The spirit of St. Paul native Charles Schulz – and his beloved “Peanuts” characters – is everywhere in this city.

Bronze statues of Marcie and Peppermint Patty share Rice Park with a statue of another St. Paul guy who made good – F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Charles Schulz-Highland Arena is on South Snelling Avenue, and Minnesota kids experienced churning stomachs on rides at the Mall of America’s Camp Snoopy.

Scattered around town you can still find brightly colored replicas of Snoopy and Charlie Brown, remnants of five summers of Peanuts characters on parade that drew a total of 3 million people to St. Paul.

So it’s not surprising that David Michaelis devotes part of his new biography, “Schulz and Peanuts,” to the popular cartoonist’s life in the Twin Cities and how his experiences here shaped his personality and his work.

“This is a dual biography,” Michaelis said, explaining the book’s title. “Whenever Schulz was asked big questions about his life, he kept saying that ‘Peanuts’ was everything to him. The world of ‘Peanuts’ – not just the characters – was his identity, his yin and yang, his happiness and unhappiness, the parts of his life he could hold onto and control and say, ‘This is me.’ ”

Michaelis, who wrote a critically acclaimed life of the painter N.C. Wyeth, admits Schulz is a difficult biographical subject.

“Everybody has feelings about ‘Peanuts,’ ” he says. “We relate the characters to particular things in our lives; some see grief and loss, some see Snoopy there to protect them.

“To find out the strengths and weaknesses of Schulz as a man is to tamper with people’s feelings. People feel very tenderly about Schulz and Snoopy and they often confuse the two.

“So many things they think about Schulz aren’t true,” Michaelis adds. “That he loved children and dogs, for instance. Schulz loved his own children, but he didn’t like being in the room with 5-year-olds. Same with dogs. When he would come across a strange dog on the street, he was careful because he’d been bitten as a child.”

“Schulz and Peanuts” is the story of a St. Paul barber’s son who became the most successful cartoonist of the 20th century, drawing 17,897 strips that ran in 2,600 newspapers read by 300 million readers.

It’s the story of a complicated man who could be generous and occasionally sarcastic, a good-looking, successful man who considered himself plain and dumb, a man whose melancholy fueled his artistic vision.

“Doing research for this book in Minnesota from 2000 to 2005 was a happy time for me,” Michaelis said in a phone conversation from his home in New York City.

“I spent time at the St. Paul Public Library and the Minnesota History Center, one of the best I’ve ever been in. I drove around, interviewing a couple of the old guard men and women who’d known the Schulz family, and I went to Wisconsin to visit surviving relatives on Schulz’s Norwegian mother’s side. Schulz’s immersion in the culture he grew up in, plus his experiences in World War II, gave him the largest part of his outlook, enveloped in the humor we all love.”

For instance, after watching tapes of interviews Schulz gave during his lifetime, Michaelis realized that the man nicknamed Sparky spoke with a four-beat rhythm Minnesotans will recognize.

“Whoopi Goldberg once asked Sparky how he’d related to girls,” Michaelis recalled. “Sparky replied, ‘I always wanted to be suave. I’m from Minnesota. No suave people in Minnesota. It’s too cold to be suave.’ ”

That staccato speech pattern is exactly the way “Peanuts” characters talk.

“I was also interested in the way silence is a way of life out there, as in Garrison Keillor’s old Norwegian bachelor farmers. You feel that in ‘Peanuts’ also,” Michaelis said.

“One of the themes of Schulz’s life was his difficulties with speaking and connecting to people. He wanted to be a cartoonist and he indicated he was confident in his drawing ability but wasn’t sure how he was going to do the characters’ dialogue. He had that kind of ambition, wanting to get ahead, but he was held back by his innate upbringing where he had struggled to be part of the world.”

THEY CALLED HIM SPARKY

Schulz was born Nov. 26, 1922, to Carl and Dena Schulz. Nobody seems to know why one of his maternal uncles dubbed the baby Sparky, a nickname he would keep through his life.

Carl Schulz, whose ancestors were German immigrants, owned a barbershop at Selby and Snelling. Dena was a pretty and shy woman who didn’t even invite the neighbor women in for coffee. She clung to her big, extended Norwegian farm family, where she was the bright star.

“I think that Dena’s sense of the world was that she didn’t have a part in it, and she worried that her son might not find a place for that odd thing he wanted to do, cartooning,” Michaelis said. “That theme came up again and again with Sparky: ‘My mother didn’t think I would be a success.’ ”

Sparky’s father, who worked long hours behind his barber chair, eventually became an officer in the state and local chapters of Associated Master Barbers & Beauticians. But he had no time for intellectuals.

Michaelis writes: “Carl considered thinking itself an extravagance – even a danger. ‘If you read too many books,’ he cautioned, ‘your head will fall off.’ … One day Charles Schulz would create a character with a big head. He would, moreover, place that big head on a child’s body, where it was unthreatening. And he would delineate the character as a determined, strong-willed, yet almost willfully ineffectual boy who would make himself known to the world as a loser but who would dream of becoming, among other things, president of the United States, a five-star general, and a ‘big-time operator.’ ”

Sparky drew throughout his childhood, at Richardson Gordon elementary school, Maria Sanford junior high and Central High School. While he was in high school, his dad did care enough about his dreams to enroll him as a home-study student in the Federal School of Illustrating and Cartooning (later Art Instruction).

On Nov. 26, 1942 – his 20th birthday – Sparky received his draft notice. By this time, he knew his mother was dying of cancer.

The Schulz family had a black-and-white spotted dog named Spike, which some neighbors thought was the meanest dog on the block. One of the last things Dena said to her son was that if they ever got another dog, they should name it Snoopy.

“Snupi is a Norwegian term of endearment; a mother might so call her young child,” Michaelis writes. “Whether that was in Dena’s thinking is not known, but the prospect of a dog named Snoopy had, for the moment at least, the quality of extending their life together into a future that it seemed they were no longer likely to have.”

Schulz was discharged in 1946 and was soon hired to do lettering for a Catholic comic magazine. He also joined the faculty of Minneapolis-based Art Instruction Inc., a school where he would make some lifelong friends such as Frieda Mae Rich, a dwarf whose body proportions are seen in the “Peanuts” characters.

“Among his male contemporaries at Art Instruction he stood apart – a teetotaler, a practicing Christian and, with each step upward, a professional cartoonist,” Michaelis writes. “For Charles Schulz, Art Instruction would always be the institution that had helped make his long-held dream possible by prodding him to fuse his natural conscientiousness as a craftsman with a kind of entrepreneurial drive that he would have been too afraid to assert if left to himself.”

Schulz’s career trajectory began when a Minneapolis newspaper published a panel of his cartoons, “Sparky’s Li’l Folks.” By 1950, he had signed a contract with United Feature Syndicate, which renamed his strip “Peanuts.” Schulz hated that name, which he thought was trivial and undignified, but he was a beginner who had to go along with the bosses’ wishes.

On Oct. 2 of that year, “Peanuts” debuted in six newspapers, from Washington, D.C., to Seattle.

LEAVING MINNESOTA

While Sparky was signing with United Features, he was dating Donna Mae Johnson of Minneapolis, who turned down his marriage proposal. Soon after that, he met Joyce Halverson in her cousin’s Lake Harriet home. They were married on April 18, 1951, but for 18 years they lied about the date to protect Joyce’s daughter, Meredith, who had a different biological father.

Joyce had no intention of remaining in Minnesota, and in 1958 the couple bought land in Sebastopol, 65 miles north of San Francisco. Their home on Coffee Lane would be a tribute to Joyce’s energy and decorating enthusiasm. She added outbuildings and sports facilities while giving birth to, and caring for, four more children.

Joyce and Sparky were married until 1972, when they divorced. In those years, Michaelis says, Joyce’s forcefulness and drive show up in the personality of Lucy Van Pelt.

“As you look carefully at ‘Peanuts’ from those years, one gets a picture of a marriage that is the fuel that the strip is burning up day by day, week by week, year by year,” Michaelis says.

“Lucy is an astonishing character. When Lucy does her thing – shining, illogically mad – like saying the knots in knotty pine paneling comes from trees that are tied in knots, she’s absolutely sure of herself. And Charlie Brown says, ‘My stomach is tied in knots.’ That bad stomach goes through the entire sequence of the strip and ends when the marriage ends.”

Part of the reason for the couple’s breakup was Joyce’s frustration over her husband’s inability to be happy, even though he was a nationally known celebrity and a wealthy man.

“Achievement increasingly filled him with dread,” Michaelis says. “As much as Schulz was genuinely thrilled by formal recognition, he was afraid that the more he was acknowledged, the more likely it was that it would all be swept away. I don’t think the medical term ‘depression’ describes Schulz’s condition throughout life. ‘Melancholy’ is more accurate, although anxiety and fear, especially about interacting with the world at large, became stronger and stronger presences in his life. Happiness and sadness – he always tried to see both sides, and you see that in the strip.”

When Joyce urged her husband to see a psychiatrist, he refused, saying that seeking help would “take away his talent.”

“I think that Schulz made a decision artists are bound to make when following certain paths – that the strip itself was the most important thing, and if he got treatment for melancholy and anxiety and fears, it would change the dynamic,” Michaelis said.

Still, Michaelis admits he’s mystified by Schulz’s inability to let go of the pain of childhood and youthful hurts.

For instance, Sparky always talked about being a small boy who was bullied on the playground. But his St. Paul friends didn’t remember any bullying. He bore a grudge his entire life against the staff of the Central High yearbook because they didn’t use his drawings, even though he never knew why.

Sparky also never seemed to get over Donna Johnson’s decision to marry another man, and he kept in touch with her for the rest of his life. He celebrated their friendship by using her as the model for the Little Red-Haired girl.

“He made a myth out of Donna’s rejection of him, saying that her mother didn’t like him,” Michaelis says. “But Donna says that she married her husband because of the kind of life he could provide her.”

SPARKY’S LIFE CHANGES

In March 1970, Schulz met Tracey Claudius, with whom he had an affair. (Schulz’s children have complained to the media that Michaelis spends too much of the book on this part of their father’s life.)

By 1972, Sparky was seeing Elizabeth Jean Forsyth, called Jeannie, who was 33 and married with two children. They married in 1973 and eventually built a house in the foothills above Santa Rosa, Calif.

“… in so many strips of this halcyon period, his themes and jokes are about health, exercise, tennis, acupuncture; the viewer can feel the California glow of Jeannie and the mid-’70s, and the new hopefulness of their marriage,” Michaelis writes.

But some critics felt the “Peanuts” gang was becoming dull, and younger readers who had come of age during the turbulent 1960s were gravitating to Doonesbury and Calvin & Hobbes.

“In the ’80s and ’90s, Sparky worked very hard at making the strip vibrant and significant,” Michaelis said. “He did acknowledge, though, that the strip was ‘a little more mild. …’ ”

As Michaelis got closer to writing about the last years of Schulz’s life, he admits he sometimes got to the point where “I couldn’t help feeling I was getting it wrong,” because there was such a sense of contradiction in the man’s personality. Although reporters often stressed how genial and down to earth Schulz was, his friends sometimes experienced personal cruelty.

“Schulz would make a remark that cut deeply or jokes that came with a cruel bite, and then he’d say he was kidding,” Michaelis said.

“You find this trait in reading Garrison Keillor. In ‘Lake Wobegon Days,’ a character is taking account of his traits and says, ‘I say vicious things to people’s faces and then explain I was kidding.’ Schulz was deeply embedded in the Minnesota from which he sprang.”

Sparky Schulz died Feb. 13, 2000, just as first editions of newspapers carrying his final Sunday “Peanuts” strip were hitting the streets.

“To the very end, his life had been inseparable from his art,” Michaelis writes. “In the moment of ceasing to be a cartoonist, he ceased to be.”

Mary Ann Grossmann can be reached at mgrossmann@pio

neerpress.com or 651-228-5574.

THE ORIGINAL ‘PEANUTS’ PROTOTYPE

Minnesotan Frieda Mae Rich was an important influence on Charles Schulz and his work.

Rich was a dwarf who worked with Schulz at Art Instruction, and author David Michaelis says her body proportions inspired the shapes of the “Peanuts” gang.

“Several of Schulz’s colleagues at Art Instruction saw Frieda standing at his desk, using her arms in certain ways, looking exactly like ‘Peanuts’ characters,” Michaelis says. “Everything about their proportions matches her exactly.”

Frieda’s spirit, too, infused Charlie Brown’s world.

“People who knew her said she was a very attractive person,” Michaelis says. “Here was a person with three strikes against her – woman, dwarf, Jewish – and Canadian makes strike four. She was made fun of by some of the folks at Art Instruction in a good-natured way. Even when the teasing became a little harder to bear, her willingness to never give in, to always take the high road and see herself in all her strengths, that is the essence of the ‘Peanuts’ characters. It’s the quality in Charlie Brown that makes him get up after a beating and keep going.”

Rich, who died in 1994, had several one-woman shows of her pen and pastel works. She was commissioned by Gretchen Quie, wife of Gov. Al Quie, to draw the State Capitol for the first family’s 1982 Christmas card. She also published a collection of drawings, “Landmarks Old and New, Minneapolis and St. Paul and Surrounding Areas.”

CHARLES SCHULZ TIMELINE

1918: Carl Schulz opens the Family Barber Shop at Selby and Snelling avenues

1920: Carl and Dena Halverson are married

Nov. 26, 1922: Charles is born; a maternal uncle nicknames him “Sparky”

1927: Family moves to 1680 James Ave.

1928: Family moves around the corner to 473 Macalester Ave.

1929: Carl sells barbershop, moves family to Needles, Calif., which Sparky hates

1931: Family moves back to Minnesota; Carl reclaims lease on barbershop; family lives at Mayfair Apartments, Snelling and Dayton

1937: Family moves back to Macalester Avenue; 14-year-old Sparky’s work appears in print for the first time when the comic feature “Believe It or Not!” publishes a picture of his dog, Spike, in the field.

June 14, 1940: Graduates from Central High School in St. Paul

Dec, 1, 1941: Graduates from Federal School of Illustrating and Cartooning (later renamed Art Instruction)

Nov. 26, 1942: Receives draft notice

March 1, 1943: His mother, Dena, dies

1943-1944: Rises through ranks to staff sergeant

1944: Meets first sweetheart, nursing student Virginia Howley

January 1946: Discharged from military

March 1946: Hired to letter dialogue balloons for a Catholic comic magazine; becomes active in Merriam Park Church of God

August 1946: Hired as permanent full-time instructor at Art Instruction for $32 a week

June 8, 1947: Minneapolis newspaper publishes block of four cartoons as panel titled “Sparky’s Li’l Folks”; later takes work to St. Paul Pioneer Press

1948: Draws a little boy with big head and shortened arms; sells to the Saturday Evening Post for $40; King Features rejects “Li’l Folks” submission; Newspaper Enterprise Association signs contract with Schulz, then breaks it

June 1949: Asks Pioneer Press for more space for “Li’l Folks,” and editor refuses; Schulz’s work never again appears in his hometown newspaper

1950: Signs contract with United Feature Syndicate; Donna Mae Johnson turns down his marriage proposal; “Peanuts” debuts Oct. 2 in six newspapers.

1951: Marries Joyce Halverson, moves to Colorado Springs, Colo.

1952: Family returns to Minneapolis; Schulz resumes work at Art Instruction

1954: Monthly share of “Peanuts” profits is $2,500

1955: Schulz illustrates Eastman Kodak picture-taking book, launching the “Peanuts” empire that will eventually generate more than $1 billion in revenue

1956: National Cartoonists Society votes Schulz outstanding cartoonist

1958: Schulz and Joyce buy land in Sebastopol, Calif.

1960: Hallmark introduces “Peanuts” cards and paper goods; Newspaper Comics Council sponsors meeting criticizing Schulz for licensing his characters; Schulz begins business relationship with Minnesota native Connie Boucher, beginning a new age in character licensing

1962: First “Happiness Is …” book is published; critics accuse Schulz of making his characters overly sweet but public doesn’t care and makes the books best-sellers

Dec. 9, 1965: “A Charlie Brown Christmas” debuts on television

1966: Christmas show wins prestigious George Foster Peabody Award; Carl Schulz dies

1967: Peanuts appears in 745 daily and 393 Sunday papers, read by half of the people of the U.S. and much of Canada; Charlie Brown and Snoopy appear on the cover of Life magazine; “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown” opens off-Broadway

1969: Schulz’s annual take for merchandise and strip reaches $1 million

March 16, 1970: Meets Tracey Claudius, with whom he has an affair

1972: Gives speech at Concordia College in Moorhead and meets with Donna Johnson Wold, inspiration for the strip’s Little Red-Haired Girl; meets Elizabeth Jean (Jeannie) Forsyth; Joyce files divorce papers

1973: Marries Jeannie

1980: Schulzes build house in foothills above Santa Rosa, Calif.

1981: Schulz has quadruple bypass surgery

1989: Annual revenues from “Peanuts” global worldwide merchandizing empire tops $1 billion

2000: Schulz dies on Feb. 13

Title: “Schulz and Peanuts”

Author: David Michaelis

Publisher: HarperCollins

Cost: $34.95

Author appearances: 4 p.m. today, Dock Cafe, 425 E. Nelson St., Stillwater, sponsored by Valley Bookseller, 651-430-3385; 7 p.m. Monday, Borders, 866 Rosedale Center, Roseville; 2 p.m. Tuesday, University of Minnesota Bookstore, Coffman Union, 300 Washington Ave. S.E., Mpls.; 7 p.m. Tuesday, in a conversation with Garrison Keillor, Virginia Street Swedenborgian Church, 170 Virginia St., St. Paul, sponsored by Common Good Books.

More Schulz: Charles Schulz will also be featured on PBS’ “American Masters” at 8 p.m. Monday on TPT, Channel 2.