Rarebit Fiend :: CARTOONISTS: photographs

Barks & first wife, 1921

Artist: Carl Barks (All)

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Artwork Details

Title:	Barks & first wife, 1921
Artist:	Carl Barks (All)
Media Type:	Photograph
Art Type:	Photograph
For Sale Status:	NFS
Views:	610
Likes on CAF:	0 1
Comments:	1
Added to Site:	2/28/2013
Comic Art Archive:

Description

Photo of Carl Barks & wife labeled on back “Carl Barks and Pearl, his first wife. She was a Turner girl. Taken soon after marriage in 1921. Neither of them were of age.”

From the estate collection of Carl Barks.

We all know do Carl Barks’ third wife, Garé, who was a painter of her own, and helped her husband by drawing thousands of coins in Scrooge’s money bin, by filling in blacks, and doing the lettering. But did you ever hear anything about the artist’s first or second wife? Here you are! (I’m quoting from “Carl Barks conversations”, edited by Donald Ault, 2003, pp. 60-62, 184)

“I was 20 and she was 16 when we got married. And neither of us should’ve gotten married. We did and had no intention of having any children, but accidentally we got one and then we got another one a little later on. ... I was always trying to figure out a comic strip or something I could do. That’s what used to irritate my wife at that time. She was perfectly satisfied just to be the wife of a laborer on the railroad; that’s all she wanted out of life. I was using our evenings and all of our spare time working at this darned stuff, and she would rather have been socializing, and so we gradually got to fighting all the time. We separated in the very first part of 1930. I hadn’t been back to Oregon for all the years we worked on the railroad, so when we separated, I took fifty dollars and what I could carry on my back and I went up the road, and she stayed down there with the two kids. She kept the two kids and the house we hadn’t paid for; of course, it went back to the mortgage holder. I got back up to Oregon ... There was nothing I could do there, so I was talking with my in-laws. They said, “Well, hell, board with us.” ... There I was, boarding with my in-laws, and I thought, well, hell, I’m just gonna put in all my time on cartooning. ... In the meantime, my mother-in-law and I had gone back down to Roseville on the train and picked up my two kids. Brought them back up there, for my mother-in-law to oversee. I just figured the kids were better-off with my in-laws, and they did, too. ... So for about a year, I just boarded there and sold cartoons, and so on. Eventually, I began thinking, well, this isn’t the right thing ... I’m imposing on those people’s hospitality a little too much. ... I took the two kids and went over and set up in the little town of Medford, in Oregon, where the climate was a little warmer. I was getting along fine. I had the kids in school and all over there, and one day they didn’t come home from school. ... I met one of the neighbours that lived down the line, and she said she saw a car pull up and a man and a woman got out of the car and talked to the girls, and the girls got in, and that they seemed very much acquainted with them. It was my wife and her boyfriend. ... She took them back over and left them with my in-laws. ... Whenever I got a little extra-money, I would send some to the in-laws to buy their clothes and pay for their food, and so on. They weren’t getting any from their mother that I know of. ... “

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Joined:	February 2005
Last Login:	September 2025
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Country:	GERMANY
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Rafa Roldan
Member Since 2010

Posted on 5/18/2013

Charming photo.

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