If you are a fairly known figure in your local community you are likely to be invited to attend certain events or asked to work on certain public projects. Such undertakings have a snowball effect meaning that if you are first spotted you become more and more in demand by different groups of the local society.
Carl Barks was such a person while living in - and in the vicinity of - the small town of Hemet* between 1942 and 1969, although nobody knew that his income derived from drawing duck stories for Disney! He was merely known for his drawing skills and inventive ideas which often came in handy in a variety of ways.

This is a page about the unknown Barks with focus on some of his non-Disney community work while living in Hemet. Most of the photos used in the sub-pages have been cut from newspapers from the time, which accounts for the somewhat inferior quality...

* Hemet is situated in the San Jacinto area in Riverside County, California. Today it is home to about 60,000 people, but when Barks lived there it only mustered about 10,000 inhabitants.