GÖRAN BROLING

Göran Broling from Sweden works with graphic artwork. He has been very interested in Disney's comic books since the early childhood. His meeting with Carl Barks is one of the highlights of his life.

Meeting with Carl and Garé Barks on July 2-3, 1989.

This is my story how a sixteen year old Swedish Barks fan began a long-time correspondence with Carl Barks that actually turned out into a meeting with him and Garé at their home in Grants Pass.
It all started with my great interest in reading comics and especially ”Donald Duck”. In 1967, in the Swedish Donald Duck magazine, the classic ”Luck of the North” story was reprinted and it impressed a nine year old kid as myself enormously. Some months later ”Vacation Time” was published. Another fabulous Barks story. I think most Barks fans agree that the years these stories were drawn, Barks reached his artistic peak. It is, however, a bit strange that youths at this young age were able to separate Barks’ ducks and storytelling from the other Duck artists. His splendidly drawn ducks, always clearly showing their expressions, were easy to recognize although his style went through some major style changes over the years.
The interest in who this master storyteller was grew bigger. Around 1972 it became known who ”The Good Artist” was and in the interesting Danish fanzine ”Carl Barks & Co.” No.1 he was even shown in a photo!
In 1974 I thought I should write to him, and got a nice answer in reply. Our correspondence actually continued after that until 1999.

At the end of the 70’s I sent Carl the fine Swedish Barks magazine ”Kalle Anka’s Bästisar” (”Best of Donald Duck”), because what I until then had seen of American Disney magazines was quite terrible. Yellowish paper, bad colouring and blurred printing. Barks responded: ”Many thanks for sending the finely printed ”Bästisar”. It is a very well done comic book. Too bad our publishers on this side don’t have the will to do such nice work. I will keep it on my coffee table for visitors to see.”
It was really great when ”Another Rainbow” finally produced their first rate collection ”The Carl Barks Library”. I became very interested when I heard about that project, but did not know about the printing quality. I asked Carl about it and got the promising answer that the quality was very good. Another question from me was if it was all his stories and layout as he originally drew them?
Barks: ”Yes, they pester me with questions about every detail of the work.”
He even enclosed an ad where it was possible to pay for the whole Library series in advance and get them sent one after the other as soon as they were printed. The price was low compared to buying them separately, so finally I got the entire collection I only had dreamed of before.

In a letter to me from 1986 Carl wrote: ”Regarding these stories of mine that are reprinted in the hardback books of the CARL BARKS LIBRARY, I can only say, ”Thank you, thank you!” to the publishers and buyers of the volumes. I am glad the stories are deemed worthy of such a high quality presentation. Also I am glad that so many of you dwellers in foreign lands can read and clearly understand my original English dialogue balloons. I know the tales lost a lot of clarity in translations.”

Carl’s letters were very nicely written, often with a funny twist showing his great sense of humour. Like his answer to a letter I wrote to him enclosing a photo of myself where I told him that my look is not accurate, looking very tired or even drunk…
Barks: ”You look much like a Scandinavian cartoonist I knew in Minneapolis fifty-plus years ago. He and I often looked ”tired” too, after hoisting ”boilermakers” ’till late at night.”
This letter was written in April 1986, just after the assassination of Sweden’s prime minister Olof Palme, and ended: ”It’s good to be 85. As I see the daily grist of doom, gloom and disaster in the news I am glad that I haven’t much time left on this overcrowded surely mess of a world. Be good to yourself and enjoy the peace of Sweden while there is still a little of it left.”

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In the spring of 1989 I had decided to make my first trip to the United States, together with a friend of mine. One of the things that interested me most of all was a chance to meet Carl. I wrote to him well in advance about my travelling plans and asked if it maybe was possible to stop by his house for a short visit. Garé wrote an answer and explained friendly but with determination what I suspected. Garé: ”Yes, we do get a lot of requests for people to visit Carl - Very few that we encourage. But you he will be happy to meet provided it is possible to arrange all and provided you do not wish to interview him, or ask a lot of questions with a tape recorder. That is a NO! NO!”

A month before our trip to the States came a letter from Carl that told me they indeed planned to meet us: ”We have checked out all the jobs that might fall on me around early July and find that all looks clear.” Carl even had a plan ready since he thought we probably should arrive by air to Medford, pretty close to Grants Pass: ”There is an airport transportation bus that runs between Grants Pass and the airport. If you call us a day ahead of your arrival and tell us what flight you will be on, we can notify the service to shanghai you in the airport and bring you directly to our house.”
As it turned out we arrived by Greyhound bus to Grants Pass. When the bus rolled into the city late in the afternoon I must say that I was a bit tense and nervous about soon getting to meet my favourite cartoonist. Had already got an Okay from Garé on the phone when telling them that we would arrive by bus, but I was in fact soon going to meet a legend!

The location of the small bus station did not make me feel more at ease. It was in a rundown area of Grants Pass with very few people around. The only ones we saw were two kind of roughlooking guys sitting outside the closed station. There was a telephone, but we did not have any coins... But as soon as the bus stopped I saw an elderly couple walking towards the bus from a car, and it was of course Carl and Garé. Carl was incredibly alert for being 88 years. While the driver, with the motor running, unloaded our bags, I shook Carl’s hand and told him how fantastic it was to meet him.
Carl gave me a big smile and nodded his head, when Garé said: ”You can say anything you wish to him now, because he don´t hear a word!” I knew about his hearing problems, from his childhood, but did not know how bad it was. In fact, Carl’s hearing ability seemed to be Okay if you were talking to him in a room, but no good if there were any other sounds around, like the noise of a Greyhound bus.
Because of the fact that we arrived just a couple of days before the 4th of July, Garé told us that they had in advance already booked us for two nights in a motel. She said that there used to be a problem getting bookings around their national holiday. They drove us to our motel, and suggested we take a rest after the long journey. However, we should be ready at nine o’clock the next morning, because they would take us to Carl’s favourite breakfast place: Elmer’s Pancake House!

- - - o - - -

I had problems getting much sleep that night… It was quite hard to really understand that I now had met the cartoonist that had made such an impact over the years since my early childhood. Another thought was that I was not more than eight years old when Barks retired. And now finally, after fifteen years of correspondence, getting the opportunity to meet him in person was indeed an unreal feeling…If I just had got the chance to meet him for a couple of hours that had been great, but instead they had planned to spend two whole days with us!
Carl’s car arrived at our motel at nine o’clock sharp. He was in good spirits, probably because of soon getting his favourite pancakes. We quickly found out that Carl and Garé were a very warm and charming couple. Carl ate a huge pile of pancakes, while Garé talked about what we should do in the following hours.
After the breakfast they took us on a sightseeing in the nice surroundings. They both liked the climate and nature in Oregon, and had no wish to return down to the dry and hot climate of Southern California. Their former home was also ”too close to Disneyland!”, as Carl expressed it. He told me that they had moved around quite a lot. Normally they had moved every six years or so. They lived in Goleta when I first got in contact with him, and before that they lived in La Jolla. In 1977 they moved to a mobile home in Rancho California, Temecula.

In May 1983 they moved north to their present house in Oregon, the state where Carl was born, and he wrote in a letter to me from that time: ”As you can see by the enclosed print (the painting ”An embarrassment of Riches”) I am busy doing work for the ”Another Rainbow” publishers in Scottsdale, Arizona. Disney allows them to buy a painting from me to make a lithograph of it. I expect there will never be more than two a year. As for doing any more watercolors of non-Disney subjects, I will have to see first if I have time. There is much work that I want to do on this new house and yard. Later on I may get tired of driving nails and cutting weeds. Then I may feel steamed up to paint again. This is a great place to be for a chance. I had grown very tired of the heat and hurry and pushy people in Southern California. This is green and cool (part of the year).

After the sightseeing Carl told us they wanted to show us an American supermarket. ”We do not think you’ve got anything like this in your small hometown”, he said. On our way to the supermarket we actually passed the house where Russell Myers, the creator of ”Broom-Hilda”, lived.
Supermarkets in the States are really huge and you can find everything you are looking for. Carl had a special interest for the section where they sold all kinds of tools and drilling machines etc., and asked me suddenly: ”How much do you have to pay for a ladder in Sweden?” I became a bit surprised, because a ladder is not something you buy every week or so… Of course Carl’s main interest was to figure out the difference in the prices between Sweden and the States. When we found a bicycle it became much more simple, and he gave me a big smile when I told him that prices in the USA are low compared to Sweden. Then we bought a lot of goodies that we should eat at their home, like pizza, cheese, grapes and melons, and then we passed a whole section of beers. Carl probably saw me looking at them from the corner of my eye because he said: ”I’ve got some cold ale’s back home, but go ahead and grab a six-pack.”

- - - o - - -

When arriving at their nice house we started by looking at all the paintings they had on the walls. Much of the space was covered with ”Artist’s Prints” of the first thirteen ”Another Rainbow” lithographs made after Carl’s oil paintings. I looked if he had any of his original duck pages hanging, but could not found any. When asking Carl about that he said: ”I only have one page left, in the safe in the basement, but we can take a look at it later.”
The one he had saved was page 18 from ”House of Haunts”. It was, however, not displaying any of his best artwork. But as Garé told me later, they had sold most of them except this one when the price was hitting $600, because they could not imagine that they could be more valuable than that(!). Garé said that one of his old and rare pages sold recently for $12,000!

Today it is pretty well known what happened to all of Barks’ approximately 6,700 original duck art pages, but in case somebody wonder Carl wrote the following to me in April 1979: ”An original page would sell for about $750 by now. Nobody knows how many such pages exist. Can’t be more than 150, well maybe 200 counting all the ”unpublished” pages that were stolen from the editorial offices. The many thousands of comic art pages were just too bulky and heavy to store, and it would have cost too much to ship them back to the artists, so the publishers burned them after the printing plates were made. That is what I have been told. One of the editors gave me the artwork from six stories when I retired in 1966. I loaned one story to the Disney Archives and put one story away for my descendants. The other four stories have all been sold one page at a time. Wish I still had a few of those pages. As I stated above, the price is now to high to be believed.”

In the safe Carl also had the only old duck oil painting he had left. It was a full figure of Donald, but it seemed to be unfinished. In his basement studio, on his easel, was his next lithographic project named ”An Astronomical Predicament”, which he had not completed yet. Carl told me that he nowadays got so much paid for an oil that he could put down as much work and polishing as he wanted. Normally he would spend three hours a day painting, and it took him about two months to get a painting completed.
The 122 duck oils Barks painted between 1971 and 1976 were done much faster and often in smaller sizes. They took no more than nine to fourteen days to finish, he said. It is really fabulous that he at his peak in 1972 painted 32 oils!
We went upstairs to view his other paintings. Carl showed us some of his non-Disney oils and it was the ”Old King Cole” painting and two motifs from a saloon, from the Wild West era, that he liked very much. Also I saw ”Bad Bird from Bodie”, a watercolour from his ”water fowl” period. Those watercolours were made after Disney in 1976 had withdrawn permission to paint the ducks. Those paintings show us how the world would have looked like if famous and mythical persons had been ducks. All those paintings are published in a fine, but expensive, limited edition book named ”Animal Quackers” by Gemstone Publishing.

I asked if there was many people in Grants Pass that knew Carl’s background as ”The Good Artist”, but Garé said that only a few close friends knew that. She told me about a mistake she made, long time ago, when the newspaper boy came by their house. Garé asked the kid if he knew how Donald Duck was created, and if he would like to come in and check it out. He did, and then of course told every kid he knew about it, and the next day all kids from the block were hanging around outside their house. After that incident Garé kept it secret what her husband was doing for a living…

The Barks couple had not been too eager to participate in the Comic Conventions they had been invited to over the years. They had however visited a few. The last one, in San Diego, almost turned into chaos when the pressure of the crowds, trying to get a glimpse of Carl, nearly ran him down. Three bodyguards had to take him out to the car, and Garé saw youngsters crying because they never got a chance to see him. At that time it became clear to her that Carl’s fame had reached enormous proportions.

Garé herself had been a successful artist, and worked professionally for many years. Her motifs were mainly charming forests in bright colours. Many of her oils had been printed as picture postcards, and they had several original paintings on the walls.
Carl and Garé friendly teased each other about their chosen motifs: ”Here is another one of Garé’s paintings”, said Carl, ”As you can see it is a lot of trees.” ”Oh, should you say that”, Garé responded, ”you only paint ducks!”

We for sure had a nice time that afternoon. Since I have a great interest in animated films we also talked about ”Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, that had recently been released. Actually Carl had seen it, but he did not like it. ”That damn rabbit flew all over the screen! It was too much action for me. I prefer features like ”Pinocchio” were the tempo is slower and you can feel that the characters are thinking”, he said.

- - - o - - -

Then we got to talk about the giant Redwood trees, which actually were among Garé’s favourite motifs. She had for a long time been a member of a society named ”Save the Redwoods League”. I knew that we would later pass those restricted Redwood forests on our way down south by Greyhound bus to San Francisco. Carl said that we would unfortunately not be able to view those trees, because the busses did not stop at any of the parks. ”But coming to think about it”, he said, ”we have not seen those Redwoods for about seven years so we can take you down to some of the parks tomorrow. Then we will drive you down to Eureka (California), and drop you off were the busses are stopping.”
I was astonished, because I knew that Eureka was very far away from Grants Pass. We tried to ward off Carl’s generous offer, thinking about the fact that he was close to his nineties, but they had already made up their mind about it. Carl said that we had to start early in the morning, because it was a four hour drive one way, and they intended to go back home that same day(!). ”But this evening we will take you out to a Chinese restaurant, before we drive you back to your motel”, said Garé. Well, now I said that we would for sure take care of the restaurant bill, but they did not allow us doing even that. While enjoying a fine dinner Carl and Garé made up the plans as to which Redwood parks we should stop by.
Then we were served the compulsory fortune cookies, and Carl got the following message: ”You will have gold pieces by the bushel!” Garé chuckled and said: ”Just like Uncle Scrooge!” They drove us to our motel and told us to be ready at eight o’clock the next morning.

Carl was right on time at our motel for the pick up, and drove us to their home where a full breakfast was served. Garé told us, while Carl was checking his car, that normally he was very tired in the mornings and rarely out of his bed before half past nine. Actually, she said that he had not been up this early more than once that year! When he drew his stories he usually started at lunch time, but continued until ten o’clock in the evening. It was seldom, said Carl later, that they got any free weekends. Often he was so tired of the ducks that he thought about quitting drawing them. But now, when he knew what he had accomplished and found out that his stories were loved worldwide, he was pleased that he had continued to draw them.

We started our long journey and the first stop was at Jedediah Smith Redwoods, just across the Californian border, were we saw the largest trees I have ever seen. After a while Carl said: ”Now we gonna leave those small trees and see some real big one’s!” He headed for Prairie Creek Redwoods and they were indeed larger and even more impressive. Then they drove us down to Eureka, and even helped us finding a decent motel room. Now I finally managed to persuade them to invite them to dinner, which was the least I could do after everything they had done for us.

- - - o - - -

After returning back home to Sweden our correspondence intensified, and Garé started writing, too. To my great satisfaction I was informed that they had not only enjoyed our visit, both of them had also enjoyed what we had done together during our stay. If I thought that Carl drove a long way during our stay it was nothing compared to what he could manage. Garé wrote to me in September that same year: ”Carl was supposed to to have left today to drive down to Prescott, Arizona, to sign the lithographs of the painting you saw, but their printing machinery broke down so his trip has been delayed.”

Unfortunately, Garé’s health condition went rapidly bad. A few days after Carl’s ninetieth birthday he wrote: ”Mostly we stay close to the pill bottles and try to avoid any social activity. There will be no more trips to the redwoods.”
His comment on a drawing I sent him joking about all the candles on his birthday cake was: ”There should be a law against people living so long - they become a fire hazard.” Then on March the 10th, 1993, Garé sadly passed away…

I was lucky enough to get a second opportunity to briefly meet Carl during his first, and only, trip to Europe in July 1994. Among all the places he visited he appeared at a successful meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, held by the Swedish Donaldist Club NAFS(K). They taped this unique event on video, and when I wrote to Carl to let him know that we were caught on tape together he responded: ”I have seen short tapes of my visits to Finland and Germany. I looked very old and unsteady. If I were a horse, my owner would shoot me. I had it easy in Europe last year but the constant pressure of crowds and long walks in airports got me tired before it ended. I never want to travel so far again. Come to think about it, I feel tired just about all the time these days. Maybe I am older than I should be."

In a letter from Carl in December 1997 he wrote that he now finally had quit painting since he lost much of his eyesight in Macular degeneration. I had asked him if he thought that Michael Barrier’s Barks biography would be reprinted but he wrote: ”I doubt that such a book will be reprinted in the USA. Comic books and memorabilia spawned by comic book stories is in a major slump in this country. The people who once bought and read comic books are now sitting at computers and find more titillating entertainment browsing the Internet. It is the end of a long era. Comic books, as a fad, lasted sixty years. Good sailing and happy days to all you fans of the Golden years."

- - - o - - -

In one of Carl’s last letters from April 1999 he had enclosed a nice poem. ”I get fan letters that say my duck stories are different from the work of other writers. Perhaps that is because my stories were written around fifty years ago. I have written a poem in tribute of their way of life. Hope you like it.”

Ode to the Disney Ducks
By Carl Barks

They ride tall ships to the far away,
and see the long ago.
They walked where fabled people trod,
and Yetis trod the snow.

They meet the folks who live on stars,
and find them much like us,
With food and love and happiness
the things they most discuss.

The world is full of clans and cults
abuzz as angry bees,
And Junior Woodchucks snapping jeers
at Littlest Chickadees.

The ducks show as that part of life
is to forgive a slight.
That black eyes given in revenge
keep hatred burning bright.

So when our walks in sun or shade
pass graveyards filled by wars,
It’s nice to stop and read of ducks
whose battles leaves no scars.

To read of ducks who parody
our vain attempts at glory,
They don’t exist, but somehow leave
us glad we bought their story.

Göran, Garé, and Carl at Elmer's

Garé and Carl during the sightseeing

This contribution first appeared in the Swedish fanzine NAFS(KURIEN) and is published here for the first time in English. Both article and photos are © Göran Broling.