The following article is the property of The Iowa Almanac and was posted with permission from the author, Professor Jeff Stein.
Jay Norwood Darling was born in Michigan in 1876, but he quickly became an Iowan. He spent much of his childhood in Sioux City, and returned there after graduating from college in Wisconsin. He became a reporter for the Sioux City Journal, but his hobby of sketching quickly overshadowed his reporting, and Darling became the paper’s editorial cartoonist.
He signed his work “Ding”…shortening his last name of Darling, by using the first letter, D, and the last three, i-n-g.
His work soon became well known and in 1906 he joined The Des Moines Register & Leader and provided artwork for that newspaper’s front page. He tried working for New York newspapers twice, but each time “Ding” Darling soon returned to Des Moines, where his cartoons graced the front page of the Register until 1950. Along the way, his work was syndicated nationally and he won two Pulitzer Prizes for his editorial cartoons, in 1924 and 1943.
But Darling was at heart a conservationist. In the 1930s, he was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to a federal commission on wildlife restoration, which is when he came up with the idea of the federal duck stamp program to raise funds for wildlife preservation, and even designed the first stamp himself. Roosevelt then appointed him as the head of what is today the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
On September 17, 1950, Lake Darling State Park was dedicated in his name near Brighton, Iowa. “Ding” Darling himself “set the gate”—the ceremony by which the valve on a spillway is closed, completing the water impoundment process to create the lake. Lake Darling State Park is made up of more than 1,400 acres, including a 300-acre lake with 18 miles of shoreline. Camping, hiking, boating and fishing are popular activities there today.
And that’s not the only recognition you’ll find for “Ding’s” conservation efforts. The J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge was named for him in 1967 on Sanibel Island, Florida, where he had a winter home.
Many know “Ding” Darling as an award-winning editorial cartoonist. But it was his work in conservation that led to the dedication of Lake Darling State Park in his name, on this date, in 1950.
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