

'Peanuts' Creator Charles Schulz Dies

Amusing, Wistful Comic Strip Ran for Nearly Half a Century By Adam Bernstein

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, February 14, 2000; Page A01 Charles M. Schulz, 77, whose "Peanuts" comic strip ran for 49 years and featured an immensely popular repertory of blithely neurotic children and a beguiling beagle whose antics were resolved in wistful but distinctly adult punch lines, died Saturday at his home in Santa Rosa, Calif., after a heart attack. Schulz, who died a day before his final Sunday strip appeared, had been diagnosed with colon cancer in November. He suffered a series of strokes during emergency abdominal surgery the same month. During the run of "Peanuts," Schulz developed a plethora of pop-culture icons seen by hundreds of millions of readers worldwide. His characters included the dog Snoopy, who fancied himself a World War I flying ace; the hapless Charlie Brown, who could spend a week of strips with his kite entangled in a "kite-eating" tree; young Linus and his ever-present security blanket; Lucy, who tartly dispensed advice for a nickel from a makeshift psychiatrist's "booth" that resembled a lemonade stand; and the single-minded, classical-piano prodigy Schroeder. The cartoon strip, which made its debut Oct. 2, 1950, was distributed by Scripps Howard-owned United Feature Syndicate. It was syndicated to more than 2,600 newspapers around the world, appeared in about 25 languages and reach an estimated audience of 355 million. The Washington Post, which was among the first newspapers to carry the strip, ran it until the end. President Clinton, in a statement released after Schulz's death, said that the artist and his characters would live on in the memories of their fans. He added, "On the day that our newspapers print his very last 'Peanuts' strip, it is especially poignant that we mourn the passing of Charles Schulz himself." Schulz was as popular with critics as he was with the public. He won the Reuben Award, the cartoon world's highest award, from the National Cartoonists Society in 1955 and 1964. His peers at the International Pavilion of Humor in Montreal dubbed him International Cartoonist of the Year in 1978. In 1990, the government of France named Schulz a commander of arts and letters. Other measures of the fame and influence of Schulz and his creations include the appearance of the "Peanuts" gang on the covers of Time and Life magazines and a popular musical based on the strip. Charlie Brown and company also appeared in television animated specials that received Emmy and Peabody awards and whose broadcast has become a seasonal tradition. An Italian priest once translated "Peanuts" into Latin, featuring "Snoopius." An entire industry of "Peanuts"-related merchandise swept the nation. Everything from jewelry to lunch boxes, as well as dolls, clothing and greeting cards featured the gang. Snoopy even became something of a corporate spokesman. One result of all this was an income for Schulz in 1995 and 1996 that Forbes magazine estimated at $33 million. In the final strip printed yesterday, he wrote: "I have been fortunate to draw Charlie Brown and his friends for almost 50 years. It has been the fulfillment of my childhood ambition. Unfortunately, I am no longer able to maintain the schedule demanded by a daily comic strip. My family does not wish Peanuts to be continued by anyone else, therefore I am announcing my retirement." He added he was grateful for his editors' loyalty and the "love expressed to me by fans of the comic strip." The last daily strip ran Jan. 3. Schulz maintained that he drew his strip to amuse the reader, and to a great extent he kept that simple promise by chronicling the pure joys and traumas of childhood in a tone that was consistently droll, good-natured and without pretense. But the comic strip also successfully captured more disquieting themes, and it was perhaps not coincidental that "Peanuts" received its widest attention in the troubled 1960s. Schulz's Time magazine cover appeared in 1965 and the Life cover two years later. It was during this decade that "Peanuts" even reached outer space. In 1969, NASA named its Apollo 10 mission lunar module after Snoopy. Schulz's friends and associates said the cartoonist captured in "Peanuts" the anxiety of an age underscored by evolving social and political unrest. His innocent children were fraught with adult-proportioned disappointments, yet their perpetual optimism, and such values as faith, friendship and wonder, sustained the strip with a timeless gentle humor and irreverence. Linus, for example, hopes his limitless sincerity will cause the Great Pumpkin to arrive on Halloween; it never comes, but every October, he sits and waits in the pumpkin patch while other children go trick-or-treating. In the 1960s, there were books explaining the cartoon as a religious parable, such as "The Gospel According to 'Peanuts' " and "Parables of Peanuts." In 1967, "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" began its off-Broadway run. The cartoon also sold hundreds of millions of copies of softback books. Schulz went on to make such Emmy Award-winning television specials as "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" (1973), "You're a Good Sport, Charlie Brown" (1975) and "Life Is a Circus, Charlie Brown" (1980). "What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown?," in which "Peanuts" characters discuss D-day, won a Peabody Award in 1983. "A Charlie Brown Christmas" won Emmy and Peabody awards in 1965. For the broadcast specials, Schulz paired with animator and director Bill Melendez and executive producer Lee Mendelson. Mendelson wrote in the 1970 book "Charlie Brown & Charlie Schulz" that "Charlie Brown has become the symbol of mid-century America not only because of his great humor but also because Charlie Brown is . . . a basic reflection of his time. People everywhere have a new awareness of feelings, a need to communicate, and a need to struggle against what often appear to be insurmountable problems." "Sermon" is not an inappropriate word to describe "Peanuts," said Robert L. Short, a Presbyterian clergyman who wrote the bestselling "The Gospel According to Peanuts" and two later titles that used "Peanuts" to explain religious doctrine. Short said in an interview that Schulz was pleased with the attention to religious nuance. Short considered the cartoonist a deeply religious man--he belonged to the Church of God and called himself a secular humanist--who "did not want to offend" readers with grandiose expressions of his faith. One cartoon featured Charlie Brown pitching a baseball and saying, "Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of the pestilence that walketh in darkness." Then a ball whizzes by, knocking him down. The final frame features Charlie Brown following up the words from Psalm 91: "But those line drives will kill you!" "Peanuts," Short added, "really is a good expression or mirror of Schulz himself. Kind, gentle and decent." Schulz said he developed much of his material by listening to his children. But the content of "Peanuts" also was influenced by his upbringing and early manhood, which was colored by depression, the death of his mother to cancer when he was 20 and losing his first love to another man just as his strip began syndication. (His former girlfriend would become Charlie Brown's "little red-haired girl," a figure his biographer, Rheta Grimsley Johnson, likened to "Beethoven's Immortal Beloved and Shakespeare's Dark Lady of the Sonnets.") Reflecting on childhood, Schulz once said: "Being a kid is not easy. It's a fearful world out there, and the playground is a dangerous place. Going to school every day is not easy. If it isn't the teacher, it's the bully. Most adults forget about these struggles and ignore the problems little kids have. As an adult, you learn how to get around these problems and how to survive. But little kids are struggling with that survival." One classic Charlie Brown routine has Lucy goading Charlie Brown into kicking a football. Every year, she removes the ball as Charlie Brown is about to kick it, and he falls on his back. In "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," Lucy promises not to remove the ball, showing as evidence a "signed document." Charlie Brown says, "I guess if you have a signed document in your possession, you can't go wrong." When Lucy pulls the ball away, Charlie Brown falls. Lucy says, "Peculiar thing about this document. It was never notarized." Schulz said in a 1967 interview with Psychology Today magazine that the football situation, besides being amusing, was heightened by the girl one-upping the boy. He added, "Charlie Brown will always keep hoping." Mort Walker, whose "Beetle Bailey" strip also started syndication in 1950, said "Peanuts" was quite novel for the era when it first appeared. "Up to that time, in all the strips about kids, the kids were rotten little kids," Walker said in an interview. "They were mischievous and always in trouble with their parents. "And there was this tragic atmosphere about [Schulz's] characters," Walker added. "Charlie Brown was a failure. He couldn't win a baseball game, couldn't fly a kite, couldn't get the little red-haired girl. Which I think reflected Charlie's own childhood." Charles Monroe Schulz was born in Minneapolis and grew up in St. Paul, Minn. When he was 2 days old, his uncle bestowed on him what would become his lifelong nickname, "Sparky," referring to the horse Sparkplug in the "Barney Google" cartoon. A less-than-average student, Schulz increasingly felt uneasy in a classroom setting, and he withdrew from his peers. Inheriting a love of cartoons from his father, Schulz practiced drawing Popeye on school notebooks. But he noted in later interviews that drawings he submitted to his high school yearbook were rejected. As a high school senior, Schulz enrolled in Art Instruction Inc., a correspondence art school in Minneapolis. After joining the Army and leading a machine gun squad in Europe toward the end of World War II, he worked lettering comics for Timeless Topix, a Catholic cartoon magazine, and taught at Art Instruction. In the late 1940s, he contributed drawings to the Saturday Evening Post and started a once-weekly cartoon called "Li'l Folks" for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Although it was in single-panel format, "Li'l Folks" was a precursor to "Peanuts" in its content: It presented children who make sophisticated observations, and there was a character called Charlie Brown, named after one of Schulz's friends from art school. Schulz withdrew his cartoon after the Pioneer Press would not relocate it from the women's page to a more visible spot. He persuaded officials at United Feature Syndicate in New York to accept his work. They renamed it "Peanuts," over Schulz's objection that the new name sounded dismissive. The syndicate insisted, pointing out that "Li'l Folks" was too similar to United Feature's already-popular "Li'l Abner" comic strip. "Peanuts" began Oct. 2, 1950, and was featured in seven North American newspapers. The first year was disappointing: "Peanuts" ranked last in the New York World Telegram's reader survey of cartoons. But it received wider exposure in 1952 as a collection in a book, thanks to a key "Peanuts" fan, John Selby, the editor-in-chief of Rinehart and Co. publishers. The strip gained popularity in the 1950s. After Schulz's first Reuben Award, in 1955, came a consistent stream of marketing; the first toy was a plastic Snoopy doll in 1958. In the earlier years, the strip appeared to be in constant change, with Schulz adding and subtracting characters. Good Ol' Charlotte Brown, a louder version of her male namesake, came and went in 1954. Sally Brown, Charlie's sister, arrived in 1959 and stayed for good. Woodstock, a tiny yellow bird who speaks an undecipherable language and is Snoopy's pal, showed up in 1970 and was named for the landmark counterculture music festival. A precursor of Woodstock appeared in 1967, with Snoopy saying to the "bird hippie": "I don't see why he gets so upset. No one understands my generation, either." Among the strip's many permutations, Schulz's most popular creation was Snoopy, especially when he first appeared as the World War I flying ace on April 16, 1966. "It was just because Snoopy looks so funny in goggles," Schulz explained. "It started as one week's takeoff on World War I movies. You know the great line: 'Captain, you can't send men up in crates like this to die.' Then I discovered I had something good going, and I let Snoopy's imagination go wild. Snoopy is funny. He leads his little life out of his doghouse." The strip is renowned for its accuracy. For example, Schulz researched Beethoven's music and reproduced parts of the composer's scores when drawing Schroeder, the pianist who believes Beethoven is the president of the United States. "I picked Beethoven because he is sort of pompous and grandiose," Schulz once told Time magazine. "I like Brahms better." Schulz, a tall, trim, silver-haired man who was as athletically inclined as Charlie Brown was not, was regarded as affable and generous in his community. He played baseball, tennis, golf and hockey, and in 1969 he built Redwood Empire Ice Arena for residents of Santa Rosa. In the early 1990s, Schulz also contributed $1 million to the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton, Fla., said Walker, who helped start the museum there. Schulz doted on simple pleasures; one of his most abiding aphorisms was, "Happiness is a warm puppy," a title he also gave a 1960s cartoon collection. Yet his comic strip, like his life, seemed limned with a deep sadness he never could escape. Such deep-rooted feelings produced one of his more vivid examples of self-exploration in an essay he wrote for the introduction to a "Peanuts" 35th anniversary-essay collection. "The most terrifying loneliness is not experienced by everyone and can be understood by only a few," Schulz wrote. "I compare the panic in this kind of loneliness to the dog we see running frantically down the road pursuing the family car. He is not really being left behind, for the family knows it is to return, but for that moment in his limited understanding, he is being left alone forever, and he has to run and run to survive." Schulz's marriage to the former Joyce Halverson ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife, Jeannie Forsyth Schulz, whom he married in 1974 and who lives in Santa Rosa; and five children from his first marriage.

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