Ding Darling, Cartoonist and Conservationist

This stone honors Jay Norwood Darling, known to the country simply as Ding, who lived from eighteen seventy-six to nineteen sixty-two. For nearly half a century he drew editorial cartoons for the Des Moines Register, syndicated nationwide, and he won two Pulitzer Prizes for that work, in nineteen twenty-four and nineteen forty-three.

But Darling poured the same energy into saving wild places. President Franklin Roosevelt named him head of the federal wildlife survey, and in nineteen thirty-four Darling designed the very first Federal Duck Stamp, drawing the mallards himself. That stamp program has since funded the purchase of millions of acres for the national wildlife refuge system. He became the first president of the National Wildlife Federation, and a refuge in Florida still carries his name. An Iowa cartoonist who taught a nation to look up and protect the birds passing overhead.