Jay Norwood Darling
Jay Norwood 'Ding' Darling. Born October 21, 1876 in Norwood, MI. Cartoonist for the Des Moines Register from 1906 to 1949, except for two brief intervals. For many years his cartoons were syndicated to more than 130 newspapers throughout the country. His cartoons on politics, conversation, humor and life in general made him one of the nation's favorite cartoonist. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize. A conservationist, the cartoonist was named chief of the U. S. Biological Survey, forerunner of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in 1934 by President Franklin Roosevelt. Darling died February 12, 1962 in Des Moines, Iowa.
Jay Norwood Darling was born on October 21, 1876 in Norwood, Michigan. His father, Marcellus Darling, was a Civil War veteran and Congregation minister, and after sojourns in Cambria, Michigan, and Elkhart, Indiana, the family settled in Sioux City, Iowa when Jay was ten. He grew up enjoying the wild spaces along the Missouri River and came to love the prairies and marshes of South Dakota.
A seemingly insignificant event in Jay’s childhood was to have an impact on his later life. While the family was in Elkhart, they met Lamarcus Thompson, an entrepreneur who went on to build roller coasters and amusement parks (a business Darling’s brother Frank was later to join). While building a roller coaster in London, Thompson sent the Darlings a “Pat and Mike” card. Jay was intrigued by this card, and tried to imitate the drawing. Soon he was carrying a sketch pad and making several sketches every day. Drawing was apparently not well regarded as a career in his Congregational household, and he did not think of pursuing art as a profession. He wanted to be a doctor.
He enrolled in Yankton College in South Dakota in 1894 but was expelled after taking a joy ride in the President’s carriage. In 1895, he entered Beloit College, supporting himself during his college years by playing the mandolin and singing bass. He was made art director of the yearbook the Codex, and first used the contraction “D’ing” to sign illustrations in it. These included drawings of professors, caricatured but recognizable, in tutus and tartans and dancing in a chorus line. He was suspended from Beloit College, supposedly for these drawings, but according to Darling, the real reason was that he was failing all his courses. During his suspension he traveled on the Chautauqua circuit with a male quartet, but returned to Beloit and graduated in 1900.
In order to earn money to put himself through medical school, Darling went to work at the age of twenty-three as a cub reporter for the Sioux City Journal. While writing for the Journal, he continued to draw. He also dabbled in photography and was occasionally asked to take photographs for the newspaper. One day he was sent to photograph an attorney to accompany an article he had written. The attorney objected and chased Darling out of the courtroom. Darling substituted a drawing that he had already made of the lawyer, and the editor decided to publish it. It was so successful that Darling was engaged to do a series of Sioux City characters called “Local Snapshots” (1901-1902). This was followed by “Interviews that Never Happened,” written with John W. Carey and illustrated by Darling’s caricatures.
Darling worked at the Sioux City Journal for six years, during which time he came to be compared to John McCutcheon of the Chicago Tribune. When George D. Perkins, editor of the Sioux City Journal, ran for governor in 1904 and Darling’s cartoons supported him, the cartoons received state-wide attention. Also during this time, Darling was courting Genevieve Pendleton, known to all as Penny. He serenaded her, to her embarrassment, with his mandolin, and on October 31, 1906, they were married in Sioux City. While honeymooning in the West Indies, an offer from the Des Moines Register and Leader reached them. Unbeknownst to them, the timing was perfect, because the editor of the Sioux City Journal was preparing to fire Darling over a disagreement about a portrait that Darling had published earlier in “Local Snapshots.”
At the end of 1906, at the age of thirty, Darling began his long career at the Des Moines Register and Leader (later the Des Moines Register). The editor, Gardner Cowles, gave Darling complete artistic and editorial freedom, only sometimes – and rarely – deciding not to publish a cartoon. Darling thrived in this atmosphere, and his reputation grew. In 1909, Penny gave birth to their son, John.
In 1911, Ding accepted a position at the New York Globe so that his work could reach a larger audience through its new national syndication service. He was unhappy at the Globe, however, where management pressured him to draw cartoons that reflected its editorial views and asked him to do comic strips. Also while he was in New York, an old injury to his right elbow flared up and impaired his ability to draw. He tried to teach himself to draw with his left hand. Adding to his general unhappiness was the fact that despite making more money, he had financial problems. A bright spot of the time in New York was the birth of a daughter, Mary. In 1913, he returned to Iowa and the Des Moines Register and Leader. To accommodate his painful elbow, he devised a technique by which he made his drawings in small versions which were projected and enlarged, then traced by an assistant.
The Des Moines Register and Leader could not offer syndication, but, after initial resistance, Cowles permitted Darling to syndicate his cartoons through the New York Herald Tribune. In 1916, Darling signed a ten-year contract with that syndicate, which has 130 client newspapers. Part of this contract required him to spend several days a month in New York, so the family lived there in 1918-1919. While in New York, he met another Sioux City man, Dr. Frederick Peterson, a neurologist, who put Darling in contact with doctors who eventually operated on his arm. The surgery was successful, and Darling resumed his active life.
In 1919, he returned to Des Moines for good. He was active in many organizations, including the Men’s Garden Club, the Des Moines Art Center, and the Izaak Walton League. In 1924, he won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1925, he was stricken with peritonitis and was unable to draw his cartoons for most of the year. His assistant, Tom Carlisle, filled in for him during this illness and many times afterward.
In the early 1930s, he became involved in conservation movements, such as the State of Iowa Fish and Game Commission, and put up $9,000 of his own money to help fund the Cooperative Wildlife Research Center at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University). In 1934, he was appointed by F.D. Roosevelt (most of whose New Deal policies Darling despised as a staunch Republican) to a three man committee to study the conservation of migrating wildfowl, and later in 1934, he was appointed Chief of the U.S. Biological Survey, where he implemented the Federal Duck Stamp Act and designed the first duck stamp. He ran the Survey energetically for twenty months. The job was exhausting, Darling was nearly sixty, his bulldog tactics and blunt locution made him and the Survey enemies, and Penny would not live in Washington, D.C.
By 1936 he had returned to the Des Moines Register. He also began organizing the National Wildlife Federation. In a 1936 conference in Washington, D.C., Darling was elected its president. Wishing to make the Federation self-supporting rather than taxing local conservation groups, Darling devised the idea of annual wildlife stamps.
