awarded the George Polk Award for an exposé on immigrants.
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. The article described a condition, sanpaku, as a morbid symptom that precedes death, according to Nyoiti Sakurazawa. After obtaining some literature from the Ohsawa Foundation in New York, and following its strict regime of vegetables and rice, Dufty transformed his body and mind. He lost weight and became "calm, cool, collected, precise, and unrattled". He became an advocate of macrobiotics, met Sakurazawa, and prepared the manuscript of You Are All Sanpaku for publication with Felix Morrow in 1965.
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,
In the 1960s, he met Gloria Swanson, a nutrition enthusiast who convinced him that white sugar was unsafe. Dufty undertook a program of research of the impact that sugar has had, and wrote Sugar Blues in 1975.
He became good friends with Japanese artist Yoko Ono and her husband, musician and former Beatle, John Lennon. When John and Yoko visited Singapore, they wrote to Swanson and Dufty. As Hunter Davies, editor of The John Lennon Letters explains,

Marriage and death

Dufty and Swanson were married, she for the sixth time, he for the second time, in 1976. He helped her 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