Charles Schulz's usual table sits reserved for him in the Warm Puppy Coffee Shop at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena in Santa Rosa,
as fans leave flowers and a hockey stick outside on Sunday, February 13, 2000. (AP photo/Max Whittaker)
United in sorrow (page 2)
Beloved "Peanuts" Creator Is Mourned Worldwide
Obituary: Influential cartoonist Charles M. Schulz dies at home the night before farewell strip appears.
February 14, 2000
By Renee Tawa
The Los Angeles Times
The Last Peanuts Strip
The death of Charles M. Schulz, whose anxious and joyful heart infused the world's most influential comic strip, dovetailed with the publication of his last original "Peanuts" on Sunday -- the way he might have scripted it. A master storyteller to the end, Schulz's goodbye message to more than 355 million daily readers worldwide became his own epitaph.
On Friday, Schulz, 77, had a last skate around the ice rink he owns and died in his sleep about 9:45 p.m. Saturday at home in Santa Rosa, with his wife, Jeannie, by his side. In December, after being diagnosed with colon cancer, Schulz announced that he would no longer draw "Peanuts," the most widely read comic strip in history. At the request of his five grown children, his syndicate contract stipulates that no other cartoonist draw it.
Son Monte Schulz said doctors gave his father another six or seven months. But his dad was drained by the chemotherapy and the effects of strokes that left him partially blind in one eye and unable to read or draw.
"He felt old at 77," said Monte, 48. "He had already lived to an older age than either of his parents, and he felt like it was his time to go."
The last daily "Peanuts" ran Jan. 3; previous "Peanuts" strips will run indefinitely (starting with strips he drew in 1974, a time when Schulz was at his peak and newer characters -- like Peppermint Patty and Woodstock--joined the cast).
"I think in a lot of ways, this is probably what he wanted -- once the strip was over, he sort of figured that was that," said Amy Lago, executive editor at United Feature Syndicate.
Said his friend, cartoonist Patrick McDonnell, the creator of "Mutts": "`Peanuts' was so much him. ... I think the two of them were so inter-twined that in sort of a strange little way, it's fate."
Sunday was officially Charles "Sparky" Schulz Day in St. Paul, his hometown -- a tribute that had been planned before his death. In Santa Rosa, his Redwood Empire Ice Arena was closed for the day, its flag at half-staff. Fans left piles of flowers outside the Warm Puppy snack shop, where Schulz began most mornings with coffee and an English muffin with grape jelly before walking to his studio.
"He was a master of timing in every way," said Hank Ketchum, creator of "Dennis the Menace." "He named his deadline for quitting his column ... made the deadline ... and then left. His was an amazing life and career, and he will be sorely missed."
By Sunday morning, a Web site by the National Cartoonists Society's president had posted the news, with a cartoon of Snoopy weeping.
Widespread Influence
"Peanuts" touched nerves and reached intimate spaces in a way no comic strip ever had: It provoked an Italian Communist newspaper ("[Lucy] is a Fascist"); was featured in exhibits at the Smithsonian and the Louvre; and spun catch phrases ("security blanket," "good grief," "a Charlie Brown Christmas tree"). Snoopy emerged as an enduring 20th century icon, etched on children's tombstones and stenciled on the helmets of U.S. soldiers who fought in Vietnam.
The cartoonist who inspired such whimsy and pathos was a loner. But Schulz made the world seem a little less lonely, with characters that people knew or saw in themselves -- woeful Charlie Brown, crabby Lucy, fanciful Snoopy, sage Linus.
"Peanuts," which was published in more than 2,600 newspapers and 75 countries worldwide, was his place.
"All of my fears, my anxieties, my joys, and almost, even all of my experiences go into that strip," Schulz told "60 Minutes" in October.
Schulz cried when he decided to give up the comic strip. Tributes poured in, from President Clinton to The New Yorker magazine to Walter Cronkite just last Friday in the CBS-TV special, "Good Grief, Charlie Brown: A Tribute to Charles Schulz" (which Schulz reportedly watched).
"It's ironic in a way," said cartoonist Lynn Johnston, a close friend, "that all of his life, he has just wanted to be liked and at a time in his life when everyone in the world was saying, `I like you, I care for you...,'
he really couldn't see it."
Instead, in the hospital, he was Charlie Brown-like flabbergasted at his bad luck, having over the years weathered strokes, emergency abdominal surgery, a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery. How could he get so sick when he was active, didn't smoke, drank no more than half a glass of wine at dinner and minded his own business?
"We were talking about schoolyard bullies," said Johnston, creator of "For Better or For Worse." "And he was saying `It's not fair. Here I am, sitting on the bench, having my lunch, and you come over and bop me on the head with a rock.' "
After 49 years of producing a daily comic strip, Schulz still talked about the joy of drawing a perfect pen line, of getting the depth and roundness to Linus just so. He drew each strip himself, and animation critics praised his groundbreaking style -- his graceful drawing, the richness of his characters. Schulz despaired that he could not do it better.
He would have marked the 50th anniversary of "Peanuts" on Oct. 2.
Poor Charlie Brown, Schulz told interviewers. He never gets to kick the football.
Schulz was also a grandfather, philanthropist and World War II veteran; he was a homebody who struggled with depression and agoraphobia. Friends say he adored his five kids, played hockey to win and liked to sit at home in an old blue leather chair with his dog on his lap and eat fish and chips and watch "Jeopardy."
He once told a reporter that he wants to be remembered in the way E.B. White spoke of humorist James Thurber: " `He wrote the way a child skips rope, and the way a mouse waltzes.' "
A public memorial service is expected to be announced in the next few days. Meanwhile, in lieu of flowers, his family asked that donations be sent to the National D-Day Memorial Foundation, 202 E. Main St., Bedford, VA 24523; (800) 351-DDAY. The money is expected to be earmarked for a gallery of World War II comic strips named after Schulz's friend, Bill Mauldin.
On Sunday, Mauldin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who chronicled World War II, said: "I am totally wiped out by this."
From Humble Start to Huge Paychecks
His first paycheck was $32.
Forbes magazine put Schulz's 1995-96 earnings at $33 million -- No. 30 on its list of the world's top-paid celebrities, just ahead of Bill Cosby. Schulz won five Emmys and arts awards from the French and Italian ministries of culture. In Japan, where "Peanuts" is a serious pastime and industry, the official translator of the comic strip is the country's poet laureate. "Peanuts" turned up on bedsheets, in Broadway musicals, as eBay.com collectibles (in December, bidding for a signed Charlie Brown children's dictionary closed at $10,100).
Yet, despite this overwhelming success, Schulz still believed what he drew -- that happiness is simple: supper, a soaring kite, jumping in a pile of leaves. He could write "happiness is a warm puppy" and was guileless enough to get away with it. His worst obscenity really was "Good grief."
What made "Peanuts" real was the way that Schulz hung his own raw psyche out for public viewing. He saw himself as the boy whose artwork was rejected for the high school yearbook, the loser who really was rejected by a little red-haired girl (Charlie Brown's unrequited love). "I was a bland, stupid-looking kid who started off badly and failed everything..." he once told a reporter.
He was an only child, born Nov. 26, 1922, to Carl and Dena Schulz. He grew up in St. Paul in an apartment above his father's barbershop (Charlie Brown's father was a barber too). All of his life, people called him "Sparky," a nickname based on a character in the "Barney Google" comic strip.
As a boy, Schulz used to peer through the windows of the St. Paul Pioneer Press building, watching the Sunday funnies roll off the presses. He and his dad read the Sunday comics from four newspapers and worried about the characters together. At age 6, Schulz decided that he would be a cartoonist when he grew up.
His parents encouraged his drawing talents. In high school, he took a correspondence course for artists and got a C+ in one subject: drawing children. At St. Paul's Central High School, he flunked English and several other classes. He was too shy to ask girls out.
After high school, Schulz was hit hard: His mother died of cancer, before he sold any of his cartoons, and that year, in 1943, he was drafted into the Army.
Schulz was an infantryman, staff sergeant and leader of a machine gun squad, traveling throughout France and Germany. His father wrote him every day. Fifty years later, Schulz drew his first comic strip commemorating D-day -- June 6, 1944 -- with Snoopy in the part of a helmeted soldier making his way to shore.
"He is a man of real American core values," said his friend Karen Kresge. "He grew up as part of the World War II generation. It is who he is. He believes in God and country and mom and apple pie."
After the war, Schulz went home to St. Paul and took a job lettering comic strips for Timeless Topix, a series of Catholic comic magazines. He also worked as a teacher at the Minneapolis art school from which he had taken his first cartooning classes.
Crushed by the Real Red-Haired Girl
Back then, in the late '40s, Schulz "liked to have his bowl of soup and draw his comic strip," said Linus Maurer, a fellow instructor at Art Instruction Schools, Inc. and longtime friend. "Nothing changed. Everything around him changed."
Schulz named "Peanuts" characters after Maurer and other friends from the school, including instructor Charlie Brown and Donna Johnson Wold, the inspiration for the little red-haired girl in "Peanuts." Schulz would scribble drawings on her desk calendar at the school, where she worked in accounting.
Wold ended up marrying someone else, whom she is still with. Schulz never got over the blow.
When they dated, Wold thought of Schulz as a nice, funny guy but never dreamed that he would hit it big. She didn't want "Peanuts" to end the way it did.
"I'd like to see [Charlie Brown] kick that football," said Wold, who lives in Minneapolis. "And if he gets the little red-haired girl, that's fine with me."
Wold saved every "Peanuts" strip featuring the little red-haired girl in a bundle now held together with worn rubber bands.
After Wold's rejection, Schulz met Joyce Halvorsen, a co-worker's sister at the school, whom he eventually married.
Meanwhile, at a friend's urging, Schulz focused on drawing cartoons featuring little kids. In 1947, the Pioneer Press bought his weekly cartoon, "Li'l Folks." From 1948 to '50, he sold 15 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post.
In spring 1950, Schulz took a new comic strip he had been working on to United Feature Syndicate in New York City. The syndicate bought the strip and dubbed it "Peanuts," saying it was a catchy name. But Schulz always hated the name. "It was undignified, inappropriate and confusing," he said, and no one ever called small children "peanuts." On Oct. 2, 1950, "Peanuts" made its debut in seven newspapers and was a hit, with timeless characters who captured the human condition -- ones who pushed on no matter what.
Schulz thought his own face was forgettable, so he gave Charlie Brown a round, ordinary face.
"I worry about almost all there is in life to worry about," Schulz wrote in his last book, "Peanuts: A Golden Celebration," published in 1999 as an early salute to the comic strip's 50th anniversary. "And because I worry, Charlie Brown has to worry."
He based Snoopy on his childhood dog, a black-and-white mutt named Spike. By 1960, Snoopy, who started off as a sidekick, had his own thought bubbles and walked on his hind legs.
Schulz got many of his early ideas from his own children. In the mid-'50s, inspired by the sight of his first three kids dragging blankets around the house, Schulz dreamed up what he later would say was the best idea he ever had -- a "security blanket" for Linus. Once, when he hushed his daughter Amy at the breakfast table, she picked up a slice of bread and said: "Am I buttering too loud for you?" -- the line later made it into the strip.
He introduced Lucy into the strip in 1952. That fall, in what would be a running gag, she snatches the football away before Charlie Brown can kick it.
His images took on a life of their own: Snoopy and the Red Baron. Lucy and her 5-cent psychiatry booth. Pig Pen and his puff of dirt.
Said cartoonist McDonnell, who picked the strips for the 50th anniversary book: "Before him, the comic strips were mostly gags. He gets his soul on the paper."
"He deals with real human emotions and just has the magic to convey that to paper," said McDonnell. "His characters are alive. He knows how to put life in them."
Unlike most other daily cartoonists, Schulz did all of his own drawing, inking, lettering and story lines. He worked six weeks ahead of schedule and sometimes, like on the D-Day strip, he started thinking a year ahead.
Schulz's influence on cartooning is unmistakable -- stylistically, narratively and rhythmically, wrote "Doonesbury" cartoonist Garry Trudeau in a December 1999 tribute for the Washington Post.
" `Peanuts' was the first (and still the best) postmodern comic strip," Trudeau wrote. "Everything about it was different. The drawing was graphically austere but beautifully nuanced. It was populated with complicated, neurotic characters speaking smart, haiku-perfect dialogue."
By the mid-to-late '60s, "Peanuts" had become a mass media phenomenon. In 1965, the animated TV special, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" began its run as a holiday classic, with its hip jazz score by Vince Guaraldi.
"Peanuts" was featured in more than 50 animated TV specials, four feature films, at least 1,400 books selling 300 million copies and countless products around the world, including a solid gold Cartier statuette of Snoopy.
In recent years, a "Peanuts" backlash picked up steam. Some critics said Schulz was distracted by marketing demands, and his characters had become caricatures of themselves by shilling for Metropolitan Life Insurance, Dolly Madison cupcakes and others.
In 1993, a Chicago Tribune columnist wrote that "Peanuts" was past its prime and no longer funny or relevant.
Well-Read, but Preferred Son's Work
Schulz had a casual and tidy look, with the bearing of a kind, sweater-wearing Sunday school teacher, which, in fact, he was when his kids were young. He had white hair and square glasses, a wide forehead, warm smile and tentative voice. In his last years, his hands shook. When he drew, he put one hand over the other to steady himself.
He liked to read, and he and Monte recommended books to each other. Schulz read Thomas Wolfe, Carl Sandburg, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Joan Didion -- and anything by his son. He told an associate that Monte's latest novel was the best book he had ever read. He never told Monte.
Schulz and his first wife raised their kids on a horse ranch outside Sebastopol in Northern California, not far from Schulz's studio in Santa Rosa. He said little publicly about their divorce in 1972. A year later, he married his second wife, Jeannie, whom he met at his ice rink.
The Schulzes usually gave money away quietly, writing unsolicited checks to friends in tight spots. In April 1998, they donated $5 million to support a new high-tech library at Sonoma State University, Jeannie's alma mater.
Schulz rarely ventured beyond his house, studio and his ice rink. Schulz grew up ice skating, and so did his kids. Until his illness, he played in an ice hockey league with friends.
Schulz was a mentor for countless animators, whom he invited to his studio and wrote to on Snoopy stationery.
"The first time I met him I was overwhelmed with the thought that this was exactly what I hoped Charles Schulz would be," said his friend, cartoonist Cathy Guisewite, creator of "Cathy."
His sweet, boyish nature endeared him to friends, who overlooked his moodiness and withdrawals.
Even when he was in intensive care, recovering from a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery in 1981, he picked up a pencil to cheer a friend up. Coincidentally, Raul Diez, his buddy from the local hockey team, was in the same hospital for blood clot complications. Schulz scribbled a cartoon of himself in a hospital bed attached to intravenous tubes, saying: "Raul, what in the world are we doing here?"
The two used to kid each other about their bad health, but not during Schulz's last bout with cancer.
"My God," Schulz told Diez after his cancer surgery. "I'm just waiting around to die now."
When he retired, he said he wanted to spend more time with family, including 18 grandchildren and stepchildren, and five kids: Meredith, Monte, Craig, Amy and Jill.
Schulz often said with glee that his kids decided that no one would carry on "Peanuts" after his death.
"My dad is Charlie Brown, inside and out," his daughter, Amy Johnson, told the Deseret News in December. "Nobody else can be that."
The difference between her dad and Charlie Brown is this: On Valentine's Day, in a longtime "Peanuts" heartbreaker, Charlie Brown always stared into an empty mailbox.
On Valentine's Day -- from the time he created Charlie Brown's lonely heart -- Charles M. Schulz's mailbox was always full.
Tributes Planned for "Peanuts" Creator Schulz
February 14, 2000
Reuters
SANTA ROSA, California -- The flag at the ice rink "Peanuts" creator Charles M. Schulz built for his adopted hometown flew at half mast on Monday as friends, fans and neighbors turned the arena into an impromptu memorial filled with flowers, balloons, goodbye notes and thank you cards.
Schulz's son Monte said a public memorial service was tentatively scheduled for next Monday for the 77-year-old cartoonist, who died in his sleep late on Saturday night after a three-month battle against colon cancer.
The death came on the eve of publication of the final "Peanuts" strip.
The cartoonist's friends and neighbors streamed through the day to the ice arena, leaving bouquets of flowers, balloons and notes thanking Schulz for creating the "Peanuts" gang.
Santa Rosa Mayor Janet Condron said the town plans to honor Schulz with bronze statutes of Charley Brown with Snoopy at his side, while a "Peanuts" museum is also set to open next year.
Before his death, the intensely private Schulz had declined city suggestions to name a street for him because he did not want the attention, she added.
A series of strokes had also weakened Schulz and he lost partial sight in one eye, making it impossible for him to ever draw again. Monte Schulz, in an interview with Reuters, said his inability to draw on some level may have caused the cartoonist to quit fighting.
"It was very unusual but we talked about it right at the time and we thought it was not entirely a coincidence," Monte Schulz said in a telephone interview. "He was very tired from his chemotherapy and did not seem to feel that his outlook was very bright."
A private funeral was planned later in the week for the creator of the lovable cast of losers that included round-faced Charlie Brown and his weird but wise dog Snoopy. Schulz will be buried in Sonoma County, where he lived for the past 40 years, Monte Schulz said.
Colon cancer had forced Schulz to give up drawing the strip, estimated to have 350 million readers in 75 countries. But the cartoonist still felt well enough to go ice skating with one of his daughters on Friday night, Monte Schulz said.
"So it was interesting in the sense that he had little things, little inspirations and joys that he was looking forward to but they weren't enough to mitigate the dark horizon of the colon cancer," his son said.
Fellow cartoonists had previously planned to honor Schulz by making all comics in newspapers around the country on May 27 about "Peanuts." That tribute, which is still planned, was kept secret so it would be a surprise but was made public after Schulz's death.
Cartoonists looked up to Schulz -- nicknamed "Sparky" after a character in the "Barney Google" comic strip -- not just for his innovative comic strip but also because he helped many get a start in the business.
"The beauty of Sparky is that he always remembered what it was like to be anything -- to be heartbroken, to be a failure, to be lost, to be lonely," said Cathy Guisewite, who draws the comic "Cathy." "He kept those memories very close to heart and I think he also kept the memory of a new cartoonist very close to heart."
Schulz, whose primitive drawing style was criticized in the early years of the strip, was estimated to have made about $55 million. The "Peanuts" gang was featured in television specials and advertising campaigns, while Charlie Brown spawned a Broadway show.
Schulz was born in Minnesota but spent much of his life in Northern California, where he become one of Santa Rosa's leading philanthropists.
He and his wife Jean pledged $5 million for a new high-tech information center at Sonoma State University and the cartoonist built the ice rink so all the town's children could learn to skate.
How can we ever forget them? Charles Schulz dies on eve of "Peanuts" finale
February 14, 2000
By Cesar G. Soriano
USA Today
As his final comic strip went to press, Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, the world's most read and revered cartoonist, died of a heart attack late Saturday at his home in Santa Rosa, Calif.
"It's almost as if he couldn't bear to live without creating Peanuts every day," says Diane Iselin, a spokeswoman for Peanuts' syndicate, United Feature.
Schulz, 77, died in his sleep after a battle with colon cancer and a series of small strokes that forced him to announce his retirement in December. His Sunday comic featured Snoopy typing out a farewell message that became Schulz's epitaph.
For nearly 50 years, Schulz drew and wrote every one of Peanuts' 18,000-plus strips, in later years from his office at 1 Snoopy Place in Santa Rosa. A mirror of baby-boomer nuance, Peanuts became a part of American pop culture, starring a gang of imperfect, neurotic and crudely drawn children facing everyday adversities.
"The hopeful and hapless Charlie Brown, the joyful Snoopy, the soulful Linus, even the `crabby' Lucy, give voice, day after day, to what makes us human," President Clinton said in a statement.
Charles Monroe Schulz was born Nov. 26, 1922, in Minneapolis and grew up in St. Paul. He was the son of a barber. "Sparky" Schulz's only cartooning education was through art correspondence courses. He was drafted and served in World War II as an Army infantryman.
In 1948 he launched his first feature, Li'l Folks. Renamed Peanuts -- a title Schulz said he never liked -- the strip made its debut Oct. 2, 1950, in seven papers. At the end, it appeared in 2,600 in 75 countries and 21 languages. Peanuts films, books, videos, theme parks, a Broadway musical and countless merchandise followed.
Schulz drew from his childhood for Peanuts. A red-haired young woman who rejected his marriage proposal became Charlie Brown's unrequited love, the Little Red-Haired Girl.
"All my fears, my anxieties, my joys and almost even all of my experiences go into that strip," Schulz said in a recent "60 Minutes" interview.
A private family service will be held this week, and a public memorial service is planned later. A tribute to Peanuts will be printed in newspaper comics pages May 27, when Schulz will posthumously receive the National Cartoonists Society's Lifetime Achievement Award. Schulz's family requested that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the National D-Day Memorial Foundation, a campaign Schulz helmed.
A clause in Schulz's contract prevents any other cartoonist from taking over Peanuts. United Feature is offering old strips to newspapers; about 95 percent of Peanuts carriers have picked up the reruns.
Another of Schulz's "60 Minutes" comments resonates poignantly in the wake of his death: "I lie in bed some nights and I can't think of anything and I can't go to sleep. And as Charlie Brown says, `Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, `Why me?' Then a voice answers, `Nothing personal. Your name just happened to come up.' "
Farewell to Schulz, Peanuts
As comic strip ends, fans mourn its creator
February 14, 2000
By Jonathan Curiel and Pamela J. Podger
The San Francisco Chronicle
Charlie Brown, Snoopy and a few hundred million mortals mourned yesterday for Charles Schulz, the gentle and heartfelt Santa Rosa cartoonist who created the Peanuts strip that was read and loved by people in 75 countries around the world every day.
Hours before his final cartoon appeared in Sunday newspapers, Schulz died in his sleep Saturday night at his home in Santa Rosa, apparently from complications of colon cancer.
"Dear Friends," Schulz wrote in the final strip, which showed Charlie Brown kicking and missing a football, Lucy sitting at her psychiatrist's stand, and Snoopy typing Schulz's letter. "I have been fortunate to draw Charlie Brown and his friends for almost 50 years. It has been the fulfillment of my childhood ambition."
Considered by his colleagues as the greatest cartoonist in history, Schulz, who was 77, had retired from drawing Peanuts in December, after suffering a series of small strokes during emergency abdominal surgery. His last daily strip ran January 3.
Schulz's death on Saturday night was a shock to his family and fans and to colleagues who planned a surprise tribute to him on May 27. On that day, every comic strip in the United States was going to honor him. The tribute had been a well-kept secret.
"We wanted him to open the paper that day and be surprised by all the cartoons," said Daryl Cagle, president of the National Cartoonists Society. "We hoped it would be a celebration of his 50th anniversary. Now, it's going to be a memorial tribute to him."
Cagle said many of the cartoons will have their characters talking to Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus and the rest of the Peanuts crowd.
In Santa Rosa, mourners streamed to Schulz's Redwood Empire Ice Arena from the Bay Area and elsewhere. Among them was longtime fan May Kobold of Santa Rosa, who paid tribute in the heavy rain that she thought symbolized the world's tears for Schulz's death.
"When Buddy Holly died, they always say it was the day the music died. Well, with Schulz's death, it is just like the day the laughter died," Kobold said.
Schulz died in his sleep around 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, after he spent the day watching golf on television with several of his friends. When he came home, according to his wife, Jean, "He said he didn't feel well. He said, `I guess it's just the chemo.' "
Schulz was diagnosed with colon cancer on November 16, spent two weeks in a Santa Rosa hospital, then was forced to take time off for chemotherapy.
Yesterday, cartoonists around the United States mourned the man they considered to be the greatest representative of their profession.
"It's the end of an era, and it's hard to imagine that cartooning will ever be the same," said Scott Adams, who draws the popular Dilbert cartoon. "In basketball, you can say that Michael Jordan was the greatest ever. In cartooning, Charles Schulz was the greatest ever -- and probably the greatest there ever will be."
Guy Gilchrist, who draws the cartoon strip Nancy and who was a friend of Schulz, said, "He was the best there ever was. He was a light on this Earth."
Every day in 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy and the other Peanuts characters made readers laugh, chuckle and empathize with their foibles. Peanuts, which debuted on Oct. 2, 1950, was translated into more than 20 languages and read by more than 350 million readers.
The most widely syndicated comic strip in history, Peanuts inspired many television specials, starting with the 1965 CBS-TV special "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Books of Peanuts were also published to widespread success.
"The consistency, the quality, the range -- there was so much he could capture in his strip," said John McMeel, chairman of Andrews McMeel Universal, a Kansas City, Mo., company that published several of Schulz's books, and whose Universal Press Syndicate sells such cartoons as Cathy and Garfield.
"He made our industry so much better," said McMeel, who has been friends with Schulz for more than 20 years. "To have his death occur just on the eve of the last Sunday strip -- Christ."
Outside Schulz's ice arena, hockey sticks, love letters to "Snoopy's Dad," stuffed animals and huge bunches of flowers piled up in a spontaneous outpouring of grief from mourners.
Inside, Schulz's corner table near the fireplace at the Warm Puppy Cafe, where the cartoonist regularly ate lunch and socialized with pals, still proudly bore its "Reserved" sign.
Schulz's son, Monte Schulz, 48, of Nevada City, leaned against the counter where ice skates are rented and reminisced about his father, who built the arena in 1969 just down the street from his studio.
Schulz said his father was greatly comforted by the affection lavished on him by fans after he announced his colon cancer and his retirement. Schulz said his father was "very depressed" after several strokes rendered him unable to draw anymore, but added that the influx of hand-penned cards and worldwide recognition helped "ease the pain."
"He's been a very popular person," said Schulz, the second oldest of five children. He said he and his siblings spoke together Saturday about the irony of their father dying right before his last strip was published.
"We talked about that last night. We thought that somehow it all went together, and it connected, to us, that his life was over."
"He was a good dad. He was sentimental, compassionate, instructive," said Schulz, who is working on a novel titled "Crossing Eden." "He inspired my writing. He wanted me to have big language and big writing."
The last daily Peanuts comic ran in early January, and the final farewell strip appeared yesterday in newspapers, including The Chronicle. Earlier versions of the strip will continue to be published in The Chronicle and in other papers.
Year after year in Peanuts, the long-suffering Charlie Brown faced misfortune with a mild, "Good grief!" Tart-tongued Lucy handed out advice for a nickel, and Snoopy, Charlie Brown's wise beagle, strapped on his helmet, jammed down his goggles and took the occasional flight of fancy back to the skies of World War I and his rivalry with the Red Baron.
The strip was an intensely personal effort for Schulz. He had a clause in his contract that said the strip had to end with his death. While battling cancer, he opted to retire, saying he wanted to focus on his health and family without the worry of a daily deadline.
"It's hard to overemphasize how important he was to the profession," Cagle said. "Before Sparky (Schulz's nickname), cartoons were largely slapstick and adventure. After Sparky, you expected sophistication and character development. You expected characters that have foibles and insecurities and who really are quite complex.
"He taught us all about character development, and he raised the art form to a new level of sophistication. On this level, no one else had more influence. He has more fans and daily readers than anything else that's written in the world."
Adams, who lives in the East Bay, was one of many cartoonists yesterday who said that Schulz changed their lives.
"When I was a little kid, when I was deciding what to be, I was reading Peanuts cartoons and completely captivated by them," he said. "I thought, `This would be a good job.' "
The Peanuts strip, said Adams, was "outwardly about someone being defeated, but no matter how many times the characters were defeated, they were essentially undaunted. The characters were so distinctive. They were like friends."
The family said a private burial will take place this week. A public memorial service in Santa Rosa is being planned for next week.
Schulz is survived by his wife, Jean, of Santa Rosa; three daughters -- Meredith Hodges, of Loveland, Colo.; Amy Johnson, of Alpine, Utah, and Jill Transki of Santa Barbara; two sons -- Monte Schulz of Nevada City and Craig Schulz of Santa Rosa; a stepdaughter, Lisa Brockway, of Ashland, Ore.; a stepson, Brooke Clyde, of Santa Rosa; and 18 grandchildren.
The family suggests donations to the Bill Mauldin World War II Cartoon Art Gallery Endowment, c/o Charles Schulz's Studio, 1 Snoopy Place, Santa Rosa, CA 95403. The National Cartoonists Society said that donations can also be sent to the National D-Day Memorial Foundation, of which Schulz was national campaign chairman, at 202 E. Main St., Bedford, VA 24523.
Yesterday, it was Schulz who had the final farewell, in his own domain.
His last Peanuts strip showed Snoopy at his typewriter and Lucy and Linus and other Peanuts regulars cavorting merrily about the final panel. In the center was Schulz's "Dear Friends" letter, thanking his readers for their support.
"I have been grateful over the years for the loyalty of our editors and the wonderful support and love expressed to me by fans of the comic strip," Schulz wrote. "Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy ... how can I ever forget them..."
The comic ended with his signature.
Chronicle cartoonist Phil Frank, research librarian Kathleen Rhodes and Chronicle news services contributed to this report.
After the Laughter
His life: "Peanuts" creator went from humble beginnings in the Twin Cities to humble success worldwide.
February 14, 2000
St. Paul Pioneer Press Staff and Wire Reports
"Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz, the most beloved and successful cartoonist of the 20th century, died of colon cancer Saturday, hours after his final strip appeared in early editions of Sunday's paper.
It was a bittersweet irony not lost on his mourners worldwide: As the artist always intended, "Peanuts" ended with him.
Schulz, who was 77, died in his sleep. As word passed among Twin Cities residents Sunday morning, hundreds of mourners made their way to Rice Park in downtown St. Paul, where one day earlier Mayor Norm Coleman had declared "Charles `Sparky' Schulz Day."
Mourners also placed flowers around the barber pole once owned by Schulz's father (now in O'Gara's Bar and Grill in St. Paul) and remembered him during a moment of silence at Camp Snoopy in the Mall of America.
Schulz was diagnosed with cancer following abdominal surgery in November, during which he suffered a series of strokes that left his speech and vision severely impaired. He announced his retirement the following month.
The announcement left St. Paul officials scrambling for a way to honor the beloved cartoonist. Schulz, born in Minneapolis, was reared in an apartment on the corner of Snelling and Selby avenues in St. Paul, above a barbershop his father owned. A call went out for suggestions on how the city might honor Schulz, and thousands of responses came in from around the world.
But all plans were put on hold Sunday.
"The city will do something to honor Schulz, but now is not the time to discuss that," Coleman said Sunday afternoon. "Fifty years of his life helped us understand ours. We have to step back a bit and reflect on this."
Randi Johnson, owner of the St. Paul business Tivoli Too and a member of the committee devising ways to recognize Schulz, said she spoke with the cartoonist's wife on Saturday and got no indication he was so seriously ill. Johnson had business dealings with Schulz for years, eventually becoming a friend.
"Sparky was an easy man to be friends with," she said Sunday.
(When he was two days old, an uncle called him Sparky after cartoon character Barney Google's horse, Sparkplug. The nickname stuck. His first cartoon for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in the late 1940s, in fact, is signed "Sparky.")
Johnson said Schulz was aware of the plans being considered in St. Paul -- which range from a series of character statues around town to an annual illustrators award -- but never expressed his preference.
Donna Wold of Minneapolis, the model for Charlie Brown's heartthrob, "the little red-haired girl," was out of town and could not be reached for comment. As a young man, Schulz proposed marriage to Wold, but she turned him down. The two kept in contact, however, and Wold's daughter said Sunday that her mother spoke with Schulz a week ago.
Indeed, "Peanuts" rarely strayed from Schulz's experience: The strip's characters were named for old friends, comments and experiences were often taken from those of his five children, and its emotional sustenance came from its creator's life. Like Charlie Brown, Schulz never did become a successful flyer of kites.
Sunday's panel, featuring Snoopy atop his doghouse, ran with a farewell from the artist, who thanked his editors and loving fans for a half-century run that was "the fulfillment of my childhood ambition." Newspapers will continue running classic "Peanuts" strips, beginning with those Schulz created in 1974.
"Peanuts," a name Schulz long eschewed, was introduced on Oct. 2, 1950, in seven newspapers. Ultimately, it ran in 2,600 papers in 75 countries and 21 languages, and reached an estimated audience of 355 million, believed to be the largest in the history of cartooning.
The progress of his disease and unexpected retirement left Schulz's spirits low, Monte Schulz, the artist's oldest son, said Sunday: "I think maybe he decided that his true passion was in the strip, and when that was gone, it was over. ... He had done what he had wanted to do."
Charles Monroe Schulz was born Nov. 26, 1922, the only child of Dena and Carl Schulz. He became interested in cartooning around age 6. At age 13, he was given a black-and-white dog named Spike, a name he later gave to Snoopy's brother.
Although he skipped two grades in elementary school, Schulz ultimately was as dismal a student as Peppermint Patty. He flunked algebra, Latin, English and physics in ninth grade.
Socially, he was Charlie Brown's equal. At St. Paul Central High, he grew to 6 feet tall, 135 pounds, and had a disagreeable complexion -- although, unlike Charlie Brown, he possessed a full thatch of hair on a less cantaloupe-shaped head. Adding misery to anguish, his cartoons were rejected for the high school yearbook, a slight Schulz -- who grew into a handsome man and accomplished athlete -- never forgot.
Upon graduation, Schulz enrolled in cartooning correspondence classes offered by Art Instruction Schools Inc., his parents scraping to come up with the $170 tuition, paid in installments.
Schulz became a teacher at Art Instruction and got his first cartooning job, lettering the feature "Timeless Topix" for a Catholic magazine. He soon created a weekly panel called "L'il Folks," the precursor to "Peanuts," for the Pioneer Press and sold 15 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post.
In 1950, Schulz sent a few "L'il Folks" panels to United Feature Syndicate, which agreed to run the strip but renamed it "Peanuts" to avoid confusion with Al Capp's "L'il Abner." Schulz abhorred the change: "To me, `Peanuts' means something insignificant and unimportant," he once said.
The strip took a few years to develop a clear style, but by 1955 Schulz won the Reuben Award, the National Cartoonists Society's highest honor. Three years later, the strip appeared in 400 papers.
In 1978 he was named International Cartoonist of the Year and in 1990 he was named Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. Television specials based on "Peanuts" earned Peabody and Emmy awards.
In 1990 he also helped produce a book and video to help children deal with cancer.
Schulz never liked to travel and returned to the Twin Cities only twice after he left in 1958 for California. He eventually made his residence in Santa Rosa, where there is a now a "Peanuts" museum and ice rink whose construction he financed.
He came to the Twin Cities for the opening of the Mall of America and its entertainment complex, Camp Snoopy, in 1992, and in 1994 for a fund-raiser for Canine Companions, a group that trains dogs to live with people with neurological diseases, Johnson said.
Until he was too ill, the cartoonist worked six days a week, sometimes propping his drawing hand in the other to steady it. While many classic comics have been inherited by other artists, Schulz intended that "Peanuts" would end with him, and, in the most poignant and precise way, it did.
Schulz leaves behind his wife, Jeannie; five children, Meredith, Monte, Craig, Amy and Jill; two stepchildren; and several grandchildren.
Private services are to be held this week.
"Peanuts," its creator pass on together
Februaray 14, 2000
By Karen Heller
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, the most beloved and successful cartoonist of the 20th century, died of colon cancer Saturday at his home in Santa Rosa, California, hours after his final strip appeared in early editions of yesterday's paper.
As the artist always intended, Peanuts ended with him.
Mr. Schulz, who was 77, began celebrating the comic strip's golden anniversary last year. He died in his sleep with his wife, Jeannie, by his side.
He was diagnosed with the cancer following abdominal surgery in November, during which he suffered a series of strokes that left his speech and vision severely impaired. Mr. Schulz reluctantly announced his retirement the following month. He had never taken more than five weeks off in his career -- and then only after his 75th birthday -- and was Peanuts' sole creator, completing each strip without benefit of gag writers, illustrators or even colorists.
On Jan. 3, the day the artist's farewell weekday comic was published, a number of his fellow cartoonists paid homage to Mr. Schulz in strips dedicated to Peanuts' ageless coterie of wise and affecting characters.
"It's really remarkable how minimal his drawing is yet the range of emotions he could display," said his friend, Brian Walker, whose father, Mort, created Beetle Bailey and Hi & Lois. "Just by the way the eyes and mouth are drawn he could convey an incredible complexity of emotions. He does perplexed and anxious just through a subtle altering of a line."
Yesterday's panel, featuring Snoopy atop his scarlet doghouse, ran with a farewell from the artist, who thanked his editors and loving fans for a half-century run that was "the fulfillment of my childhood ambition." Newspapers around the country, including The Inquirer, plan to continue running classic Peanuts strips, beginning with those Mr. Schulz created in 1974.
Peanuts, a name Mr. Schulz long eschewed, was introduced on Oct. 2, 1950, in seven newspapers. Ultimately, it ran in 2,600 papers in 75 countries and 21 languages, and reached an estimated audience of 355 million, believed to be the largest in the history of cartooning.
Mr. Schulz created more than 18,000 daily strips, and spawned a Disney-like industry, Creative Associates, whose 800 licensees generated $1 billion in 1998 retail sales.
The strip exploded beyond the funny pages. In 1998, one in five Hallmark cards sold -- 1.5 billion -- featured a Peanuts character. Apollo X modules bearing the names Snoopy and Charlie Brown orbited the moon. "A Charlie Brown Christmas," which debuted in 1965, launched a string of 50 Peanuts TV specials that won five Emmys and two Peabody Awards. "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," a staple of high school drama departments, premiered off-Broadway in 1967 and ran for five years; last year's Broadway revival garnered two Tony Awards.
Generations of dogs were named Snoopy. Rare was the child's bedroom that did not contain a stuffed Snoopy dog and at least one of the more than 1,400 Peanuts books -- 300 million copies sold. "Happiness is a warm puppy" is in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. "Good grief" and "rats" (both phrases the proper Mr. Schulz used in lieu of cursing), the Great Pumpkin, security blanket, the kite-eating tree, blockhead, and the revival of Bulwer-Lytton's "It was a dark and stormy night" -- all are instantly identified with Mr. Schulz's artistry.
But the cartoonist's most enduring legacy is his characters. Profoundly heartfelt without leaving readers misty-eyed, Peanuts contributed the most hapless and effervescent figures on the funny pages: Charlie Brown and Snoopy, the bipedal beagle whose global celebrity may be second only to that of Mickey Mouse. Rarely topical, consistently intimate, Peanuts' attention to the hardships of the human condition was the cornerstone of its universal appeal and earned Mr. Schulz the adulation of his fellow cartoonists.
"Isn't it amazing how you have no control over your real life?" Mr. Schulz told protegee Lynn Johnston, creator of the comic strip "For Better or For Worse," at Christmas. "You control all these characters and the lives they live ... [yet] you have no way of writing your own story."
"But I think, in a way, he did," Johnston said yesterday. "It's amazing that he dies just before his last strip is published...[It's] as if he had written it that way."
The progress of his disease and unexpected retirement had left Mr. Schulz's spirits low, Monte Schulz, the artist's oldest son, said yesterday: "I think maybe he decided that his true passion was in the strip, and when that was gone, it was over ... He had done what he had wanted to do."
Schulz was a rabid hockey devotee who gave his town a professional ice rink, a former Sunday School teacher in whose strip some saw the Gospel, and a man with a briar patch of neuroses similar to those of his characters, who articulated the indelible wounds of childhood.
"He would love to say he was Snoopy, but he's not often a Snoopy personality," Paola Muggia Stuff, director of San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum (which Mr. Schulz helped found), recently observed. "He's got the crabbiness of Lucy; he feels as lonely and as out of place as Charlie Brown. He's all of those characters."
Mr. Schulz's childhood experiences of the Great Depression, rejection and physical awkwardness remained close to him in adulthood.
"Those early defeats you never get over," he said last year.
Charles Monroe Schulz was born Nov. 26, 1922, in St. Paul, Minn., the only child of Dena and Carl Schulz.
"The comics entered my life early," he wrote in "Peanuts: A Golden Celebration," published last year. At 2 days old, an uncle called him Sparky after Barney Google's horse, Sparkplug. The nickname stuck.
For 45 years, his father -- like Charlie Brown's -- owned and operated the Family Barbershop, and for many years the Schulzes lived upstairs. During the Depression, the family often ate pancakes for dinner, the son believing the diet was borne out of preference rather than financial hardship.
He became interested in cartooning around age 6. At 13, he was given a black-and-white dog named Spike, a name he gave to Snoopy's pampered brother.
Though he skipped two grades in elementary school, Sparky Schulz ultimately proved to be as dismal a student as Peppermint Patty. He flunked algebra, Latin, English and physics in ninth grade.
Socially, he was Charlie Brown's equal. At St. Paul Central High, he grew to 6-feet-tall, 135 pounds, and had a bad complexion -- though, unlike Charlie Brown, he did possess a full thatch of hair on a less cantaloupe-shaped head. Adding misery to anguish, his cartoons were rejected for the high school yearbook, a slight that Schulz -- who grew into a handsome man and accomplished athlete -- never forgot.
Upon graduation, Mr. Schulz enrolled in cartooning correspondence classes offered by Art Instruction Schools Inc., his parents scraping to come up with the $170 tuition, paid in installments.
One of the artist's most traumatic moments came upon his 1943 induction into the Army when his mother was seriously ill. "He was at boot camp, came home and went to the movies with his parents. [His mother] says, `This might be the last time we see each other,' " recalled Brian Walker, who now co-produces "Hi & Lois." "The next morning she dies, and then he's shipped out. I think that was at the root of his agoraphobia. He liked to be at home doing his routine with his warm, extended family, just like his father the barber."
Schulz served in France, but saw only four days of front-line combat. After the war, and despite the C+ in Drawing of Children (another slight he carried with him), Mr. Schulz became a teacher at Art Instruction and got his first cartooning job, lettering the feature "Timeless Topix" for a Catholic magazine. He soon created a weekly panel called "L'il Folks," the precursor to "Peanuts," for the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper and sold 15 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post.
In 1950, Schulz sent a few "L'il Folks" panels to United Feature Syndicate, which agreed to run the strip but renamed it "Peanuts" to avoid confusion with Al Capp's "L'il Abner." Schulz abhorred the change: "To me, peanuts means something insignificant and unimportant."
The strip took a few years to develop a clear style, but by 1955 Schulz won the Reuben Award, the National Cartoonists Society's highest honor. Three years later, the strip appeared in 400 papers.
In 1949, Mr. Schulz married Joyce Halverson, the sister of a fellow art instructor. They had five children and moved to northern California in 1958. The marriage ended in 1970.
Schulz became an excellent golfer and played center for a local senior hockey league. After the old rink fell in disrepair, Schulz built the Redwood Empire Arena in 1968 as a gift to Santa Rosa, an hour north of San Francisco. It served as a virtual second home to the artist, whose daily ritual was to have breakfast and lunch each day at the rink's Warm Puppy restaurant, a short walk from his nondescript office at One Snoopy Place.
In 1974, Mr. Schulz married filmmaker Jeannie Forsyth -- a woman as outgoing as he was retiring -- whom he met, naturally, at the ice arena.
Raised Lutheran, Schulz became a member of the Church of God. He tithed regularly to the church and gave to charity with little fanfare -- $5 million to Sonoma (Calif.) State University to help finance an information center, $1 million to the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton, Fla. He never drank, smoked or swore. He vented frustration, as his characters did, with a "rats" or "good grief."
Schulz was also a voracious reader, devouring fiction -- Anne Tyler was a favorite, Tolstoy another -- and subscribing to Publishers Weekly.
"He was an incredibly complex person," said Lucy Caswell, a cartoon historian and friend. "He was the kind of conversationalist where you never know what he was going to ask you. He was a man of very generous spirit. He wore his wealth well."
The cartoonist lived comfortably, but quietly. Forbes magazine perennially listed Schulz among the country's highest-paid entertainment figures -- $62 million in earnings in 1989.
He owned a plane, which Jeannie Schulz copiloted, but loathed travel, despised hotel rooms, and declined most invitations save for those from fellow cartoonists. Schulz suffered from panic attacks, worried incessantly, and battled depression. He was happiest at home and working.
"He's not the hail-fellow-well-met," Jeannie Schulz once said. "For years he knew he didn't fit, he didn't feel comfortable in the mainstream. We may go out and laugh, but his comfort zone is where he lives. It's a narrow zone."
"Peanuts" rarely strayed from Schulz's experience: The strip's characters were named for old friends; comments and experiences were often taken from those of his five children; its emotional sustenance came from its creator's life. Like Charlie Brown, Schulz never was a successful flyer of kites.
The feature was launched at a time when papers requested a drastically reduced format that would allow them to stack the comics. Schulz's inspired response was to create a strip dependent on characters, rather than gags, with less dialogue and in an understated style that spoke louder than anything on the page.
"One can scarcely overstate the importance of Peanuts to the comics, or overstate its influence on all of us who have followed," observed Bill Watterson, creator of "Calvin and Hobbes," citing Schulz's "brilliant graphic shorthand and stylistic economy."
"Schulz would set you up with a couple of tiny tots speaking in childlike innocence for three panels," wrote cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty in Slate, "then come out of the wild blue yonder with one of them sounding suddenly like a middle-aged college professor in the grip of a nervous breakdown. The dimensions of comic-strip possibility expanded."
Above all else, the strip understood the difficulty of childhood. "Being a kid is not easy. It's a fearful world out there, and the playground is a dangerous place," Schulz said last year.
Schulz "epitomized one very basic principle of human nature," said his editor, Amy Lago. "We all want to be as witty and lovable and funny and just interesting and adorable as Snoopy, but we all feel like we're like losers like Charlie Brown."
Schulz never forgot the rejection by Donna Johnson, the original red-haired girl, a fellow art teacher who broke his heart a half century ago and married someone else.
Peanuts' leitmotif was unrequited love: Charlie Brown for the never-seen, red-headed girl; Lucy for Schroeder, who pined only for Beethoven; Sally for Linus, who preferred the security of his blanket. "I find unrequited love funny," Schulz observed more than once.
"Some people can get over loss very quickly; then there are people who can remember every golf match or tennis match, or any loss," Schulz told his biographer, Rheta Grimsley Johnson. "They never get over it. Maybe I've been somewhat like that."
"He's bitter about all kinds of things," said "For Better or for Worse's" Johnston. "He's bitter about the little red-haired girl who didn't marry him. He's bitter about his divorce. He's bitter about getting old."