Charles Schulz

By Tom Kirvan

He was the comic genius who gave the world Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, Peppermint Patty, Woodstock, and America’s loveable loser: Charlie Brown.

Together, they became “Peanuts,” the beloved comic strip created by cartoonist Charles Schulz, a Minneapolis native born on November 26, 1922.

The son of a barber, Schulz served in the U.S. Army during World War II and began his cartooning career as a freelancer with The St. Paul Pioneer Press and then The Saturday Evening Post. He eventually began syndicating “Peanuts” in 1950, and at its peak, the popular comic strip was published in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries, making Schulz a very rich man with annual earnings approaching $40 million. The comic strip also spawned a series of books and TV specials, including “A Charlie Brown Christmas” that first aired in 1965 and won an Emmy award and is still shown annually to this day.

Charles Schulz*

Charlie Brown, the principal character in “Peanuts,” was named after Schulz’s colleague from Art Instruction Inc., the correspondence school where he once taught. Like Charlie Brown – who often was bedeviled by Lucy, the older sister of Linus – Schulz was also shy and withdrawn as a boy, admitting in a TV interview: “I suppose there’s a melancholy feeling in a lot of cartoonists, because cartooning, like all other humor, comes from bad things happening.”

Schulz passed away in 2000 at age 77, ending a magnificent career that tickled the collective funny bone of thousands of devoted cartoon followers for more than a half-century. Before he departed, Schulz left us with some memorable musings:

“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.”
“Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, ‘Where have I gone wrong.’ Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night.’”
“Stop worrying about the world ending today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.”
“In the ‘Book of Life,’ the answers aren’t in the back.”
“Just remember, when you’re over the hill, you begin to pick up speed.”