| The comic strip Peanuts made its debut on October 2, 1950. Its creator, Charles "Sparky" Schulz, was born in Minneapolis in 1922, and grew up across the Mississippi River in St. Paul, where his dad owned a barbershop near the corner of Snelling and Selby Avenues. Sparky was an indifferent student, shy and awkward, and he always failed at least one class every year he was in high school. But he kept going, because he wanted to become a cartoonist. After he graduated high school, he took some correspondence courses in art; he served as a machine gunner in World War II, and when he came home, he returned to the school - Minneapolis's Art Instruction, Inc. - as an art teacher. While there, he became romantically involved with a redheaded woman who worked in the accounting department. She ended up dumping him, but she later served as the inspiration for the Little Red-Haired Girl whom Charlie Brown had a keen crush on. In 1947, Schulz sold a comic strip called Li'l Folks to his hometown paper, the Pioneer Press. It was a flop, but he kept drawing, and in 1950 he submitted a collection of his strips to United Features Syndicate. They liked his work, and bought the strip, but they insisted on changing the name to Peanuts, which Schulz didn't like at first. "I wanted a strip with dignity and significance," he later said. "Peanuts made it sound too insignificant." The strip ran in seven newspapers when it debuted on this date in 1950. It got off to a slow start its first year, but it picked up steam after a book of reprints was published. By 1960, it ran in hundreds of papers, and Schulz had won the most prestigious award in the cartoonists' pantheon: a Reuben. And in 1969, NASA named its command module "Charlie Brown" and its lunar module "Snoopy." At its peak, the strip ran in more than 2,600 papers, and was read by more than 350 million people in 75 countries. Peanuts grew into dozens of original books and collections, Emmy Award-winning television specials, full-length feature films, Broadway musicals, and record albums. Schulz's 1963 book, Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, sold more that year than any other hardcover book for children or adults. Charlie Brown's dog first appeared in the third installment of Peanuts. Snoopy was inspired by a black and white dog Schulz had had as a kid. His dog's name was Spike - the name Schulz eventually gave to Snoopy's desert-dwelling cousin. The strip wasn't explicitly political, but its creator was clearly aware of the changing times, and commented on issues like New Math, the Battle of the Sexes, and trends in psychotherapy. Peppermint Patty, an athletic tomboy from a single-parent household, made her debut in 1966. Schulz introduced Franklin, the strip's first African-American character, in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; Franklin's father was a veteran of the Vietnam War. The 1960s counterculture also inspired another beloved character: Snoopy's friend Woodstock, the little yellow bird, whose speech bubbles contain nothing but a series of vertical lines. Schulz suffered a stroke in November 1999; he was also diagnosed with colon cancer. He announced his retirement in December, and died at home on February 12, 2000 - the night before the final Peanuts strip appeared in the papers. Charlie Brown and his friends are still beloved by young and old alike. When Jim Davis, creator of Garfield, showed his two-year-old son a drawing of the famous fat tabby cat, the boy promptly and joyfully cried out, "Snoopy!" Last year, a new 3-D Peanuts feature film hit the theaters to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the strip, and the 50th anniversary of A Charlie Brown Christmas, the first animated Peanuts special. |
-- from "The Writer's Almanac" |
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