Kerby Confer has vivid memories of collecting stamps as a kid growing up in Williamsport, Penn.

“I had a five and dime stamp collection,” he recalls. “You could buy a packet of stamps for 25 cents, put them on hinges and put them in a book.” Even as a boy, Confer knew about the ultimate collectible stamp. “I was 9 or 10 and I remember telling myself, ‘You know what? The Inverted Jenny? That’s the stamp. That’s the one you’re going to get someday.’

“My earliest goals,” Confer says today, “came out of collecting.”

Sure enough, after a successful career in radio and TV — including a stint as a TV dance show host that helped inspire the movie “Hairspray” — Confer acquired a block of Inverted Jennies, the postage stamp first issued in 1918 in which the image of a Curtiss JN-4 airplane is accidentally printed upside-down.

But Confer was interested in more than just acquisitions. For him, it became vital to make a connection with his collection. And at the age of 40, Confer connected with Carl Barks, the Disney Studios illustrator and comic book creator who invented Duckburg and several of its inhabitants, most notably the miserly Scrooge McDuck.

Confer had read Disney comics as a kid, but never realized the art and stories he enjoyed in the late 1940s and early 1950s came from the pen of Barks. “It was such high hilarity for me, seeing the richest duck in the world,” Confer says.

Three decades later, Levitra Professional Confer began collecting original oil paintings by “the Good Duck Artist,” eventually amassing an exquisite collection of more than 40 of the 200-plus paintings Barks produced in his lifetime. Pieces from the Confer collection have been exhibited in museums and toured Europe and the United States. “It’s been common knowledge in the hobby,” says Barry Sandoval, director of operations of the comics division at Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries, “that Kerby owns most of the best examples of Barks’ paintings.”

For Kerby, collecting is about enjoyment.

“The joy of owning the Inverted Jenny when you put it in a safe deposit box and it sits there for 16 years, it’s like, ‘Whoopee,'” Confer says. “But when you walk into a room and you see Scrooge McDuck diving off a diving board into his money and you get a giggle, I just can’t describe what the difference is.”

Now, Confer, 69, is auctioning his Carl Barks collection. Pieces from the Kerby Confer Collection are featured in Heritage Auctions’ comics and comic art auction scheduled for Aug. 5-7, 2010, in Dallas. Some of his Barks paintings are expected to fetch more than $100,000.

“It’s been a much harder emotional decision to sell the duck collection,” he says. “It’s been hard because there’s so much emotion invested in it, and so many great memories dating back to childhood. But I’ve enjoyed these paintings for 25 years. The time is right.”

Q: How did you get hooked on comics?
A: Before I had a job, when I was about 8, I got a 25-cents-a-week allowance. My big problem was what to do with that 25 cents. Immediately next to the drugstore where they sold comic books was the ice cream shop. It was a single dip for 5 cents, a double dip for 10 cents, a triple dip for 15 cents. I could get two comic books and one dip, or three dips and one comic book. That was the dilemma. My decisions varied by hunger and flavors they had.

Q: This is when you discovered the work of Carl Barks?
A: It took me hours deciding exactly which comic book I was going to blow my last 10 or 20 cents on. It would always be Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck. For an 8 year old who gets his 25 cents a week to open his first Scrooge McDuck comic book and the very first panel is Scrooge diving off the diving board into the money, and the next panel is he’s burrowing through it like a gopher, and the last panel is he loves to throw it up and let it hit him on the head — I was totally captivated!

Q: OK, so how did you get into the radio business?
A: I was going to be an astronomer for maybe two or three years. I built myself a telescope. Somewhere around the age of 15 I discovered girls and I figured out being an astronomer all night was definitely not going to help my social life. I gave that up, but while I was awake late at night, I was listening to out-of-town radio stations. My uncle had a tape recorder and I would go over to his house and pretend I was on the radio. Then a guy came to town to put on a new radio station. He was going to play pop music, but he was an old guy and didn’t know anything about it and I was 16 years old. So I went over there and got a job for a buck an hour. So in 1957, I’m on the radio. I watched him put the station together piece by piece, which was invaluable. When he went on the air, I was the nighttime DJ. I was the first one in town to play rock ‘n’ roll records.

Q: Then things started moving fast for you.
A: Within a couple of years, I was off to the big city. In my early 20s, I was working at a TV station in Baltimore. A kid on my show wrote down everything that was happening on the show and it eventually became the movie and the Broadway show “Hairspray.” There was actually a DJ on TV before me who had a segregated dance show on a channel in Baltimore and black kids couldn’t get on it and so there was a riot and they smashed the cameras and his show went off the air. Six months later, I came to town and started the first integrated dance show in America. So the movie is a composite of two DJs. “Buddy” Deane had the segregated show from 1955 to 1963. I came in 1964 and another TV station in town offered me a job with a new dance show. It was called “The Kerby Scott Show.” I felt we really needed to have people of color on the show. It was a revolutionary idea for those days.

Q: So in the early 1980s, as if by magic, Scrooge McDuck reappears?
A: Actually, yeah! … By the time I was 40, I was on planes visiting stations in 23 states every week. I was flying and reading a Delta magazine when I saw there was a hobby of collecting animation cels. I was fascinated by that because of all the Disney films I had seen as a kid. This was so cool! I had never had a hobby before. … So I started with a goal of getting a cel from every animated Disney movie. … Then .. I get a Sharper Image catalog and in there I see Scrooge McDuck in a money bin and there’s a huge bulldozer pushing more money into his vault. Well, I started laughing out loud and I said to myself, “I am laughing again like I was 8 years old!” I had forgotten how much fun this brought me!

Q: How many different Carl Barks paintings have you owned?
A: I think I’ve only ever traded or so sold two, so I’d have to say almost 50 oils, more than 50 if you include Carl’s pastels.

Q: So why now? Why are you selling your collection?
A: The No. 1 reason is I’m 70, and I have a wife who’s 10 years younger. I do not want her to have to worry about it. I’m the second or third owner, at the most, of most of these paintings. I’m certainly going to keep some lithographs and other memorabilia, but it’s just time. Obviously, anyone who buys these paintings will treasure them and understand the history behind them.

Author Bio: Hector Cantu is editorial director at Heritage Magazine (www.HeritageMagazine.com), where this story originally appeared. For a free subscription, visit www.HeritageMagazine.com.

Category: Recreation and Leisure/Entertainment/Movies
Keywords: Walt Disney, Carl Barks, Heritage Auction Galleries, Heritage Auctions, Donald Duck, Scrooge McDuck, paintings, art, Mickey Mouse