Peanuts

Peanuts first hit the papers 65 years ago today, back in 1950, when a quiet kid from Minneapolis named Charles Schulz finally got his shot. He’d been “Sparky” once — the smallest kid in every room, skipped ahead so fast he never quite caught up, the kind of kid other kids pick on because they can. His kindergarten teacher told him he’d be an artist someday, and Sparky, being Sparky, took it seriously. By first grade he was drawing Popeye like he’d been born with ink in his veins, and he figured, well, that’s it then — cartoonist or bust.

School didn’t do him any favors. Shy, timid, failing something every year, he gave up on college before college could give up on him. He signed up for a correspondence art course — the kind where you mail your dreams in an envelope and hope someone mails them back improved.

Then 1950 rolls around and Sparky walks into a big syndicate office with his best work under his arm. Eight papers pick him up. Eight. Not exactly the stuff of legend — until it was. Peanuts goes from those eight little papers to more than 2,600 in 75 countries. Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy — suddenly they’re everywhere, like old friends you didn’t know you had.

Schulz worked like a man who didn’t trust luck. Every morning started with a jelly doughnut, then he’d sit there waiting for an idea to show up — sometimes in minutes, sometimes after a long, lonely stretch. He did everything himself: script, art, lettering. Wouldn’t hire an inker. Said it’d be like a golfer hiring someone to make his putts. And he meant it. In fifty years he took one vacation — five weeks for his 75th birthday. That’s not dedication; that’s devotion.

On February 12th, 2000, Schulz died quietly at home. The next morning, the final Peanuts strip ran. Snoopy on top of his red doghouse, typewriter in front of him, reading a farewell letter from the man who’d drawn him into existence. Schulz wrote that he’d been fortunate — almost fifty years with Charlie Brown and the gang — but he couldn’t keep up the daily grind anymore. And he said something simple and perfect: his family didn’t want Peanuts continued by anyone else.

How could he ever forget them, he wrote.

And you know what? None of us ever did.

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