In 1970, students in a fifth-grade class at Hawthorne School in Beverly Hills were assigned to write a letter to someone they admired, asking them "What makes a good citizen?"

Joel Lipton, 10 years old at the time, wrote to Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz.

Fast-forward to this past February, when Lipton and his wife were cleaning out their closet. "And she pulled out a box and started going through some photos," Lipton says today. "And between some old photos was this letter. I said, 'Oh, wow, there's the Charles Schulz letter!'"

Lipton remembers getting a response from the famed cartoonist, typed on official stationery from his Sebastopol studio, and hanging it on his bedroom wall with thumbtacks. But he was amazed when he re-read Schulz's letter almost 50 years later, and realized how prescient it was.