William Albert Stinchcomb (1878-1959) received the Pugsley Bronze Medal in 1940. He was born in farmhouse in Cleveland, attended the Cleveland public schools and left high school at the age of 16 to work for the National Iron and Wire Company. He became a self taught engineer. in 1895, he joined the city engineering department as a surveyor and worked his way up to assistant city engineer in charge of bridges, harbors and docks. In 1902, Mayor Tom Johnson named Stinchcomb as chief engineer of parks, directing him to popularize and expand them. He laid out football grounds, baseball diamonds and tennis courts. Built bathhouses and neighborhood playgrounds and completed the main buliding of the new Brookside Park Zoo. He worked as a landscape engineer from 1909 to 1912. As a county engineer Stichcomb directed the construction of the Detroit-superior High Level Bridge, the Brooklyn Brighton Bridge and other large projects.
In 1915, Cleveland was the nation's sixth largest city. In 1915 the park board passed a resolution creating the first teo "paid" positions- an engineer and an assistant secretary. In 1921, the park board held title to more than 1,000 acres of land, most of it obtained by donation, but with the new taxing authority it appointed Stinchcomb as the first director-secretary of the Park District. Stinchcomb set about completing pending negotiations for park land and initiating new transactions. In 1920, the park district held title to just 109acres of land, but by 1930, it had acquired 9,000 acres in nine large reservations at a cost of $3.9 million. Following his retirement, the Cleveland News inititated a public subscription to create a permanent tribute to Stinchcomb's life and work. In November 1958, a monumnet designed by sculptor William McVey and architect Ernst Payer was unveiled on a hilltop in Rocky River Reservation. He died at Lutheran Hospital on January 17, 1959. He was 80.