JL Darling is an American waterproof paper pads and stationary company based in

Tacoma, Washington Tacoma ( ) is the county seat of Pierce County, Washington, United States. A port city, it is situated along Washington's Puget Sound, southwest of Seattle, southwest of Bellevue, Washington, Bellevue, northeast of the state capital, Olympia ...

. It was founded 1916 and is known for "Rite in the Rain" waterproof paper pads. The pads originally supplied timbermen in the rainy Pacific Northwest but the company branched out and now a third of its sales are to the U.S. military.

History

The first paper processing formula, using zinc, white varnish and wheat flour, was patented in 1917 or 1920 by Jerry L. Darling who was originally from the

Grays Harbor Grays Harbor is an estuarine bay located north of the mouth of the Columbia River, on the southwest Pacific coast of Washington state, in the United States. It is a ria, which formed at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels flooded the ...

area. The pads originally supplied timbermen in the rainy Pacific Northwest but the company branched out and by 2003 a third of its sales are to the U.S. military, with products including field notebooks and waterproof pens. Other specialty products include notebooks for news reporters, contractors and firefighters; For ranchers to track calving; OSHA industrial compliance forms, field interview forms for police, field diagrams for soccer coaches, expedition notebooks for

mountain climber Mountaineering, mountain climbing, or alpinism is a set of outdoor activities that involves ascending mountains. Mountaineering-related activities include traditional outdoor climbing, skiing, and traversing via ferratas that have become mounta ...

s, notebooks for underwater use by

scuba diver Scuba, originally SCUBA, often expanded to scuba set, is any self contained underwater breathing apparatus, a source of breathing gas used for underwater diving which is carried by the diver. Scuba may also refer to: * Scuba diving Scuba ...

s; and waterproof military zeroing and

bullseye Bullseye or Bull's Eye may refer to: Symbols * ◎ (Unicode U+25CE BULLSEYE), in the Geometric Shapes Unicode block * (Unicode U+0298 LATIN LETTER BILABIAL CLICK), the phonetic symbol for bilabial click Animals and plants * Bull's Eye, '' Eury ...

targets ''Targets'' is a 1968 American crime thriller film directed by Peter Bogdanovich in his theatrical directorial debut, and starring Tim O'Kelly, Boris Karloff, Nancy Hsueh, Bogdanovich, James Brown, Arthur Peterson and Sandy Baron. The film ...

. The Tacoma factory burned down in 1986. The company found that although its finished products had been soaked with water by the fire fighting effort, they were undamaged, and were trimmed and used for four or five months of inventory after the fire.

References

External links

*{{Official website, http://www.riteintherain.com Companies based in Tacoma, Washington 1916 establishments in Washington (state)