My Tour through the Asylum , livre ebook

My Tour through the Asylum
Bill Dufford signs a copy of the 1961 Beaufortonian yearbook at the Newberry Opera House on May 11, 2015, the night he was presented with the Order of the Palmetto, South Carolina s highest civilian honor. Photograph by Ted Williams, courtesy of the Newberry Opera House.
My Tour through the Asylum

A SOUTHERN INTEGRATIONIST S MEMOIR
William E. Dufford
With A da Rogers and Salley McInerney
Foreword by Pat Conroy

The University of South Carolina Press
Publication is made possible in part by the generous support of the William E. Dufford Fund for Civil and Social Justice Publications .
2017 William E. Dufford
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-896-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-897-5 (ebook)
FRONT COVER PHOTOGRAPHS : Bill Dufford with Dr. Earl Vaughn, principal of Lincoln High School in Sumter, South Carolina, in 1969, courtesy of the author s collection
South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum .
James L. Petrigru to Benjamin F. Perry, December 8, 1860 From McPherson, Drawn with the Sword
RECORD RAINS , 2015
Jeff Greene, friend and former student of William E. Dufford
Last night, I called you to check in about the floods
and assuage my guilt at not being in touch-news
of record rains saturating your town nearly drowning me.
Your voice held the rising water at arm s length,
that calm equanimity that had once rescued me
its own force of nature.
I never learned to swim properly, thrashing
through the alien water, a spastic amid
agile amphibians. It wasn t a natural disaster,
like the flood filling your basement
with things that swim and bacterial
mud from the Saluda and the Broad.
I asked how you were and you told me
of your gratitude, reminded me that so long ago,
I had taken care of you.
When the floodwaters recede, a new world is
visible, a baptism by disaster.
Oh! I must go back to the water
now that I can swim with such grace
and know who has been saved.
Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Foreword: The Summer I Met My First Great Man
PAT CONROY
Prologue: Realizing How It Was and How It Should Have Been
SALLEY MCINERNEY
PART 1: 1926-1968
WILLIAM E. DUFFORD
CHAPTER 1
The Web
CHAPTER 2
Rambling
CHAPTER 3
Good Home Training
CHAPTER 4
One of the Boys
CHAPTER 5
Separation at the Pool, Unity on the Home Front
CHAPTER 6
Heeding the Call
CHAPTER 7
Out in the World
CHAPTER 8
From Navy Veteran to Frat Boy
CHAPTER 9
Winyah Gators
CHAPTER 10
Two Homecomings in Two Years
CHAPTER 11
It Was Ugly in Your Head
CHAPTER 12
The Path Gets Clearer
CHAPTER 13
Lift Every Voice and Sing
CHAPTER 14
Definitions
PART 2: 1969-1976
A DA ROGERS
CHAPTER 15
Spring 1969
CHAPTER 16
Welcome to Sumter
CHAPTER 17
Reunion with Reed Swann
CHAPTER 18
Student Body President Allen Johnson
CHAPTER 19
Steps to Togetherness
CHAPTER 20
Breaking the Ice in the Hot Tub
CHAPTER 21
For God and Coach
CHAPTER 22
The Salvation of Walter McRackan
CHAPTER 23
Bus Ride
CHAPTER 24
Scuffle
CHAPTER 25
Parents Speak Out
CHAPTER 26
Alabama Kisses
CHAPTER 27
Pool in School
CHAPTER 28
Becoming Familiar with the Unfamiliar
CHAPTER 29
On the Steps of Edmunds Gym
CHAPTER 30
Good Luck Class of 1970
CHAPTER 31
Pomp and Circumstance
CHAPTER 32
The Biggest Achievement of the Year
CHAPTER 33
Baseball Dreams
CHAPTER 34
Left Behind
CHAPTER 35
Freedom Song
CHAPTER 36
Summer Upheaval
CHAPTER 37
A Statewide Mission
CHAPTER 38
Sumter Fall-Out
CHAPTER 39
Summer Study 1971
CHAPTER 40
Boston Calling
CHAPTER 41
The Deepening, Widening Circle
CHAPTER 42
From the Frying Pan to the Fire
CHAPTER 43
Welcome to York
CHAPTER 44
A New Team
CHAPTER 45
Impossible to Say No
CHAPTER 46
Learning the District
CHAPTER 47
Decision at Hickory Knob
CHAPTER 48
Tension Rising
CHAPTER 49
Last Man Standing; or, Swann Song
CHAPTER 50
The Crash
PART 3: 1977-2016
WILLIAM E DUFFORD
CHAPTER 51
Back Outside the Fray
CHAPTER 52
The Way It Should Be
CHAPTER 53
Justice and Fairness
CHAPTER 54
The Old Plantation and the Upper Room
CHAPTER 55
Oldest Living Newberry Indian
CHAPTER 56
Houses and Kids and Cars
CHAPTER 57
Ode to Secretaries, Custodians, and Team Managers
Epilogue: Hold to the Past, Look to the Future
A DA ROGERS AND SALLEY MCINERNEY
Illustrations

Frontispiece: William E. Dufford at Newberry Opera House in 2015
following page 64
William E. Dufford as a young boy with his barn cats, circa 1930
Dufford in the second grade, Speers Street Elementary School, Newberry, South Carolina
Dufford family photograph taken at their College Street home in Newberry, 1938
Dufford s Life Saving badge from his years as a teenage lifeguard
William E. Dufford and older brother C. A. Dufford Jr. on military leave in 1945
Dufford with his fellow members of the USS Los Angeles K-1 radar division, 1945
Boats in the Port of Shanghai in the 1940s
Dufford as a Newberry College student, circa 1946
Dufford as principal of Winyah Junior High School, Georgetown, South Carolina, 1954
Winyah High School varsity basketball team with Coach Dufford, 1957
Dufford as principal of Beaufort High School, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1961
Pat Conroy as Beaufort High School senior class president, 1963
following page 146
Dufford as principal of Edmonds High School, Sumter, South Carolina, 1970
Dufford with Dr. Earl Vaughn, principal of Lincoln High School, Sumter, South Carolina, 1970
Edmunds High School assistant principals Reed Swan and Ethel Burnett, 1970
Gene Norris, Julie Zachowski, Pat Conroy, and Dufford at a Beaufort High School reunion, 1983
The Dufford family in 1988
Pat Conroy with Barbra Streisand at The Prince of Tides film premier, New York, 1991
Gene Norris, Pat Conroy, and Dufford at The Prince of Tides film premier, New York, 1991
Gene Norris and Norma Duncan at a reunion of Beaufort High School educators, 1995
The former Dufford family home, now the Newberry College Dufford Alumni House
A 2006 reunion of Georgetown High School students
Dufford with former Beaufort High School student Daisy Youngblood, 2006
Dufford s former Edmonds High School student Walter McRackan, 2006
Former Beaufort High School student Alexia Helsley with Millen Ellis and Dufford
Dufford and Pat Conroy at the 2014 South Carolina Governor s Awards in the Humanities ceremony, Columbia, South Carolina
Dufford being presented with the South Carolina Order of the Palmetto at the Newberry Opera House, 2015
Winyah High School and Junior High School custodians Johnny Jones and Josh Wright, Georgetown, South Carolina, 1956
Dufford with Neil Cribb and Jay Bazemore with a portrait of Josh Wright before a 2015 memorial event honoring Wright
Dufford with members of the Winyah High School varsity baseball team at the Myrtle Beach Pavilion, 1950
Dufford with members of the Winyah High School varsity baseball team, reunited in 2016
Dufford s cat, Chester, Columbia, South Carolina, 2016
Dufford on the Congaree River with friends, 2009
Acknowledgments

C OUNTLESS THANKS go to the many former students, colleagues, and friends who lent their own recollections to this project, to Pat Conroy for his gracious foreword (first presented as an introduction at the South Carolina Governor s Awards in the Humanities induction ceremony), to Tim Conroy and Jeff Greene for their early readings of the manuscript and to Greene as well for his poem Record Rains, to A da Rogers and Salley McInerney for their remarkable efforts in researching and telling a life story some ninety years in the making, and to the University of South Carolina Press and its former director, Jonathan Haupt, for preserving and sharing that story in the hopes that it might help chronicle our past and light the way to a brighter future-together, as one people.
Foreword

The Summer I Met My First Great Man
PAT CONROY
I N THE SUMMER OF 1961, when I was a fifteen-year-old boy, I was lucky to have the great Bill Dufford walk into my life. I had spent my whole childhood taught by nuns and priests and there was nothing priestly about the passionate, articulate man William E. Dufford who met me in the front office of Beaufort High School dressed in a sport shirt, khaki pants, and comfortable shoes in a year that history was about to explode in the world of South Carolina education circles. Because he did not wear a white collar or carry a long rosary on his habit, I had no idea that