Visitors to the new Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center pause in front of the row of wood-etched
characters while looking up at Japanese artist Yoshiteru Otani's massive "Morphing Snoopy" sculpture (not shown in the picture). (AP photo/Eric Risberg)
These articles are arranged from the most recent down, so you'll always find the newest news about Charlie Brown and his friends toward the top; older articles will be located further down, or on previous pages.
Jeannie Schulz From Peanuts to Powder Puffs
September 2002
By Margaret O’Connell
Sequential Tart
In addition to having been married to Charles M. (“Sparky”) Schulz,
creator of the celebrated Peanuts comic strip, Jean Forsyth Schulz,
better known as Jeannie Schulz, has served as an officer, board member,
or founding trustee of community service organizations ranging from the
League of Women Voters to Canine Companions for Independence, for which
she produced two award-winning documentary films. She co-chaired a
committee which was instrumental in passing a bond issue required to
build the new Santa Rosa, California, City Hall, and was given a Key to
the City of Santa Rosa in 1968. Jeannie holds a pilot’s license with
commercial and instrument ratings and has flown in the Powder Puff
Derbies of 1972 and 1973 and in the cross-country Air Race Classic in
1975, as well as other regional air races. Parts of this interview were
conducted over the phone, based largely on questions proposed in advance
via e-mail. A number of follow-up questions and answers were also
exchanged via e-mail.
ST Are you originally from California, or did you, like Charles
Schulz, move to Santa Rosa as an adult after growing up somewhere else?
JS I was born in Germany of British parents in 1939. I have two
older brothers and we were told to leave by the British Government, so
my parents decided to come to California. I’ve been here since 1940
except for three years in Hawaii -- 1959-62.
ST How did you and Charles Schulz meet?
JS Sparky and I met at his Redwood Empire Ice Arena in Santa Rosa
where my daughter was taking skating lessons. We were married September,
1973. He had five children from a previous marriage. I have two. My
oldest and his youngest are the same age -- so although he was 17 years
older than I, our kids are similar ages.
ST Do you know if Charlie Brown and the Van Pelts are supposed to
be next door neighbors? In the strips from 1952, when Lucy is first
introduced as a toddler two or three years younger than Charlie Brown,
it seems as if he either goes over to her house or she’s at his house
practically every day. Even later on, once the strip has settled down
into what became its typical pattern, with Lucy being a crabby
fussbudget who’s about the same age as Charlie Brown, Lucy and Charlie
Brown seem to spend an awful lot of time hanging around together,
considering that they don’t seem to like each other very much.
JS Well, I thought a lot about that, and it seemed to me that what
you have to envision is that probably their mothers were friends, so I
think you have to be thinking that the adults, who of course we never
see, are probably in the kitchen having coffee. You know, of course, a
comic strip is different from a novel where you try to explain all the
relationships. Here, they’re caricatures, so we only have to have enough
of the relationship to make the caricature work.
ST Yeah, sometimes you’re not even sure how much is really
happening and how much is in someone’s imagination.
JS Especially with Snoopy, of course.
ST Oh, definitely. Like when Lucy threw Linus out of the house, he
suppose dly stayed overnight at Snoopy’s doghouse, also known as Joe
Cool’s dorm, and you weren’t sure whether it was really happening or
not.
JS Yes, and then you have to realize Sparky occasionally would
have people who took the cartoon strip too seriously and say something
like, “How can you put that in a comic strip? Imagine if some big sister
threw her little brother out!” He would say, “Egads, don’t you realize?
It’s a comic strip!”
I always have to be careful to take what I say from hearing him
repeat it over and over again. But I know that I never heard him say
that they were next door neighbors, or that that was important. So I
think he would probably say that they were friends and it’s just my
imagination that the moms are in the kitchen having coffee.
ST For the first few years of the strip, it seemed as if he
usually introduced new characters by having them appear as babies or
toddlers, then having them grow up fairly rapidly until they seemed to
be about the same age as Charlie Brown, Violet, Patty, and Shermy, who
were basically the core characters (besides Snoopy) at the very
beginning. He did this with both Lucy and Schroeder, and to a certain
extent with Linus, who grew up quickly to the point where he’s still
portrayed as being somewhat younger than Charlie Brown, but is in the
same class because he skipped a grade. Was there any particular reason
he introduced new characters this way instead of having new children who
were already the same age as Charlie Brown and so on move into the
neighborhood?
JS I would guess that this would be because in the ’50s, he had
his own toddlers and his own little kids growing up. One of the strips
that I love is Linus is sitting there and the fan is on and it’s blowing
all his hair back and they turn the fan [off] and he falls forward on
his face. So I can almost imagine him thinking of that as he sees his
own children trying to sit up and then toppling over, thinking all they
would need would be a puff of wind to blow them over. So I imagine that
the [characters] growing up at that stage was because that was what he
was observing in his own life, the growth of children.
Then of course when Peppermint Patty and Marcie came into the
strip, they were kids from another neighborhood that Charlie Brown’s
baseball team could play with, so it wasn’t necessary to grow them up.
ST Yes, it seemed as if he met them through some other kid he met
at camp.
JS So I think the explanation for the growing up in the early days
was that he was observing a lot of toddler/crawler situations that he
could turn into the comic strip.
ST Who decides which strips get reprinted in a Peanuts collection?
Because I noticed in one recent one -- I think it was Being a Dog Is a
Full-Time Job -- there were two separate sets of strips about summer
camp, one toward the beginning and one toward the end of the book, but
no strips about Christmas or Halloween in between.
JS My answer would be that whoever does it -- Fawcett did it
originally -- that there’s an editor at Fawcett who’s chosen to do the
reprint book and it is simply the editor’s choice. There are some comic
strips -- and there are two or three people whom I go to for
information, people who deal in this sort of trivia -- who know which
comic strips have never been reprinted once they were in the newspaper.
And I think those are just the choices of individual editors at
publishing houses.
ST I figured someone had made a specific choice -- I just wasn’t
sure if you and [Charles M. Schulz] Creative Associates were in on it or
not.
JS No, I don’t think Sparky ever was, because I know he had
expressed that sort of interest -- “I don’t know why they make those
decisions.” I can remember him saying that. And I don’t believe it’s
people at United Feature Syndicate because I think I would have heard.
So I think it is simply an editor at one of the publishing houses doing
the reprints. But it is interesting to me why some strips were never
reprinted. Presumably that editor didn’t think they were funny.
There is one possible explanation, too, for the two sets of summer
camp strips and no holidays in between. It could be that that set of
reprint books -- that editor or that house -- Random House, Penguin,
whoever’s redoing it -- that they were also doing a holiday book. So
they were going to do, in one year or in a two-year period, a holiday
book, a baseball book, and a reprint book. So then I suppose they could
make a case for not just following along [chronologically].
ST Yeah, they wouldn’t want to duplicate strips amongst all of
them.
JS But they do duplicate strips, in fact. They put different
covers on the reprint books at various times, and people will buy a
reprint book and then realize they’ve already got it because they’ve
changed the cover over the years in some period of five years or ten
years or something. But those are all sort of problems and details and
decisions that are out of Sparky’s hands and I believe out of United
Feature’s hands, too, once they’ve signed over some of the publishing
rights. That’s my guess.
ST Why do you think Lucy grew up to be both the meanest and
arguably the most important female character in the strip, when Violet
and Patty were already there doing things like snubbing Charlie Brown
and making a point of not giving him valentines when Lucy was still
being drawn as if she were in nursery school?
JS I thought your [advance] question “Does the fact that she was
the first one in the group to get a younger sibling to deal with have
anything to do with it?” -- I have a note “Sparky would like that
question.” For some reason -- it’s hard to know [why] -- when you go
back over the early ’50s, Violet almost morphed into Lucy.
ST They even look alike.
JS Yes, exactly. So I don’t really know why it didn’t stay Violet.
But I think you’re right, or you’re going in the right direction, when
you suggest that because she was the one who had the brother, then you
have a combination where she can not only be crabby and sarcastic to
Charlie Brown, but she can also then lord it over her little brother. So
it then becomes a little more complex a situation, whereas Violet was
just Violet. So I think you’re onto something there, and that once a
character had a little brother, that character evoked more possibilities
for funny things. So I think that’s a good observation.
ST When I started doing research on Lucy I was surprised to see
how much she had changed over the years. Even though most people still
seem to think of Lucy as calling people “blockhead” all the time and
constantly playing nasty tricks on Charlie Brown, she seemed to get a
lot less crabby and inclined to lose her temper for no reason in the
last two or three decades of the strip. In fact, in the 2002 Peanuts
collection The World According to Lucy, Charlie Brown’s little sister
Sally actually seems meaner than Lucy most of the time.
I found a collection of interviews with Charles Schulz where he
gave some possible reasons for this. In a 1985 interview reprinted in
the [University Press of Mississippi] book Charles M. Schulz
Conversations, he talks about having mellowed over the years and says,
“I’m not as sarcastic as I used to be and the characters in the strip
aren’t as sarcastic.” Then he goes on to reply to a question about
whether he’d ever consciously changed anything about the characters by
saying, “I suppose the most conscious thing would be trying to tone Lucy
down so she is not as mean as she might have been.”
JS I think that he did say that quite a bit, that he became aware,
as he mellowed -- he often said that Lucy’s sarcasm was a way for him to
let out his own sarcasm, and that as he mellowed, she mellowed. I also
think that we all become conscious after a while that things that are
funny in the beginning aren’t always as funny as they go on. First of
all, Lucy’s the only one who calls him a blockhead, or that’s the only
situation in public. But then you begin hearing of situations where kids
are really violently mean to each other in school, and so then that in
itself tends to tone down -- what was funny isn’t as funny any more.
Maybe it’s only that we know more about it, because newspapers are
picking up all these stories, and we all become much more sensitized, if
you will, to how it’s all going on in the world. And I think that would
tend to make it [childhood bullying] just not quite as funny. And I
think Sparky said a few times that what seemed funny in isolation
suddenly wasn’t funny when there’s a lot of antagonism and violence
you’re hearing about in real life. And it just seems as if as time goes
on we hear more and more about all of these incidents that are going on
everywhere that we simply didn’t know about before.
But I do remember Sparky a few times having people say, “I don’t
let my children watch your cartoons -- they’re too violent.” And he’d
say, “Oh my gosh, do you realize what’s going on in the world, and you
call my cartoons violent?” So that’s both sides of the same coin, in a
sense. But I do think he matured, he mellowed, and he went in other
directions. And I think that’s a good deal to do with it.
ST In the introduction to the 1998 collection Lucy Not Just
Another Pretty Face, he seems to attribute the change in Lucy
specifically to her developing some sort of belated nurturing instinct
toward her youngest brother, Rerun, after having tormented Linus for
years. He says, “Suddenly Lucy’s personality has mellowed, and she has
become the only Peanuts character to pay much attention to [Rerun]. We
have seen her playing games with Rerun and actually trying to teach him
a few things, but directly opposite of the outrageous teachings she used
to push upon Linus.” He goes on, “This, then, is the problem -- what do
we do with Lucy? She seems no longer to be a fussbudget, but we also
don’t want her to be too nice.” It also seemed to me as if maybe it
became less necessary to the strip for Lucy to be a trouble-causing
fussbudget once there were some newer female characters such as
Peppermint Patty and Marcie who also had strong personalities, but were
able to generate plot ideas more because of their own entertainingly odd
behavior than by picking on other characters.
JS I think you’re exactly right and I think that was where I was
going when I said that he didn’t need that as much any more. At the same
time as it was becoming not quite so funny for him to have Lucy be
insulting and sarcastic, he had other characters who were doing
interesting things. So I think you’re absolutely right.
ST In both families in Peanuts where there are siblings of both
sexes, the brother/sister relationships tend to be quite strained.
Everyone knows that Lucy bosses Linus around mercilessly, but when I was
reading some of the later Peanuts collections I was surprised to see how
as Charlie Brown’s little sister Sally got older, she started doing
things like saying “What do you want to talk to *him* for?” whenever she
answered the phone and it was for him, then trying to convince the
person on the other end not to bother talking to him.
In the 1972 storyline leading up to the birth of Rerun, Lucy gets
so mad at Linus that she throws him out of the house. When Charlie Brown
tells Sally about this, she says that she would throw Charlie Brown out
of the house herself if she were older than him instead of younger.
(When Charlie Brown demands to know how she’d feel if he tried to throw
*her* out of the house, her only answer is “I’M A GIRL!”)
When I brought this up on a Peanuts message board on America Online
called Snoopy’s Doghouse, one of the other people who posted there said,
“The fact that girls were the antagonists was simply a product of
[Charles Schulz’s] upbringing -- he felt that boys shouldn’t be mean to
girls and that as a rule, girls could get away with saying/doing things
to boys that the reverse wouldn’t do.”
JS Yes, I think that’s true. You could say it’s his upbringing,
but [also] Sparky would often say “It’s not funny for boys to bully
girls. It wouldn’t be funny.” That would be too hurtful. So for the boy,
who’s stronger and can really hurt the girl, to be doing something -- Of
course, let’s face it, hurting someone’s feelings is hurting them, too,
but for the boy, who has the physical advantage, to be bullying a girl
would not be funny. Whereas with the girl, it’s a reversal of roles, if
you will. Suddenly the weaker girl is able to put one over on the
stronger boy. Sparky said somewhere, and I’m sure you’ve seen it in
things that you’ve read, that he realized very early, probably from his
own life, that girls mature faster than boys. He would have realized how
inadequate he felt as a young man with all these cute girls around that
he didn’t think would ever pay attention to him. So that would be one
thing, but then of course as he was raising his own children, he
realized that girls mature so much faster than boys that they have a
real advantage in school and on the playground and so forth, because
they can usually out-talk and they’re just more mature at the same age.
Boys are kind of bumbling around playing with their cars and girls are
manipulating things with their personalities. So I think that’s what a
lot of his playground things, with the girls being smarter, putting one
over on the boys through their facility at rationale, that that’s where
that came from.
ST In line with what you were saying about the girls being able to
dominate people by greater facility with words and so on, I noticed that
in just about all the old Peanuts cartoons, even though Charlie Brown is
pretty unpopular, the only people who really seem to pick on him are
girls, especially Lucy, and in the later years of the strip Sally.
Sometimes boys like Linus or Schroeder say or do things that annoy him,
but it usually doesn’t seem as if they’re going out of their way to hurt
his feelings the way some of the girl characters do. In general, it
seems like boys don’t tease or bother other boys much and girls don’t
pick on each other very much in Peanuts -- it’s mostly girls just
picking on boys.
JS I wonder now that I’m looking through that -- it almost seems
to be saying that boys are nicer than girls. (Laughter) But one thing I
wanted to just go back to is that Charlie Brown isn’t really unpopular
-- I think Sparky would say that “unpopular” is the wrong concept. He
calls himself a loser and he’s self-deprecating, but it’s almost as
though -- And Sparky was self-deprecating. Sparky would say, “Well, I
only draw a comic strip. I’m not a great artist, I just draw a comic
strip.” But he sincerely believed what he was saying. He wasn’t being
disingenuous, he sincerely believed it, because he understood that there
is great art and a comic strip is not great art. But he always said “I
think Charlie Brown is a really nice guy. I think everybody would like
to be his friend because he’s really just a nice, decent person.”
ST Yeah, it seems as if he perceives himself as being more of a
loser and more friendless than he really is, because actually there are
quite a lot of people who hang around with him, apparently voluntarily.
JS Yes, who are his friends. But I think that [Sparky] would say
that he’s an easy person to sort of pick on or make the butt of a joke.
And remember that there are a lot of people who in order to build
themselves up have to put somebody else down. And I think that’s a
little bit of what you’re seeing here, too. After all, what does Lucy
have to be proud of? What’s she done that’s so great? At least Charlie
Brown tries. He puts the baseball team together, and what does Lucy do?
So it could just be that what you’re finding is that just to show how
smart she is, she has to find somebody to put down, and Charlie Brown’s
a good subject to put down, because he doesn’t have the facility with
words to fight her with. And then Linus, of course, tends to be pretty
nice to Charlie Brown, and they might talk about some problem Charlie
Brown has with the little red-haired girl or with the baseball team or
whatever, but Linus is almost into finding solutions or finding ways to,
if not solve the problem, at least think about it and put it into a
philosophical context. And so he’s not mean to Charlie Brown because his
whole approach to life is to find, as I say, some sort of a
philosophical context for some of these things. But you’re right that
the girls are the ones who are pretty crabby. It’s a good vehicle [for
humor], and Sparky was probably noticing that there were a lot of crabby
girls around. (Laughter)
And then he said that on the rare occasion when some strange boy
comes along and does something like telling Peppermint Patty and Marcie
to move over -- occasionally he would put in intentional bullies like
that in the strip, but not very often. He did it once in a movie, Race
For Your Life, Charlie Brown, where they had to have the antagonist in
there and so they were a group of bully boys that would do anything
unsavory or unsportsmanlike to win the race. So he occasionally put in a
bully -- more in the animated [specials], but I remember at least once
that there was a camp bully. Again, Sparky would have ideas that came
from just his life. He would say, “Well, how would it be if when they’re
at camp, there’s this bully that just never lets anyone sit where he
wants to sit and takes all the good doughnuts first and whatever, and
then Linus comes along and really shows him up and gains his respect?”
So that’s the old hero putting the bad guy down -- the Western, the good
guy vs. the bad guy. It’s the same kind of story, just putting it into a
comic strip.
ST I read somewhere that Charles Schulz introduced Peppermint
Patty into the strip because peppermint patty candies gave him the idea
of the name “Peppermint Patty” for a little girl and he liked it so much
that he wanted to use it before some other cartoonist did, even though
there was already a character named Patty in the strip (although she
wasn’t being used very much by the time Peppermint Patty was created).
Do you know if this is true, or was there more to it than that?
JS Well, he always told that story, that he was walking through
his house and in his living room he saw a dish of peppermint patties and
he thought “That’s a great name.” But he also said that when he
introduced Peppermint Patty and Marcie, he was at a point where he
realized that it would have been very easy to let it become a
boy-oriented strip, and he consciously did not want it to become a
boy-oriented strip. So that’s why these two characters fit then. And
then their personalities gave him fodder to work with.
ST Yeah, they definitely play off each other in a very interesting
way.
JS They play off each other in a very interesting way, and they’re
totally different. The tomboy -- none of the other girls are tomboys. So
the tomboy character who could play baseball and -- you mentioned this
again in your questions -- could play baseball as well as or better than
anyone else on the team, and was saying, “Come on, Chuck, come on over,
play us! We’re ready to take you on!” So that gave him a totally
different direction for the strip to go. And then, of course, as you
say, the play between Peppermint Patty and Marcie is so funny, and he
said, “I don’t know where this all happened. ‘Stop calling me sir!’ I
don’t know why she calls her ‘sir’ -- it’s just a quirk of her
personality.”
He also has said, apropos of not wanting it to become a
boy-oriented strip, that he had to be careful to measure how much he
used Snoopy in the strip. He said it would be easy for him to just let
Snoopy dominate the strip, because he was so easy. He brought so many
ideas to the comic strip that it could become a completely
Snoopy-dominated strip and he had to work consciously to make sure that
he didn’t let Snoopy dominate the strip.
ST Especially since he’s one of the most popular characters.
JS So I think that he was conscious also of not wanting it to be
[too] boy-oriented, and when those two characters came in, that helped
him. It also gave the comic strip a little bit of breadth in the sense
of another neighborhood out there for whatever that was worth. But the
whole idea of another neighborhood, of kids moving in and out of each
other’s lives, added a little bit, an additional aspect to the comic
strip. And of course Peppermint Patty is so funny in school.
ST Oh, yeah.
JS Sparky loved to draw her falling asleep in school and then
waking up and having her hair all stand on end. It gave him a whole
other bunch of school things, which he always liked to do.
ST Yes, Peppermint Patty’s school seemed to have a whole different
feeling from the one that Charlie Brown and Lucy and the others went to.
It seemed like a lot more off the wall things happened there.
JS And then the other Patty, as you mentioned, she wasn’t being
used very much, and she really disappeared. And then it was funny
because in the first [production of the musical], there was Patty who
wasn’t Peppermint Patty. And then when they updated the musical a couple
of years ago I think they might have changed it to Peppermint Patty --
I’m not sure because I’m not that familiar with the musical. [ST note
According to an article in Volume 1, No. 2 of the newsletter of the
Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, “during the 1999 Broadway
revival of ‘You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,’ Patty’s character was
eliminated and replaced with Charlie Brown’s younger sister, Sally.”
According to several employees at New York’s Drama Bookshop, where I
went to look for a copy of the unfortunately now out of print musical’s
script, Peppermint Patty does not appear in either version.]
ST You mean You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown?
JS Yes, the new one that they did a couple of years ago that had
Kristin Chenoweth in it [as Sally].
ST That would be difficult to do, though. It seems like you’d have
to even give her different songs, because the characters are so
different.
JS They did -- they wrote a couple of new songs for it. And you
said did he make her a tomboy with freckles and sandals to distinguish
her from [the other Patty] -- I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to
that. I never heard him say that he needed to distinguish her. I think
that possibly is just what came into his head. But again, just because I
didn’t hear him say it doesn’t mean that he didn’t say it. I just don’t
consciously recall him saying “I wanted to name her Peppermint Patty and
I knew I had to make her different from the other Patty so people
wouldn’t be confused.” It sounds like something he could have said, but
I just don’t remember it. But it sure sounds like something that could
have happened.
ST Speaking of clothes and how they were visually distinguished, I
noticed that in strips up through the early 1970’s, most of the girls
except Peppermint Patty and Marcie, who were introduced in 1966 and
1968, virtually always wear relatively fancy-looking dresses with fitted
waists and skirts that stick out. I did spot a few strips of Sally
wearing pants at home or in the sandbox around that time, but there’s a
1972 strip reprinted in Peanuts The Art of Charles M. Schulz in which
Lucy is still wearing her traditional puff-sleeved dress with a sash
with a bow at the back during a baseball game. That seemed to be almost
as much of a uniform for her at that time as Charlie Brown’s shirt with
the zigzag line on it was for him, even though in real life most little
girls started wearing A-line dresses that just went straight up and down
sometime in the mid-1960’s, and stopped wearing dresses all the time
sometime after that. But then by the late 1980’s, even the more
traditionally dressed-up-looking girl characters like Lucy and Sally
have a more updated look and are usually drawn wearing pants with shirts
or sweaters except when they’re dressed for school. Do you know if there
was any particular reason for that change?
JS You’re very observant to know that they were wearing A-line
dresses -- that’s great.
ST Well, I remember because my sister inherited my hand-me-down
clothes, and she was five years younger and a little bit smaller, so by
the time she was big enough to wear my old dresses they were way out of
style with what girls her age were wearing then.
JS Well, my initial thought about that was that having [Lucy]
always look the same is sort of a cartoon conceit, if you will, like the
fact that Little Orphan Annie always looked the same, and had to look
the same. Now, they updated her -- didn’t they do two musicals or two
cartoons or something, and they had her with the curly hair in the first
one and then, it seems to me, they updated her with a more modern
hairdo, too.
ST They updated her hairstyle in the comic strip and then they
sort of modified that to make it look a little more like the traditional
one because apparently lots of people wrote in complaining that she
didn’t look like Little Orphan Annie any more.
JS So there exactly you have the problem -- you can’t change a
character too much, because you don’t always say their name every time
they’re talking, so people have to recognize them by their
characteristic whatever. But I think you’ll notice in some comic strips
-- I can’t bring any to mind -- it’s difficult to follow the comic strip
because you’re not sure unless you’re an avid, avid fan and see it every
day, you’re not always sure who the characters are.
ST Yeah, if there are two characters who look somewhat alike and
have basically the same hairstyle and people don’t constantly address
them by name, you have a real problem.
JS So I think Sparky through comic strip tradition would have kept
Lucy relatively in the same clothing. And probably in the ‘60’s, I’m
guessing that, again, his last child was born in ‘58. He had an older
daughter who might have been fashion-conscious, but then he had two
boys, who wouldn’t have been fashion-conscious. So I’m guessing that
pretty much through ‘67 or ‘68, at least, he wouldn’t have had a
girl-conscious sense of fashion and what was in fashion or out of
fashion. So those two things, the comic strip conceit about keeping the
character’s characteristics so that everyone knows who it is, and then
not particularly being involved in the fashion probably is why Lucy
stayed in a little dress with a bow even though she was playing
baseball. But then as you said she did begin wearing pants, so I’m
guessing finally it dawns on you that all the girls are wearing pants.
But I would guess that you would find that comic strip characters,
unless it’s a fashion strip, are less likely to keep up with fashion.
Occasionally I would say to Sparky, “Sometimes I have a hard time
telling Rerun from Linus,” and he said “Rerun is always in overalls.”
ST Yeah, for a long time I didn’t even realize that they were
separate characters. I really thought that somehow Linus was riding
around in that little seat on the back of his mother’s bicycle and I was
wondering “Why is this happening?”
JS So that will show you why they don’t change the fashions --
because it becomes too difficult to know where you are if they were to
change too much.
ST I also wanted to ask you about that early 1970’s storyline in
which Peppermint Patty was temporarily forbidden to wear sandals to
school because of the dress code. I saw a couple of strips from that
reprinted in Peanuts The Art of Charles M. Schulz, and in one of them
she actually seemed to have been forced to wear a dress as well as
regular shoes. But they didn’t print the end, and I don’t remember what
it was from the newspaper.
JS Well, my assistant printed them out for me -- they’re very
funny. A boy laughs at her and says “You have to wear a dress to
school,” and she bops him over the head. (Laughter) Then she’s lying in
bed and she says, “I can’t go to school wearing a dress -- I just can’t!
I can’t!” Then there’s one where she says, “No, ma’am, I didn’t wear a
dress today because I’ve decided to defy the dress code,” and at the end
of the strip she says [to Franklin], “Well, write to me in the Tower of
London.” (Laughter) And she takes Snoopy to the principal as her
attorney.
Yes, that was a good story for him. He loved it if he could do a
two- or three-week story, and he was one of the few comic strip people
who don’t have a continuity strip who would throw in a two- or
three-week series.
ST Yeah, I noticed that.
JS And he didn’t do as much of it later on in the ‘90’s, probably
-- if he had a week-long series, it was about the most. And I think it’s
because they be come really hard to do, to make it funny every day and
still have the strip [in continuity] takes a lot of planning. I know
when he was doing those kinds of long story strips, he would draw a
strip sometimes that was part of the story, but he didn’t always draw it
in continuity. So that he would draw that strip, but then he’d put it up
on his desk over in the corner, because then he’d have to draw an
intermediate one, or one or two intermediate ones, to make it work out
better. And then of course you have to I think maybe not do it on
Saturday, because every paper -- I don’t know if this is true in the end
of his run, but in the beginning, sometimes papers didn’t print on
Saturday, so --
ST I think also that’s the lowest-circulation day papers have,
because a lot of people just buy the paper on their way to work or on
Sunday. They don’t bother on Saturday.
JS That’s right. So if he were doing a story, he could not have
something that was important to the story on Saturday, and of course
you’d have to skip Sunday.
ST Yeah, because that’s a different storyline.
JS So doing these stories that are two or three weeks really was a
lot of work. He loved doing it, but I noticed that he did fewer of them.
ST I noticed that there were a lot of girls who were conspicuously
good at things like playing baseball and marbles in the strip right from
the very beginning. Charlie Brown is always getting disconcerted by the
fact that Lucy or Patty turns out to be better at batting or catching a
baseball or playing marbles then he is, even if it’s the first time
they’ve ever tried it. There’s even a sample of Just Keep Laughing, the
first regular comic strip he ever had published, reprinted in Peanuts
The Art of Charles M. Schulz, in which a little boy with a baseball bat
is sitting on a curb saying to a little girl, “Y’know, Judy, I think I
could learn to love you if your batting average was just a little
higher.” So the idea of girls playing sports or being good at sports
actually showed up in his work pretty often even back when this was
apparently considered pretty unusual in real life. Do you know if he
actually knew any girls who played sports when he was a kid, or did he
like it when women shared his interest in sports as an adult?
JS Yes, he did. Did he like it when women shared his interest --
yes. He always said that one of his heroes was Billie Jean King. A lot
of that was her drive and her determination. Not just the fact that
she’s a woman, but her love for the game and her wish to share it with
the other people -- her drive in her sport, which he related to his
drive in his career. They were both pressed to be the best that they
could. And he loved playing on the Dinah Shore -- he often was asked. I
think we went down there six or eight years to the Dinah Shore, and he
loved playing with the women golf professionals. But I think that again
you probably go back to the situation where it’s funnier if a girl is
better than a boy, because you expect a boy to be better. Certainly back
in pre-Title IX days; now you get accused of being sexist or whatever if
you say too much of anything. But it’s funny for a girl to be better
than a boy, and the contrary simply isn’t that funny.
I have to tell you one funny story. Sparky and I were both going
down to San Francisco to play in some sort of tournament down there -- I
think the men played with the men and the women played with the women.
And I walked into the restroom and there was a tall woman with a sort of
fancy hairdo and a big bow in it and I said, “Are you here for the
whatever it was?” and she said yes, and I thought, “Oh, well, she may be
tall, but I can beat her, I’m sure.” Well, it turned out after we got
out on the court, she’d been playing junior Wimbledon. She sure fooled
me, just from the way she looked. I mean she looked so feminine and
pixyish -- her name was Pixie even though she was tall. But it’s that
old “You can’t tell a book” -- you know, don’t assume anything. So I
often think that -- your question about girls being better at sports
made me think about that. But I think that what you’re looking at, the
fact that they were able to beat him, in a way, even though they didn’t
look tomboyish -- it’s funny because it’s not what you expect. Speaking
of that, of course Lucy’s a terrible fielder, and one of our next
animated shows is called Lucy Must Be Traded, and it’s based on her
terrible baseball playing, and the fact that one day Peppermint Patty’s
team traded -- again, how can I forget these things, but there are too
many things going on -- I think they traded Snoopy for Lucy.
ST But aren’t they on the same team anyway?
JS Yeah, so that doesn’t make sense. Maybe they were trying to get
rid of Lucy, but [Peppermint Patty] didn’t want Lucy, she wanted Snoopy
instead, and they said “How can you trade your own dog?” Anyway, Lucy
puts all the -- anything that girls could be good at sports, she puts
all those to shame, the way she stands out in the baseball field and
thinks about Schroeder and whether it’s too hot and all the things she
does out there when she should be playing ball.
ST Thinking of excuses for why she missed the fly ball that make
her miss the fly ball while she’s thinking of them.
JS Exactly. You know, you said at the end do I think that one of
the reasons Peppermint Patty likes Charlie Brown so much is that they’re
both sports fanatics, and if Sparky were here he’d say “Don’t you also
think it’s because he’s cute?” (Laughter) Yes, I think you’re right. I
think she sees in him somebody who is as fanatic as she is.
ST Yeah, ‘cause they’re both the respective ones in their groups
who will be determined to go on playing no matter how badly the game is
going or if it’s pouring rain or whatever.
JS Yeah, you’re absolutely right. But I think she also is in love
with him because he’s cute. (Laughter)
ST Do you know if there was any particular reason why he had
Peppermint Patty refer to some of the other Peanuts characters by
variant versions of their names, like “Chuck” instead of “Charlie Brown”
and “Lucille” instead of “Lucy”?
JS Well, he would typically say, “I don’t really know why she does
that. Maybe it’s because she just can’t seem to focus on it, it’s not
important to her. She just has her own way of doing everything.” He
often answered questions -- when people would say “Well, why does this
happen?”, he would say “Well, you know, I don’t know.” And I think that
the truth of the “I don’t know” is that it’s something that just came
out as he was drawing or doing it, and it seemed funny. And he did it,
and it continued to seem funny, so he continued to do it. He would laugh
himself at Marcie calling Peppermint Patty “sir” when he told that story
-- *he* would laugh. “I don’t know why she calls her ‘sir’ -- she just
does.” So he would laugh, as if he had no control over it. And maybe
when you hear writers say their books just write themselves you’re
talking about the same phenomenon.
ST Yeah, I noticed in some of the interviews with him I read it
was like he was observing this through some porthole into another world
or something and he didn’t really know what was going on behind the
scenes that caused the characters to do this.
JS And I think that’s true. You’ve probably read that when he
couldn’t think of ideas he would draw doodles. He would draw little
pencil sketches of the characters rolling over or with their hair flying
or something. And I think that when he did that, what he was doing was
transporting himself into another space. It was actually a form of
meditation or whatever you want to say. But it took him out of his
thinking thought processes and into a kind of meditative state where
things did come through a different channel. It sounds good, anyway.
ST When you sent me your short bio so I could write the
introduction to this interview, it turned out that you’d been involved
in a wide range of interesting activities of your own, quite apart from
anything connected with Peanuts. The bio described you as having been
involved in civic activism since the 1960’s. How did you first become
interested in that -- through the League of Women Voters, or in
connection with the specific issues involved in the 1966-67 Santa Rosa
Building a Better City Committee?
JS It was the League of Women Voters that taught me that
“government belongs to the citizen” -- it was a great training ground
and was really unique in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s (once more women began
working, much changed, I believe).
ST Were you given a Key to the City of Santa Rosa in 1968 as a
result of your role in getting the bond issue to build the new City Hall
passed? What does a Key to the City look like, anyway? Is it really a
giant-size key, like the ones sometimes shown in key to the city
ceremonies in animated cartoons?
JS Yes, the Key to the City was because of my participation on the
bond issue -- “Building a Better City.” I think it is about seven inches
long.
ST Your short bio says that you were instrumental in developing
the Volunteer Wheels Program while serving as a board member of the
Sonoma County Volunteer Center from 1973 to 1988. What is this program
exactly -- some sort of volunteer transportation program (via minivan?)
for people who don’t have access to cars?
JS Yes, we began it in the early ‘70’s as a completely volunteer
program, with mileage reimbursement and a part time junior college
intern as scheduler. When Federal programs were enacted which mandated
equality on public transport for those with disabilities, it became a
more institutionalized program. It’s huge, now.
ST How about Canine Companions for Independence, which you’ve been
a board member of since 1986? Is that some sort of organization for
matching up blind people with Seeing Eye dogs, or does it involve other
kinds of helper dogs (e.g., for the deaf or people in wheelchairs) as
well?
JS We train dogs for people with disabilities other than
blindness. Some of our most touching students are children with
disabilities who flourish with the help of a dog. [According to CCI’s
annual report, which Jeannie sent me a copy of, the organization breeds
and trains dogs to perform four different functions 1) service dogs,
which perform practical everyday tasks such as pulling a wheelchair,
turning lights on and off, opening doors, and picking up dropped items;
2) skilled companion dogs, which work with children with disabilities
and adults with severe disabilities, performing many of the same
functions as service dogs and supplementing this role by providing a
social bridge to others; 3) hearing dogs, which assist adults who are
deaf or hard of hearing by alerting them to key sounds such as the ring
of a doorbell, the buzz of an alarm clock, or someone calling their
name; and 4) facility dogs, which work at the side of health care
workers and educational professionals in settings such as rehabilitation
centers, hospitals, hospices, and special education classrooms --
presumably a more fulltime version of the “pet therapy” performed by
some dogs and cats whose owners regularly bring them to visit patients
in hospitals and nursing homes.]
Both of the films I produced, What a Difference a Dog Makes (1987)
and Heart of a Hero (1994), came from CCI’s need for such a documentary.
Both are similar except that our training had changed so much that by
1994 a new film was necessary.
ST What made you decide to take up flying and enter the Powder
Puff Derby, which you competed in in 1972 and 1973? Is this a modern
version of the all-female Powder Puff Derby of 1929 that a number of
famous pioneering women aviators like Amelia Earhart and Pancho Barnes
participated in?
JS My mother began flying when she was 50. I began after she did.
My first husband and I flew a lot together. I flew the Powder Puff
Derbies with my mother. She was always the pilot, I the co-pilot
(definitely the drudge of the team!). The Powder Puff Derby is the one
begun by Earhart and colleagues. It later became the Air Race Classic
(in 1974, I believe), which I also competed in.
ST The final line of your short bio says that your other interests
include tennis, golf, scuba diving, and flying trapeze. Is that last
item tongue in cheek, or are you serious?
JS I have done flying trapeze for 7 years in a group with Sam
Keen, who wrote the book Learning to Fly, among others. We belong to our
own small club, the “Chronologically Challenged Frequent Flyers.” One
must be over 60! I appeared on the CBS Sunday Morning Show (I believe it
was) as an adjunct to a piece about Sam and his flying and associated
work with “at risk” kids and women’s groups.
ST Since you’re involved in such a wide variety of activities, can
you tell us about any upcoming events or projects you’re working on?
JS Currently I (and a marvelous staff) are getting ready to open
the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California. The members’
opening date is August 16, and beginning August 17 we’ll be open to the
public, with special programs and guest cartoonists planned through
Labor Day. (Further information about the museum and its activities, as
well as how to become a member of it -- individual memberships are
available for $35 US, $40 international -- can be found at
www.SchulzMuseum.org.)
Missing Lucy turns up
The 'Lines of Lucy' statue, stolen in early June, is found by
construction workers near St. Paul's High Bridge.
August 29, 2002
By Karl J. Karlson
The St. Paul Pioneer Press
A Lucy statue stolen almost 12 weeks ago was found safe and, for
the most part, sound early Wednesday at a St. Paul construction site
where she apparently was left overnight.
The statue sustained minor damage — a few paint scrapes — and is
being repaired. It will be placed in Mattocks Park, where it originally
went on display in early June as part of the "Looking for Lucy'' summer
celebration, according to Lee Koch.
Koch, vice president of Capital City Partnership, which oversees
the celebration that is a tribute to the life and work of cartoonist
Charles Schulz, said recovering the statue and the fact that it was
basically intact is a positive sign.
"Stealing it was probably just some silly prank,'' she said. "We're
glad it was not destroyed.''
The statue was "Lines of Lucy,'' one of 103 statues of Lucy Van
Pelt that were displayed around the city for "Looking for Lucy.'' It had
a classic Lucy design — blue dress and bow — and was covered with quotes
from the comic strip that Schulz, a St. Paul native, drew for 50 years.
The artwork on the statue was done by Stephanie Johnson, Schulz's
granddaughter. After it was stolen, she did a replacement statue that
was also placed in Mattocks Park — at Davern Street and Palace Avenue —
in early July. The newly found Lucy will join her replacement in the
Macalester-Groveland park.
Keith Owens, who works for St. Paul Regional Water Services, was
working Wednesday morning with other utility employees on Cliff Street
near Goodhue Avenue — on the north end of the High Bridge — digging a
deep trench in the limestone rock for pipes.
"Someone saw her head sticking up over the edge, and Dan and Jerry
Ludden (brothers and co-workers) went over the fence and handed her up.
I stood her up on the sidewalk,'' Owens said, jokingly calling the
maneuver "The Great Lucy Rescue.''
He said the statue was not there Tuesday when crews were in the
same area.
"Somebody set her up there. She was just standing there pretty as
can be, staring at the High Bridge,'' Owens.
Other workers, some from the Schurcon construction company of
Stillwater, were also in the area rebuilding Cliff Street, and said they
had not seen the statue until Wednesday morning.
Neighbor John Domonkos said he heard nothing in the night that
would have indicated the statue was being dumped in the area.
When it was stolen around June 5 it had a several-hundred-pound
concrete base attached, but that was found within a few days near
Humboldt High School on the West Side.
It was estimated that the statue without the base weighed less than
100 pounds and would have been easy to carry or transport.
A $500 reward was offered for the return of the statue but there
was little activity in the investigation until last week, when someone
called Capital City Partnership and asked if the reward was still being
offered. Police Sgt. Fred Gray said it probably is, but as of Wednesday
afternoon it was not clear who might get it.
$9 reward has nice ring to it
August 28, 2002
By Ruth Nerhaugen
The Red Wing Republican Eagle
When Bill Hosko thinks of Lucy Van Pelt, he doesn't imagine her as
an accountant or a carpenter or a hockey player. To him, Lucy is a bride
in search of her elusive groom — Schroeder.
That's the way Hosko depicted her when he submitted a design for
the Lucy statues which are on display all over St. Paul.
And that's the Lucy Minnesota Life Insurance Co. selected for the
statue it sponsored as part of "Looking for Lucy," the annual
communitywide display honoring Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. Hosko's
"Looking for Schroeder Lucy" stands at Eighth and Wabasha streets in
front of the Minnesota Business Academy, formerly the Science Museum.
Hosko, a St. Paul artist and gallery owner, has purchased a house
in Red Wing which he is converting to a gallery. His name has been
popping up in newspaper articles because his Lucy bride has attracted
lots of attention - not all of it happy.
It seems someone stole Lucy's "diamond" engagement ring by prying
open the coat-hanger bezels that held it in place.
"To let Schroeder know how thoughtful she is," Hosko said, "she got
the rings" - the biggest faux diamond she could find for herself and a
golden grand piano-shaped ring for him.
Hosko secured them in a jeweler's box made of foam core, two blocks
of wood and lots of epoxy.
A $9 reward has been offered. That doesn't sound like much, he
said, but it represents a lot of work for Lucy. After all, she charges
only 5 cents per session for advice at her psychiatric stand.
Actually, Hosko added, he bought the gem and two extras for $9 each
on the Internet. He plans to replace the faux stone in the next few
days, because the ring is an important part of who Lucy is - and because
being chosen to create one of the 103 Lucy statues gave him an
opportunity to honor Schulz. Years before the first set of Snoopy
statues, Hosko tried to talk St. Paul officials into honoring the
cartoonist, a native son.
Creating the statue
"I was a Charlie Brown growing up," he said. "I still think one of
the best half-hours of television ever made is that Charlie Brown
Christmas special."
Minnesota Life picked Hosko's Lucy design out of a book of
sketches, and he was given $1,000 to create it - including materials,
which cost Hosko about $400.
Turning Lucy into a bride took some creativity. All the artists had
to work with the same basic statue - a 5-foot-tall, 400-pound
polyurethane Lucy wearing her typical dress.
Hosko turned the collar into a string of pearls and created a new
neckline with a stand-up collar; puffed out and extended the sleeves;
added two smaller bows in back; put bows on her shoes; gave her pink
glittery socks, and topped it all with a lacy illusion overdress. Window
screen, aluminum foil and clay epoxy were the primary materials.
"Roses are too fussy for Lucy," Hosko said, explaining her floral
headdress and bouquet. "She went out and picked flowers from her
garden." There's a single rose in her hair. "She needed one little
flower that was formal." A monarch butterfly clings to the blossoms on
the back of her head.
Special exhibit
The statue is owned by Minnesota Life, which plans to auction it
privately as a fund-raiser for the Business Academy, a charter school
geared toward preparing students for work.
Being part of the project has been fun, Hosko said. "A lot of
wedding parties now go to the statue to have their picture taken."
A special exhibit on the Peanuts gang is showing through Sept. 15
at the St. Paul Children's Museum. A group of the statues - not
including the Lucy bride - is on display in Carousel Park at the State
Fair, and all 103 are scheduled to be Sept. 28 at St. Paul's Rice Park.
An auction of most of the statues will be Oct. 13 at the Mall of
America.
State Fair embraces Schulz
After three years, St. Paul's 'Peanuts' statues are a fixture.
August 28, 2002
By Karl J. Karlson
The St. Paul Pioneer Press
Minnesota State Fair officials aren't sure if Charles Schulz ever
got to the Fair — he used to live down the street — but his beloved
creations of Snoopy, Charlie Brown and Lucy certainly have.
"The place is crawling with people all the time, posing with Lucy,
taking pictures of her," Jerry Hammer, the Fair's executive vice
president, said of the display of Lucy statues in what is known as
Carousel Park by the Grandstand.
Hammer said that for three years the Fair has invited organizers of
the annual St. Paul summer tribute to Schulz and his "Peanuts" comic
strip to bring some statues to the Great Minnesota Get-Together.
"The State Fair is the biggest event in St. Paul. It's a perfect
fit for Lucy," said Lee Koch, vice president of Capital City
Partnership, which now coordinates the Schulz tribute. "So many people
have heard of the Lucys but don't get an opportunity to see them. This
gives them a chance."
Hammer credited the statues with helping bring people to the Fair.
"It's fun to go out 'Looking for Lucy' but not everyone has that
opportunity. At the Fair, we show off the 16 they brought in and the two
we have all the time," he said.
And the Fair still has the statues it has sponsored in the past
"State Fair Snoopy" waving a Pronto Pup from "Peanuts on Parade" of 2000
and "Farmer Brown" in his bibs from "Charlie Brown Around Town" in 2001.
Both are in a garden by the Bandshell.
This year's Fair-sponsored statue, "Super Star Lucy," with her blue
ribbon from the 30th annual amateur talent contest, is across the
street.
As for Schulz, when he was young he lived just two miles from the
Fairgrounds at Snelling and Selby avenues, where his father had a
barbershop.
Statues moved to the Fair for display are "Lucy in the Sky With
Diamonds," "Career Explorer Lucy," "Unfinished Lucy," "Advice 5 Cents,"
"Lucy Loves to Sell Groceries," "Let's Hang Drywall," "Queen for a
Play," "Pig's Eye Lucy," "Be Aware," "Muchos Colores," "West Side Flats
Lucy," "Girl Scout Lucy," "There's No Place Like Home," "Land O'Lucy,"
"Grandma Maggie" and "Lucy Loves Torii." The "4-H Centennial Lucy" was
already on display.
Honouring Sparky's dream
Jeanie Schulz is proud of the museum
August 27, 2002
By Maggie Shiels
BBC News World Edition
The male and female toilets at the new Charles Schulz Museum are
where the work of the man behind the Peanuts cartoon can be appreciated
on a one-to-one basis.
A continuous strip of Charlie Brown's exploits runs right around
the toilet stalls and the sink area of the bathrooms of the museum in
his home town of Santa Rosa, just fifty miles north of San Francisco.
It's an area the artist's widow Jeanie is particularly proud of.
Schulz, known to his family as Sparky, died in February 2000 aged
77 from colon cancer, only a few weeks after he produced his last
Peanuts strip.
"This is a great place and many of the cartoons in here are very
old," Jeanie explains.
"They include a series when Snoopy's dog house burned down, which
is actually a replay of Sparky's own house burning down."
The museum is a light and airy building that takes the visitor on a
guided tour through the life of this much loved artist, nicknamed Sparky
by his family, who died two years ago.
Changing personas
Vistors see the early incarnations of Charlie Brown, Lucy and
Snoopy from the 1950s and how they grew into the figures adored by over
350 million people from all over the globe.
That evolution is captured in a massive wooden sculpture composed
of 43 layers which are cut away to reveal the changing personas of
Snoopy
They begin with Spike, Schulz's childhood pet and inspiration for
the world famous beagle.
On another nearby wall there are 3,500 Peanuts strips, which, from
a distance, show Lucy with a football and Charlie Brown.
The very office where Sparky worked is recreated on the second
floor of the museum with many of the original items taken from his
California studio.
For Jeanie Schulz it is a place which gives her goose bumps.
"My first reaction when I came up to the threshold was that I
didn't want to go in.
"We never went into Sparky's office until we made sure he knew we
were coming because nobody wanted to disturb his train of thought."
Star
Schulz's work reverberated around the universe. US soldiers
stenciled Snoopy onto their helmets and the Apollo 10 astronauts
christened their command module Charlie Brown and their lunar landing
vehicle Snoopy.
Peanuts made the cover of Time magazine and the Guinness Book of
Records while Schulz got a star on the Hollywood Hall of Fame.
Museum director Ruth Gardner Begell says the success of Peanuts is
because many people felt Schulz spoke directly to them.
She recalls "He remarked many times 'if you want to know me read
my strip.'"
Visitor Dan Peterson — accompanied by his eight-year-old daughter
Leah — adds "You can relate a little bit to each of the characters in
different ways. For example my baseball career was like Charlie Brown's
baseball career."
Jeanie Schulz says her husband's gift of being able to speak to
children and adults alike was an astounding one, that sometimes put her
centre stage.
"My only claim to fame is that occasional funny things about my not
cooking very well ended up there," she says.
"I also called Sparky my sweet baboo and in the strip Sally calls
Linus her sweet baboo."
The museum also has an education and research centre with many of
Sparky's business papers, videos and DVDs for students interested in
researching Schulz's life and cartoon art in general.
"Cartooning is important as an art form because it's
understandable," says Ruth Gardiner Begell.
"Very often people think great art has to be difficult to
understand.
"But if you look at the definition of art that Charles Schulz liked
to talk about, it is that great art is something that speaks to
subsequent generations."
Schulz museum echoes cartoonist's style
August 25, 2002
By Bob Keefe
SANTA ROSA — For fans of "Peanuts," happiness may be a warm puppy,
but a new museum dedicated to the enduring comic strip and creator
Charles Schulz may be the next best thing.
Don't come here shopping for stuffed Snoopys or to go on Red Baron
roller-coaster rides. For that, there are theme parks around the world,
and the mass-merchandising of the "Peanuts" gang has put T-shirts and
stuffed Woodstocks in department and toy stores everywhere.
Although souvenirs are available in the gift shop, the Charles M.
Schulz Museum and Research Center lives up to its name, eschewing things
touristy and kitschy in favor of a plain portrayal of an unpretentious
man and the comic strip characters that made him famous.
Along with housing Schulz's earliest drawings, the museum holds
collections of books about his work, manuscripts and personal papers
from the quiet cartoonist's life — and of course, lots and lots of
"Peanuts" strips. Exhibits dominate the center, but it also has a
100-seat auditorium and a classroom where students can study cartooning.
"We didn't want this to be a playland, another Disneyland," said
Jeannie Schulz, the cartoonist's effervescent widow, who started working
on the museum in 1994. "Sparky did not draw for kids, after all."
The two most playful exhibits in the museum, in fact, are more
works of art than attractions.
A tile mural that dominates one hall is composed of more than 3,500
black-and-white "Peanuts" strips. Together, they depict a well-known
image of Lucy holding a football for Charlie Brown.
Adjacent to the mural, a massive 26-foot by 11-foot wood sculpture
depicts the evolving persona of Snoopy, starting out with Schulz's
boyhood dog Spike and morphing into the world's best-known beagle. It
was designed by Japanese artist Yoshiteru Otani, who has made an
occupation creating "Peanuts"-related art.
Charles "Sparky" Schulz drew "Peanuts" for 50 years, turning the
gang of precocious kids and one beagle into a cultural icon known the
world over. He died on Feb. 12, 2000 of colon cancer, just hours before
the last original Sunday Peanuts strip appeared in newspapers worldwide.
Peanuts' following is unprecedented. At the peak of its popularity,
the comic strip could claim 355 million readers. With movies and books,
merchandise and advertising rights, Schulz earned between $30 million
and $40 million a year. At one point, "Peanuts" appeared in more than
2,600 newspapers and more than 20,000 products were based on the strip.
As a testament to the enduring appeal of "Peanuts," more than 1,500
fans from around the globe turned out for the museum's public opening
Aug. 17.
"We had a phone call from a woman from Virginia who said she was
coming all the way across the country on a Greyhound bus," said museum
director Ruth Begell.
The 27,000-square-foot museum is divided into two parts.
The top story is dedicated to Schulz. In a recreated studio,
Schulz's Crayola colored markers and a Canson Biggie sketch pad still on
the drawing board sit next to a desk and a bulletin board filled with
pictures of his children.
Outside, a glass box holds mementos from an earlier life. Yellowed
bowling and hockey team photos echo through Peanuts strips that would
come later. Other heirlooms were much too serious for the funny pages.
"Good Germans," Schulz scribbled above a drawing in a sketch pad he
carried during a hitch as a machine gunner in the Army during World War
II. The drawing depicts a German soldier's grave and a bullet-riddled
car.
One of most prominent exhibits is an 8-by-12-foot mural Schulz
painted for his daughter Meredith in a house in Colorado Springs, Colo.
in 1951. The wall, with an early rendering of Charlie Brown jumping over
a candlestick and a bounding Snoopy, was discovered in 1979 under at
least four coats of paint by a family that later bought the house. It
was donated to museum.
While the top floor of the museum is dedicated to the cartoonist,
the bottom floor is dedicated to his cartoons.
Rows of glass-encased "Peanuts" strips, addressing everything from
young love to the Vietnam draft, take up the bulk of one room.
In a testament to Schulz's influence on his peers, another room
contains some of the more than 150 get-well cartoons that admiring peers
sent him after he announced his illness and planned retirement. Also on
display are cartoons that ran in newspapers nationwide on May 27, 2000
as part of a tribute to the retiring Schulz.
"I think Sparky would have liked this," said cartoonist and
children's book author Dale Hale, Schulz's long-time assistant, on a
recent pre-opening tour of the museum. "It's informative, but not
silly."
Cartoons that were Schulz's earliest influences give some
historical perspective on how the world's best-known comic strip came to
be.
First is a drawing of Barney Google riding his horse "Spark Plug."
Two days after his birth, an uncle would nickname Schulz "Sparky" after
the horse.
Also hanging on the wall is a poster-sized drawing of cartoonist
George Herriman's "Krazy Kat," a 1940s strip that was one of the first
to blend social commentary and cartoons in a way that Schulz would later
emulate through "Peanuts."
"This reminds me of dad more than the 'Peanuts' strip," Monte
Schulz, the cartoonist's 50-year-old son said, standing next to poster.
"He had this hanging in the studio. I remember being a kid and not
understanding it."
The museum's location, tucked between houses, churches and shopping
centers in this community of wine makers and tech workers north of San
Francisco, seems incongruous.
But not far from here is where Schulz had his studio, and where he
spent some of the best days of his life. His home is not far away.
Next to the museum is the Redwood Empire Ice Arena, which Schulz
built for the local community. Inside, at the Warm Puppy coffee shop,
Schulz ate an English Muffin with grape jelly for breakfast and a tuna
sandwich for lunch nearly every day.
Around the corner is a baseball field, now worn and weed-choked and
not unlike the one where the "Peanuts" gang often played in the comic
strips, that Schulz also built for the community.
But it is the museum that holds the most interest for aficionados
and is the place most reflective of Schulz and his comic strip.
"One of dad's favorite words was 'bittersweet,' " said son Monte.
"That's what this museum is to me. Bittersweet."
Planting a park in a downtown St. Paul triangle
August 21, 2002
By Curt Brown
The Minneapolis Star Tribune
A pivotal triangular chunk of downtown St. Paul is transforming
into a tree-lined public park, complete with sitting walls, permanent
bronze "Peanuts" sculptures, sloped lawns and an ecologically friendly
stream bed that will collect and clean storm water.
Construction is well underway at Landmark Plaza, which sits along
St. Peter Street between the century-old Landmark Center and the new
Lawson Software office tower.
The first eight river birch trees arrived last week from a nursery
in Woodbury, and a swamp white oak, two sugar maples and some pin oaks
are due by next week.
"Nice to see the suburbs contributing to the core city again,"
Mayor Randy Kelly quipped during a walking tour of the plaza Tuesday.
"This will be an important connection between Rice Park and the
central business district," he said, adding that he hopes it someday
will link the state Capitol to the Mississippi River as architect Cass
Gilbert once envisioned.
Patrick Seeb, the executive director of the nonprofit St. Paul
Riverfront Corporation, said the park should be nearly completed by
November, although a formal dedication won't be scheduled until next
spring.
More than $2.8 million of the park's $4.2 million cost has been
raised, and Seeb said the public will be invited to pitch in by
sponsoring daffodils, which will emblazon the park in yellow each
spring. Contributors to the daffodil fund will have their names
displayed in the park; details will be announced next month.
Landmark Plaza — which sits kitty-corner from one of St. Paul's
oldest and most-beloved public spaces, Rice Park — has come a long way
in three years. Back then, a one-story Firstar Bank building occupied
the lot. The Riverfront Corporation acquired the land in 1999, razed the
bank and used the site for surface parking during a long design process.
At one time, a European-style bistro was planned for the 5th and
St. Peter corner of the plaza across from the St. Paul Hotel. Seeb said
the plaza is being designed with that possibility in mind, although the
glut of downtown coffee shops might make the bistro unnecessary, at
least for now.
A so-called "ephemeral stream" will run the length of the plaza
and, no, it won't often have water in it.
When it rains, the water will drain through native crushed rock — a
process that not only will irrigate beds of perennial flowers along the
stream bed but also will filter the runoff. Planners say the system will
reduce the pollutants that run through the sewer system and into the
Mississippi. They hope to make this storm water setup a demonstration
project for other developers to study.
Peanuts in bronze
Public art will punctuate the park. And in St. Paul, public art has
become synonymous with the creations of the late hometown cartoonist
Charles Schulz. After three years of polyurethane Snoopys, Charlie
Browns and Lucys scattered throughout the city, three permanent bronze
"Peanuts" sculptures will make their home at Landmark Plaza.
Those bronzes, which will be about two-thirds the size of the
polyurethane figures, will be sent off to a caster in Ham Lake this
week, according to Hart Johnson of Tivoli Too, a sculpting and design
studio based in the city's Highland Park neighborhood.
Johnson and his sister, Randi, have been the force behind the
"Peanuts" tributes to Schulz, whom they befriended 10 years before he
died from cancer in 2000.
Proceeds from the annual auctions of the "Peanuts" sculptures will
pay for the bronze installations at Landmark Plaza. Hart Johnson said
there will be three distinct pieces one with Charlie Brown sitting with
Snoopy on his lap, another with Lucy leaning into Schroeder's piano, and
a third with Linus and Sally talking over one of the sitting walls.
"I'm happy Linus is getting included," Mayor Kelly said. "He's been
kind of left out so far."
"Peanuts" won't be the only public art in the plaza, though. A
so-called "Water Story" will use historic and contemporary quotations to
explain how the stream bed works. And historic objects will be
incorporated into the sitting areas, with etchings that ask questions
about the site's significance.
