Ding Out

"I went to Washington thinking that one man might be able to do the job. I found that I was as helpless as a cork in the middle of the ocean."

Thus last week did pungent Cartoonist Jay Norwood ("Ding") Darling, who had done the job of saving the nation's wild life fully as well as any other one man could have done it, explain his resignation as Chief of the U. S. Bureau of Biological Survey.

When Secretary Wallace persuaded Cartoonist Darling, a lifelong conservationist, to leave his desk at the Des Moines Register & Tribune year ago last March, Ding sped to Washington with high hopes of spending $50,000,000 to turn 12,000,000 acres of submarginal U. S. farm land into breeding grounds for wild fowl, refuges for other game. The plan seemed to fit in beautifully with both the New Deal's agricultural and relief programs. But getting money out of a bureaucracy, Chief Darling soon discovered, was slower than wading through a duck marsh. When he set out to restore swamps he would find some other government agency out to drain them. When he picked some woodsy river side for a game refuge, another agency would be planning to scratch irrigation ditches through it.

Chief Darling's 20-month record is, however, far from one of complete frustration. By an unnoticed rider to an innocuous joint resolution he got $6,000,000 out of Congress, From WPA, PWA, the Forestry Service and other agencies he chivvied another $8,500,000 to spend primarily for their purposes, but indirectly with benefits to his wild game. He has actually turned some 900,000 acres of submarginal land over to his beloved ducks and other animals.

Well pleased was retiring Chief Darling last week with the man he had been allowed to pick as his successor, Ira Noel Gabrielson, 46, a conservation expert who has spent all but the first three years of his professional life with the Biological Survey. Of new Chief Gabrielson, who weighs 260 lb., Ding remarked: "They won't push him around."

Tears welled in Chief Darling's eyes when his Bureau employes stepped up to hand him a shotgun as a parting gift. "Up to this time," cried he, "we've had only God looking after wild life. God needs a substitute. The opportunity is yours."

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