Jay Norwood Darling
Inducted 1988
Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist
Jay Norwood (“Ding”) Darling (1876-1962) was a Norwood, Mich., native whose nearly 50 years of political satire on the front pages of the Des Moines Register won him two Pulitzer Prizes and a position as the nation’s premier political cartoonist. A graduate of Beloit College in Wisconsin, Darling first worked as a reporter in Sioux, Iowa, and became a cartoonist for the Sioux City Journal in 1902. His career with the Des Moines Register spanned from 1906 until his retirement in 1949. In 1924, Darling was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize, the second ever given for cartooning, for a four-panel cartoon depicting the hard work and devotion of Herbert Hoover. The second Pulitzer came for a 1942 cartoon depicting Washington, D.C. inundated with paperwork. In the preservation of land and wildlife, Darling was an out-in-front activist. He became chief of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey in 1934 and the first president of the National Wildlife Federation in 1936. After his death, the Sanibel Wildlife Refuge was renamed in his honor.