Clifton Lee Darling, Jr. was born in Spokane, Washington on May, 1911, the older son of Clifton Lee and Bertha Hollway Darling. The family moved to Illinois in 1920, and Darling graduated from Trier High School in Winnetka in 1928. Darling attended the University of Rochester in New York, where he was active with theatre and singing groups, before graduating in 1933. He worked several different jobs including as a psychiatric aide before returning to his theatrical roots, singing with a quartet and on the vaudeville stage, and spending a year as one of the Gang in the original Broadway run of Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms in 1937. Darling was drafted into the army in 1941, serving until March of 1946 and earning the rank of Major, a Bronze Star medal, and two battle stars. In 1942 he married Alice Winnifred Feakins, and the couple moved to Wisconsin in 1946. Darling had a long and varied career working at the R.J. Olson Glass Company, Ohio Medical Products, taught dog training classes, joined MENSA, and supported barbershop quartet singing. Alice Darling died in 1988, and Clifton remarried to Josephine Louise Harper the next year at the age of 77. Clifton Lee Darling, Jr. died November 11, 1998 in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, and donated his body to the U.W. Medical School’s Anatomy Department.