Margarine and Garé

[Stefan Diös]

Hi, all!

Usually, when a question is raised on this forum, lots of knowledgeable 
people beat me to the answer even if I happen to know it. Which is just 
fine with me! Now, however, there may be one or two issues where I might 
add something.


First off, Anders Christian Sivebaek on May 1 (Digest #515) about the 
margarine factory where Donald sometimes works:

>- I saw this place mentioned as the skunk oil
>factory, but it sounds strange. In some danish stories Donald has been
>working there, and it's generally a known fact - Donald works at that
>factory when he hasn't got some other (crazy) idea.


In WDC 165 (June 1954), and only this time as far as I know, Barks 
mentioned Donald working as "a delivery boy for a skunk oil factory". When 
the story first was published in Sweden (Kalle Anka & C:o 2/1955), Donald's 
occupation was creatively rendered as "licking gummed tape on cardboard 
boxes at the margarine factory" (my own effort of literal translation from 
the Swedish text). This works fine, since the job is never shown, just 
mentioned (in a rather degrading tone, to boot).

Some time around the 1980's, several stories produced by Egmont (then 
Gutenberghus) started to show Donald working at a margarine factory in 
Duckburg. It happened so many times during the following years that, just 
as Anders Christian notes, it became something of a norm. If a regular 
reader was asked where Donald Duck worked, the likely answer would either 
be "in Uncle Scrooge's money bin" or "at the margarine factory". Then, as 
Egmont stories spread around the world like margarine, more people learned 
about this "fact", more writers began to use it (perhaps so urged by the 
editors), and it became a tradition. It might be noted that Donald 
obviously was promoted during the years: in all the time he has spent at 
various margarine factories around Duckburg, I cannot recall having seen 
him lick as much as one gummed tape onto the boxes!

Why did this all happen? Knowing that many prominent story writers and/or 
editors at Gutenberghus/Egmont were (and are) Swedish, the logical guess 
would be that one of them remembered the margarine factory as an "old 
classic fact of the 50's" and so wanted to use it in new stories to add 
some recognition. This makes sense, and it doesn't really matter whether 
this person knew that the reference only existed in the Swedish translation 
and only in this one story from 1955. (I don't know for sure if it was used 
in Swedish any other times in the 50's, but I doubt it.)

This is the way I always surmised it happened. But another known fact is 
that the Swedish and Danish dialogs often resembled each other, borrowing 
names for characters and so on, way into the 60's or even the 70's. I 
believe that the Swedish translators (in 1955, it was Axel Norbeck) often 
were given Danish or other foreign "originals" to work from, even if most 
stories originally were American. It's possible that it also happened the 
other way round, so the Danish translator might have borrowed something 
from the Swedes; but in order to determine that, one would have to check 
every case of similarities and decide (or guess) which version came first.

What I don't know is what the Danish translation of WDC 165 says. It seems 
to have appeared at the same time as the Swedish one, in Anders And & C:o 
2/1955. If the margarine factory is in that text, it could just as well 
have been a Dane who revived it in the 80's. For anyone really interested 
in learning the details from that time, it shouldn't be too hard to find 
someone involved to ask about it - which we can't say as easily about 1955. 
Anyway, the margarine factory went on to be a well-known tradition in 
Sweden, and evidently also in Denmark. How about other Egmont countries? 
Does "everyone" know that Donald works in the margarine factory?

An interesting side note is that I also have seen later-day instances of 
Donald working in the actual skunk oil factory. These stories are obviously 
written by people, American or others, well schooled in the original Barks 
canon. So this tiny reference by Barks in a story that dealt with something 
completely different gave birth to two distinct traditions!


Next question, on which I shall not be as wordy, was addressed by Daniel 
van Eijmeren on May 5 (Digest #518):

>Gare died on 10 March 1993. I have no idea about her birth date.
>Does someone here know when and where she was born?


According to research done on the Internet by Swedish Donaldists Anders 
Berglund and Magnus Christiansson, and referred to in a newsletter (Kvacket 
1/01) to members of the Swedish Donaldist society NAFS(k), Margaret 
Wynnfred /Williams/ was born on December 6, 1917. This differs from 
information I have seen elsewhere that Carl was about 20 or maybe even 30 
years older than Garé.

 From the same source, Carl's mother Arminta died on November 7, 1916, 
while his brother Clyde Hob Barks was born on August 15, 1899, and died on 
November 11, 1983. He was married to Zena Mae Barks, who lived March 14, 
1904 - December 28, 1986.





Stefan