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We welcome Dan Thiel back to the podcast for the second part of the series discussing the history and formation of Ducks Unlimited. In this episode, Dan and host, Katie Burke, take a side bar and chat about the influence of Jay “Ding” Darling on waterfowl and wetland conservation in the United States. The pair discuss Darling’s pivotal role in creating the Federal Duck Stamp program and other works ultimately influencing the direction of DU.
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Listen now: www.ducks.org/DUPodcast
Send feedback: DUPodcast@ducks.org
SPONSORS:
Bird Dog Whiskey and Cocktails:
Whether you’re winding down with your best friend, or celebrating with your favorite crew, Bird Dog brings award-winning flavor to every moment. Enjoy responsibly.
Creators and Guests
What is Ducks Unlimited Podcast?
Ducks Unlimited Podcast is a constant discussion of all things waterfowl; from in-depth hunting tips and tactics, to waterfowl biology, research, science, and habitat updates. The DU Podcast is the go-to resource for waterfowl hunters and conservationists. Ducks Unlimited is the world's leader in wetlands conservation.
Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited Podcast, RELOADED, where we bring you the best of our past episodes. Whether you're a seasoned waterfowler or curious about conservation, this series is for you. Over the years, we've had incredible guests and discussions about everything from wetland conservation to the latest waterfowl research and hunting strategies. In RELOADED, we're revisiting those conversations to keep the passion alive and the mission strong. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this reload.
Katie Burke:Today on the show, I have Dan Thiel to discuss a little more of the history of Ducks Unlimited and mostly the history prior to Ducks Unlimited. Today on the show, we're gonna talk about Jay Norwood Darling. But first, welcome to the show, Dan.
Dan Thiel:Thank you, Katie. Great to be back.
Katie Burke:Great. So Jay Norwood Darling was born in 1876, and I guess what most people, when they first hear him, well, they think Jay ding Darling, and he's most famous for the duck stamp. But he had quite a life leading up to that point, so I guess let's go all the way back to the beginning. He was born in Michigan, but most of them know him from Iowa. So how does he get from Michigan to Iowa?
Dan Thiel:His father was a minister, and his father was a successful minister, and he followed the congregation. And in that particular church, they first moved to Elkhart, Indiana, then they moved to Iowa. And to put in context, Iowa, in that location at that time, was very much the Western border. And in his childhood memory, he actually saw Native Americans. He saw streams that had not been polluted.
Dan Thiel:He saw fields that had not been plowed. He saw massive herds of bison. So he was really a part of the American West at a very transformational time. That experience had a huge impact on him not much later in his life when he began his career.
Katie Burke:When he is in Iowa, he goes to I forgot the name of the school that he goes to.
Dan Thiel:So he's went to Yankton College.
Katie Burke:Yes. Yankton College,
Dan Thiel:and he moves to the There are some wonderful stories about his behavior, and he was both tall, handsome, articulate, gifted, athletic, but he was a prankster, and it was his just inherent behavior as a prankster that got him thrown out of Yankton. It's a great story. Apparently, the president of the college kept a buggy and a buggy horse tethered at all time to a hitching pose so that he could use it when he needed to. Well, just like you might borrow an unattended car on a college campus, they, Ding Darling, borrowed the president's horse and buggy, and he then proceeded to engage in racing contests using the president's horse and buggy, and everything would have been fine except he wore distinctive cufflinks, and in the bottom of the buggy, they found his cufflink. So they brought him forward, and they said, it is time for you to leave Yankton College.
Dan Thiel:And that was actually a pretty good experience for him to be expelled from college. He then found a family member. He went to work in the family business. He had an opportunity to go to a new location. He hunted, he fished, he grew up a little bit.
Dan Thiel:And eventually, he attended Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin. And if you dig deep into his biography, when he was at Beloit, he almost completely paid for his tuition by his singing ability, his violin, and mandolin ability, and he sang at weddings, he sang at churches, he sang at funerals, and it was described that on Sunday he was the busiest boy in town because he would run into several different churches, sing, and then move on to the next church. And in his biography, it identifies that he always had plenty of money because of his singing ability. And he gets in trouble at Beloit as well. He is suspended from Beloit for a year, and this is the earliest stages of his cartoon adventures.
Dan Thiel:And he was never a good student academically, but he was a very popular student. He had an incredible talent for drawing, and he determined that it would be great fun to draw caricatures of various faculty members. The caricatures were so accurate that when the yearbook was published, the faculty were outraged that this young student had made fun of them with these caricatures. That led to another experience of being expelled. And again, this expelled period was very pivotal in his life.
Dan Thiel:While his father was a minister, and he was certainly not a wealthy man, but they were very frugal, they were very hardworking, and the father believed that experiences outweighed almost anything else in life, and he was determined that his family would have experiences rather than material possessions. And they go to Europe for several months, and it's kind of that grand tour of Europe, and the four of them did it together. Each member of the family put in $400 And, you know, I don't know how you convert what money today would have been back in that era, but $400 was a lot of money. And he earned it by doing chores, by raking hay, by working at a farm, and by his singing ability. And he also sold a couple of watercolors.
Dan Thiel:So he scratches together $400. Each member of the family puts in $400. They go to Europe. The European adventure really had an incredible influence on his life. And as you said in the introduction, everyone knows Ding Darling today as the individual who created the duck stamp, the federal duck stamp.
Dan Thiel:If you put in context, in his life, the federal duck stamp was one very small part of an incredible life. And what he saw in Europe really expanded his horizon. It developed an appreciation for other cultures. Those experiences and the things that he saw on that trip had an impact on the rest of his life.
Katie Burke:When he comes back, what does he then transition into? Does he go straight into newspapers or does he because I know, you know, in college, his original aspiration was to become a doctor, so obviously that's not what happens. Do you know when that transition is made from committing into newspapers?
Dan Thiel:Yes. So when he graduated, he became his first job, and I believe it was titled Cub Reporter, and I don't know if the world has Cub Reporters today, but, you know, we need to put in context that in this era, there was no television, there was no radio. The world received their information from newspapers. Most cities had multiple newspapers, most cities had a morning edition, some had an afternoon edition, and some had an evening edition. So there was a lot of newspaper work in The United States during that period.
Dan Thiel:He's 23 years old, and he lands a position at the Sioux City Journal, and he did everything. He he laid lead type, he wrote stories, he took photographs, and it was actually if you go back in his biography, remember the camera at this time period was still a fairly new invention, and not many people had cameras. Before he went to Europe, he saved money, and I believe it was $11 he bought a camera, and he learned to use that camera. And a lot of the photographs that he took in Europe were still part of the family estate when he died. That camera was also part of what he took with him when he was a Cub reporter.
Dan Thiel:And in the town of Sioux City, there was a very high profile trial, and the editor of the newspaper sent Ding to the trial to get a photograph of the judge and one of the attorneys. And one of the hiccups with the camera, at the very minute he took the photograph, the attorney covered his face, and of course, the photo was not usable. He was devastated because he knew he had to get an image of that attorney. So he returned to newspaper office and he drew a sketch, and that sketch was perfect. And the editor of the newspaper was very pleased with the sketch, and then his sketches kind of became the norm for that newspaper.
Dan Thiel:He became so successful at the small Sioux City newspaper that a much larger newspaper, the Des Moines Register, recruited him. And at about this same time, he becomes married, he needs more money, he needs he not doesn't need, but he wants the exposure to a larger audience, and he found it in Des Moines. So he goes to the Des Moines Register, this is in 1906, they doubled his salary to the unheard of salary of $50 a week, and kind of in the biography it indicates he had more money than he knew what to do with working for $50 a week, and he very quickly became the highest paid person on the newspaper except for the editorial staff. So he was very successful very early. He began doing cartoons, and his cartoons became, they absolutely surpassed his work as a journalist, and he focused then on drawing cartoons.
Dan Thiel:Go back to what I said earlier about his travel to Europe, his cartoons were on a world scale. They were not local Des Moines story. He drew political cartoons and civic cartoons and conservation cartoons. In his lifetime, he did over 15,000 cartoons that were published in newspapers. Again, his fame caught up with him, and he was recruited by one of the major New York newspapers.
Dan Thiel:And with great fanfare, he moved his small family to New York City, and he loved it. He absolutely loved the experience of living in the largest city in the country. He loved the nightlife, the theater. He loved meeting famous people. At a very young age, he had become a celebrity, and because of his celebrity status, he was meeting the authors, the journalists, the Broadway actors of that era, politicians of that era.
Dan Thiel:Everyone knew who Ding Darling was, and he was part of that social set. One of the challenges, though, was living in New York City, and I kind of go back, you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy. In his heart and at his depth, he was a hunter and a fisherman, and he longed for the great outdoors. And so after a fairly short period, he leaves New York, he gets his old job with the Des Moines Register, and it's from the Des Moines Register that he really develops and blossoms into this international cartoonist, and I believe, Katie, his cartoons were covered in over 150 daily newspapers around The United States. So he was making a great salary as a cartoonist.
Dan Thiel:He made an even greater salary because he was syndicated.
Katie Burke:When did he get syndicated? Right after New York?
Dan Thiel:Right after he moved back to Des Moines. He landed very quickly and immediately discovered there was great demand for his work.
Katie Burke:So, you know, in those early years, you know, he developed a close relationship with Teddy Roosevelt, which, as we all know, is a great conservationist in his own right. So how does that influence Ding on his conservation cartoons and his conservation awareness?
Dan Thiel:So I think it's important to note that his primary relationship, he was an adoring fan of Teddy Roosevelt. His connectivity was with Franklin Roosevelt, and it was Franklin Roosevelt in the thirties who created, I believe it was called the Beck Commission.
Katie Burke:Yes. Prior to that, yes.
Dan Thiel:Prior to that, it was all about Teddy Roosevelt, and one of his most famous cartoons is that cartoon of Teddy Roosevelt. So when Theodore Roosevelt died, one of his most famous cartoons was Teddy Roosevelt on a horseback in his full cowboy regalia riding off into the sunset and waving goodbye. So he really bought into the conservation ethic that Teddy Roosevelt demonstrated.
Katie Burke:Right. Well, he also was friends with President Hoover as well for a while.
Dan Thiel:Yes, he was.
Katie Burke:Because that's apparently, there's a little secret in his signature, there's an x
Dan Thiel:That's correct.
Katie Burke:For Mrs. Hoover. Because he was a let's not forget before we get to FDR, because it comes to be important, his politics during this time, because his politics do not align with FDR.
Dan Thiel:No, he is a arch conservative, he's a Republican, but because he had such respect for what the president was attempting to do, and because of his desire to be a part of the solution, he put his Republican feelings aside and joined a Democratic administration. There's one thing I forgot to share, Katie, and it's kind of important because it had an impact on his life, and that is, Ding Darling was plagued by health issues. He had health issues as a young man, he had mysterious illnesses where he had tremendous stomach pains, but at some point, I believe it was the fall from a horse in an elbow that didn't heal properly, he was beginning to lose all ability to draw with his right hand, in his right arm. If you can't draw, it's very, very hard to be a cartoonist. And so when he would draw cartoons, he would draw them on a very large scale.
Dan Thiel:His arm cost him great pain, and to compensate for the great pain when he used his arm, he taught himself to draw with his left hand. And the only way that he could make the left hand work even close as well as the right hand, he drew on a much smaller scale. And after he drew almost a miniature version of Khartoum, another artist would come in and, using some kind of a mirror and drawing device, they would throw that image on the wall, and that guy would draw it to the size it needed to be. So it's important to note that at some point while he was in New York, he had surgery, and if you look back at that time period, surgery of any type was a pretty big effort. Right.
Dan Thiel:And the surgery was very successful, and he regained full use of his arm. The reason I share that situation about his arm and his health, part of the reason that his time in Washington as head of the US Biological Survey was fairly brief, was because of his health. He simply was not healthy, and it was determined that he needed to get out of that environment. And so, once again, he escapes Washington and goes back to Des Moines Right. And his health returns.
VO:Stay tuned to the Ducks Unlimited Podcast sponsored by Bird Dog Whiskey after these messages.
Katie Burke:So let's let's get in to, because this is the big part of our conversation and we probably should focus on, is that time in the BEC committee and then on to the biological survey, because those two things have a very big impact on our history. So without those two things, we wouldn't have the Ducks Unlimited history we have. So let's let's go into that. So the Beck Committee, which we have talked about, the Beck Committee was composed of Ding Darling and who else was on that? Then we have a founding we have a founding member whose last name
Dan Thiel:was Beck. I believe that Aldo Leopold was also
Katie Burke:Aldo Leopold was on there, and then, oh, I can't think of Beck's last first name. But he was the Beck Beck was a founding member of Ducks Unlimited, and that was formed in 1934 by Franklin Roosevelt. But the primary driver of that committee did not end up being Beck, it ended up being Ding Darling.
Dan Thiel:Yes, and one of the things you learn about Ding Darling, whether he was in the newsroom, whether he was in New York, he became a ringleader. Every time he ever got with a group of people, again, he was tall, he was charming, and he simply had natural leadership skills. And you're right, he did take over that committee, and the Federal Duck Stamp Program was his idea, the art was his art, and if you look at art that he created and it's interesting to note that he didn't perceive himself as an artist, and he always looked on his art. He was a little skeptical of his own talent, and if you look at some of his cartoons, he also made fun of modern art, and he didn't have much appreciation for modern art, and he had very little, he had no art training, and so he was a little intimidated by the artist of the day because he wasn't an artist. And if you look at his portfolio, there's actually not a great amount of art that he created.
Dan Thiel:It's interesting to note that the art that he did create most often had to do with outdoor, and most definitely with waterfowl. And, you know, we should say that the duck stamp program has gone on to be the, it is considered, the most efficient and most effective federal taxation program ever established. And I can't quote the numbers. I mean, it's in the billions of dollars that the Ducks stamp program has generated, but what started as a $1 stamp, then a $2 stamp, a $3, a $5, and today a $25 stamp, has paid incredible dividends for conservation and for wetlands and waterfowl. And over the years and what was interesting, over the years, federal agencies have attempted to hijack these funds, and when Ding Darling wrote the program, they wrote it in such a way that it could never be taken over by another program.
Dan Thiel:Those funds can't be hijacked, and that in itself is a pretty significant accomplishment. So
Katie Burke:when he goes through this, though, at the Beck Committee, basically, to summarize, Thomas Beck and Autoloop would kind of disagree on what should happen, like, where how these funds should be what should be the method of how they go about solving this problem with Waterfowl in the country. So, Ding Darling takes over, submits their proposal to FDR, it gets approved, and from there I mean, I think they asked for like 12,000,000 to begin for wildlife restoration, but I think they only get a million is what they're gifted.
Dan Thiel:That is correct.
Katie Burke:So, but it was a verbal promise. They weren't promised a million, they get a verbal promise from FDR. And one of the stories I like about that was when he was, and hopefully I get it right because I'm summarizing, but he got right after he got pointed to being head of the biological survey, one of the things is he had to find that money, and he went around Washington trying to find that money, and you may can correct me, but one of the guys, finally, that he got to go get that money from was about to leave for Europe, and he basically, like, hounded him until he got that $1,000,000.
Dan Thiel:That is correct. Yeah. He was tenacious, and this was worth every effort he could put into it, and if you look at the role that the biological survey was at the time, it was actually a fairly small, insignificant new program. Today, it's the US Fish and Wildlife Service. I have been to
Katie Burke:the
Dan Thiel:National Conservation Leadership Training Center, and he is absolutely one of the heroes of everyone in the conservation community. They actually have an incredible amount of his physical artifacts, his art, items from his home. One thing about Ding Darling, he left an incredible legacy, and it's interesting, Katie, that while he did over 15,000 cartoons, I believe a 150 of them, only a 150, had a conservation theme. But but those 150 cartoons are his most famous cartoons. I don't know that anyone cares what he did about, you know, the European Union or issues in war.
Dan Thiel:They cared about conservation. And it was interesting, an artist, he did very few color images, and the very few color pieces of his work, very rare, hard to find. When he did do etching, and the whole etching process, we could do an entire show on what it is to etch art, it's very complicated, and and he mastered it. And if you look at his plates, they became more and more complex as he became more comfortable in this medium, and just the world knows that every year, Ducks Unlimited has an event called Into the Vault, and Into the Vault is an online fundraising program we do in November, and Into the Vault is designed to offer our members an opportunity to bid and buy very unique items, old shotguns, old decoys. We've actually become very good friends with the estate of Ding Darling, and through that relationship, they have given us several items that we will permanently display at national headquarters.
Dan Thiel:They've also given us some duplicates, and so we will sell five Ding Darling re strikes in the upcoming Into the Vault auction. So if if you're a ding darling collector, this is a very unique and very rare opportunity to both see these items and and bid on these items.
Katie Burke:Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, I think about his Some of his cartoons are very, like, I can picture them, they're very synonymous with him. The He's did the biological survey, and you talk about the training camp and things like that. You know, he does quite a few things there.
Katie Burke:But one of those things is expanding, I wanna get the wrong, basically the university programs across The United States, which was I think there was just the one at the time. Right. Yeah. And he so that he does that. He also puts people in office in the biological survey.
Katie Burke:They go on to spend many years there. So, he leaves, he goes back to the register, then he comes back again into Washington. And I don't that that part of the story is a little bit because he has you said he comes to US Fish and Wild. He has a play in that, but I
Dan Thiel:So he does a couple more things. So we should never forget, as a political cartoonist, he won two Pulitzer Prizes. Yes. And the Pulitzer Prize in that era was a huge accomplishment, and to win two of them and to win them decades apart was pretty incredible. So first and foremost, as a journalist, that is a significant accomplishment.
Dan Thiel:Katie, he went on to he was one of the early founders of the Isaac Walton League, but also the National Wildlife Federation, and the National Wildlife Federation is pretty close in stature to Ducks Unlimited, and he was the founder. And it's interesting, if you know the history of the National Wildlife Federation, their early fundraising was all based on stamps, and they had stamps for all manner of birds, reptiles, mammals, and it was kind of based on what Ding Darling had done for the federal duck stamp, the early stamps were created by Ding Darling. So he had a huge impact and probably an equally large legacy when you consider the great work that the National Wildlife Federation has done. He started that, and he's the one who gave them, at the time, their greatest fundraising tool. He was a member of Boone and Crockett.
Dan Thiel:Even in his latter years, he was still an active hunter and fisherman. For those that have the opportunity to travel to Florida, one of the great locations is Captiva in Sanibel, the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge. I've visited a couple times. It's incredible. The material culture from his home, of the park itself, I believe, is 1,500 acres.
Dan Thiel:That land would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars in development, and it's this magnificent wildlife refuge that he wanted preserved.
Katie Burke:That's amazing. Yeah. Because he just went there on a whim. Right? He was sick and decided to go like, the story that I read was basically the mobile home had come out, he hadn't been feeling well, was under the weather, they thought he needed better weather, and he goes to Florida and he ends up there.
Dan Thiel:He made almost an annual pilgrimage back to Captiva, and if you look at what Florida was during that time period, pretty remote, pretty wild and woolly at the time, I've seen some wonderful photographs of him wearing a white shirt and a tie walking on the beach. So, truly one of the great characters in conservation.
Katie Burke:Yeah. So, before we go, before I say bye, what would you like to add about Ding Darling that we haven't hit? Have we hit everything?
Dan Thiel:Well, so what I've attempted to do, and I've not had success with it, is to identify any connectivity between Ding Darling and Ducks Unlimited, and I've scoured early documents, and I really find no mention of Ding. I find great mention of the federal duck stamp program, but I can't find that Ding was ever a member of Ducks Unlimited. I would be surprised if he was not a member of Ducks Unlimited. Unfortunately, our records really only began in 1968. And just a point of trivia, Ducks Unlimited's office was on 5th Avenue in New York from 1937 to 1968.
Dan Thiel:In 1968, they moved to the Chicago area, Long Grove, and so the records that we still have access to, they don't begin till 1968. So I just can't find that documented connectivity, but you can't do what Ding Darling did and not have had some association with Ducks Unlimited. He would have been contemporaries with Joseph Knapp, many of our founding members, that they all crossed the same path.
Katie Burke:Right. Yeah. That's interesting that, yeah, they don't have any record of it. But you know he had to at least
Dan Thiel:Absolutely had to.
Katie Burke:Had to have conversations about what Ducks Unlimited At
Dan Thiel:some point, would be interesting, and, you know, in doing my background for this, we discovered a master's thesis written, I believe, at Iowa. Oh,
Katie Burke:it was Indiana.
Dan Thiel:Yes. And in reading that, the correspondence that he had access to was incredible. I can't help but think that in that correspondence, there's probably a letter or two to Joseph Knapp or Arthur Bartley.
Katie Burke:Yeah, that would be interesting to find out. So if you're listening, give us a call. Well, thank you, Dan, for coming back on the show. It was fun, and we'll continue this with two more episodes to continue our discussion with Ducks Unlimited's early history.
Dan Thiel:Thank you, Katie.
Katie Burke:Thank you to our special guest, Dan Theo. Thank you to our producer, Chris, and thank you to you, our listener, for supporting wetlands and waterfowl
VO:Thank you for listening to the DU Podcast proudly sponsored by Bird Dog Whiskey and Cocktails. Whether you're winding down with your best friend or celebrating with your favorite crew, Bird Dog brings award winning flavor to every moment. Enjoy responsibly. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit ducks.org/dupodcast. Opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect those of Ducks Unlimited.
VO:Until next time, stay tuned to the Ducks.