The second McMillen Professor in Chemistry, Stephen Foster Darling, was born in May 1901 and died in October 1990; into those intervening 89 years he packed an incredibly diversified life.
Darling's resume indicates that he had been a "member of the Departments of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota and Harvard, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, [was] intensely interested in food and drug legislation, particularly as it pertains to cosmetics and patent medicines," had a hobby of chemical experiments in color photography, and was "interested in the Cooperative movement, an experimental gardener, and a talented violinist." In his spare time, he was also Chair of the Chemistry Department at Lawrence and a teacher at the Institute of Paper Chemistry, where he continued doing research until 1975.
His academic life encompassed a B.S. and M.S. from the University of Minnesota (1922 and 1924, respectively) and an A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1926 and 1928, respectively). He was a teaching assistant at the University of Minnesota from 1922 to 1924, and held the same post at Harvard from 1924 to 1926. He was appointed instructor at Harvard from 1926 to 1928. After receiving his degree, he became a Sheldon Traveling Fellow of Harvard University, attending the University of Vienna. He arrived in Appleton in 1929 and the following year became a research associate and one of the first teachers at the Institute of Paper Chemistry . He was appointed to the McMillen professorship in 1935.
Darling's publications included, among other things, several studies on cyclopropenes, including papers on Diphenyl-cyclopropenedicarboxylic Acid and on Nitrocyclopropenes. Topics on which he indicated willingness to present public lectures included pure food and drug legislation - especially that regarding cosmetics and patent medicines; perfumes; the German "Mensur" (the student duel), illustrated with slides taken by Darling in Austria; and any topics pertaining to the cooperative movement. In 1959, he was appointed to the food standards advisory committee which assisted the Wisconsin state legislature and state department of agriculture in formulating Wisconsin food laws and regulations.
Darling also served as a founding member and president of the Outagamie County Equity Cooperative, a charter member and president of the Fox Valley Gladiola Society, president of the Appleton Cooperative Association, and delegate to the Mutual Service Insurance Company. He was an amateur postal historian, and had a collection of early Appleton postmarks from the Wisconsin Territory which dovetailed nicely with his activities in the Outagamie County Historical Society. Never one to sit still, he also took up basket weaving when one of his daughters taught it to a high-school art class. During the summers, he performed research for Fox River Valley paper mills and taught at St. Norbert College in DePere, Wis.
At the time of his retirement from Lawrence in 1966, he was a member of the American Chemical Society and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences; he was named an honorary member of the Midwestern Association of Chemistry Teachers in Liberal Arts Colleges; and he was listed in Who's Who in America and in American Men of Science.
Most of Darling's life, he was also an amateur astronomer. In 1925, he and a Harvard classmate went to a convention of stargazers in Vermont. There he learned about making reflecting telescopes and the two men made a telescope using a porthole window when they returned to Cambridge. In 1986, Darling realized another goal as an amateur astronomer when he traveled to Peru and Chile on the Halley's Comet Rendezvous organized by The Astronomy Society of Houston. As a nine-year-old boy in rural South Dakota, Darling had seen Halley's Comet in May, 1910, and although the comet did not live up to expectations, Darling was thrilled to have seen it twice in his lifetime.