Charles M. Schulz

• 1. The Poor Kid

  ›

  Charles M. Schulz, known as Sparky to everyone close to him, was holding back tears in December 1999 when he described the moment he signed his final comic strip. Thinking of his hero Charlie Brown, he said, "that poor, poor kid, he never even got to kick the football." For decades, the character Lucy had held that football and yanked it away at the last second, sending Charlie Brown to the ground. Now the man who drew the gag felt its cruelty. Schulz was retiring from Peanuts, the strip he had created, and he would be dead in February 2000. How did a young man from Minnesota turn a small newspaper debut into a strip read around the world? How much of Charlie Brown's world was borrowed from Schulz's own life? And what became of a strip whose creator insisted that nobody else would ever draw it?

  2157312

• 2. A Boy Called Sparky

  ›

  Charles Monroe Schulz was born on the 26th of November 1922 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and grew up in nearby Saint Paul. He was the only child of Carl Fredrich August Schulz, a barber, and Dena Bertina Schulz, born Halverson. His family was of German and Norwegian descent.

  His nickname came from an uncle. The uncle called the boy Sparky after Spark Plug, a horse in Billy DeBeck's comic strip Barney Google, which young Charles enjoyed reading.

  The family dog, Spike, ate unusual things, including pins and tacks, and Schulz liked to draw him. In 1937 he mailed a picture of Spike to Ripley's Believe It or Not! Robert Ripley's syndicated panel printed it with the caption "A hunting dog that eats pins, tacks, and razor blades is owned by C. F. Schulz, St. Paul, Minn." Below it ran the credit "Drawn by 'Sparky'."

  His school was less impressed. Saint Paul Central High School rejected his drawings for the yearbook, and sixty years later it placed a five-foot-tall statue of Snoopy in the school office. After graduating, Schulz took a correspondence course from Art Instruction Schools.

  The army interrupted that training. Schulz was drafted in November 1942 and served in Europe as a staff sergeant with the 20th Armored Division. He was a squad leader on a .50 caliber machine gun team, and his unit saw combat only at the very end of the war.

  His own account of that combat was gently comic. He said he had a single chance to fire his machine gun, forgot to load it, and watched the German soldier in his sights surrender instead. Being under fire earned him the Combat Infantryman Badge, and he was proud of it.

  A private grief came during his service. In February 1943, his mother died at home after a long battle with cervical cancer, and Schulz was with her. He later described his sadness that she never saw his work published. In late 1945 he returned to Minnesota with his career still to build.

  7615118

• 3. Becoming Peanuts

  ›

  Timeless Topix, a Roman Catholic comic magazine, gave Schulz his first post-war work as a letterer. In July 1946 he took a job at Art Instruction, the school where he had studied by mail, reviewing and grading students' work. He stayed for several years while he developed his career as a comic creator. A co-worker there named Charlie Brown would one day lend his name to the hero of the strip.

  The anti-Communist propaganda comic book Is This Tomorrow, published in 1947, carried some of Schulz's earliest work. In June of that year he began Li'l Folks, a weekly series of one-panel jokes for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. It ran until January 1950, usually with four drawings per issue.

  Li'l Folks already held the seeds of what came later. Schulz applied the name Charlie Brown in four gags to three different boys, and once to a figure buried in sand. The series also featured a dog that looked much like Snoopy.

  In May 1948, Schulz sold a one-panel drawing to The Saturday Evening Post. Within two years the magazine ran 17 untitled drawings of his, while he kept working for the Pioneer Press.

  Syndication proved harder. Schulz tried to place Li'l Folks through the Newspaper Enterprise Association on terms that would have made him an independent contractor, which was unheard of in the 1940s. Negotiations broke down, and the Pioneer Press dropped the feature in January 1950.

  Later that year he approached United Feature Syndicate. By then he had also developed a strip, usually four panels instead of one, and to his delight the syndicate preferred the longer version. To his consternation, the title had to change for legal reasons, and Schulz selected the name Peanuts.

  Peanuts first appeared on the 2nd of October 1950 in seven newspapers. The weekly Sunday page followed on the 6th of January 1952. After a slow start, the strip grew into one of the most popular in history.

  Schulz tried other projects along the way. His sports-oriented strip It's Only a Game ran from 1957 to 1959, and he abandoned it once Peanuts took off. From 1956 to 1965 he drew Young Pillars, a gag cartoon about teenagers, for Youth, a publication associated with the Church of God. He also illustrated two volumes of Art Linkletter's Kids Say the Darndest Things, in 1957 and 1961, and in 1964 he illustrated Dear President Johnson, a collection of letters by Bill Adler.

  141551816

• 4. Peanuts at Scale

  ›

  At its height, Peanuts appeared daily in 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries and 21 languages. Over nearly 50 years, Schulz drew 17,897 published strips. Together with merchandise and product endorsements, the strip generated revenues of more than $1 billion per year, and Schulz earned an estimated $30-40 million annually.

  He almost never stopped. Schulz took exactly one vacation during the strip's run, a five-week break in late 1997 to celebrate his 75th birthday. Reruns filled the gap, the only time that happened in his lifetime.

  Television gave the characters a second life. A Charlie Brown Christmas aired in December 1965, was the first animated special, and won an Emmy award. Many specials followed, the latest being Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical in 2025.

  Schulz did not leave the screen work to others. Until his death he wrote or co-wrote the specials and oversaw their production. He did the same for four animated films: A Boy Named Charlie Brown, Snoopy Come Home, Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown, and Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don't Come Back!!).

  Books carried the strip as well. Rinehart & Company published the first collection of Peanuts strips in July 1952, and many more books followed. Those volumes greatly contributed to the strip's growing popularity, and in 2004 Fantagraphics began its Complete Peanuts series.

  193531005

• 5. Borrowed From Life

  ›

  In an interview with Charlie Rose in May 1997, Schulz said, "I suppose there's a melancholy feeling in a lot of cartoonists, because cartooning, like all other humor, comes from bad things happening." He drew heavily from his own experience. Like Charlie Brown, he had often felt shy and withdrawn.

  The family details were close to home. Charlie Brown's father was a barber and his mother a housewife, just as Schulz's parents had been in life. Schulz also reportedly had an intelligent dog as a boy. It was a pointer rather than a beagle, but family photos confirm a certain resemblance to Snoopy.

  Snoopy's brother Spike lives outside Needles, California, and that too came from memory. The Schulz family lived in Needles from 1928 to 1930, after moving there to join relatives who had relocated from Minnesota to tend to an ill cousin.

  The Little Red-Haired Girl, Charlie Brown's unrequited love, had a real model. Donna Mae Johnson was an accountant at Art Instruction, and Schulz fell in love with her. In June 1950, shortly after signing his first contract with the syndicate, he proposed. She turned him down and married another man.

  Friends and relatives supplied other names. Linus and Shermy were named for his good friends Linus Maurer and Sherman Plepler. Peppermint Patty was inspired by Patricia Swanson, a cousin on his mother's side, and Schulz devised her name after noticing peppermint candies in his house.

  Sally's pet name for Linus, "Sweet Babboo," came from his second wife. Jean Schulz recalled, "I called him, 'Sweet Babboo' and instead of saying, 'O, that's clever, I think I'll use that,' it just showed up six weeks later in the comic strip!"

  Schulz also slipped in his taste in film. According to the Charles M. Schulz Museum, he watched the 1941 movie Citizen Kane 40 times. Lucy van Pelt shares the fondness, and in one strip she cruelly spoils the ending for her younger brother.

  2124255539

• 6. Teachers, Rivals, Heirs

  ›

  The Charles M. Schulz Museum names Milton Caniff, creator of Terry and the Pirates, and Bill Mauldin as key influences on Schulz. In the strip, Snoopy made annual Veterans Day visits to Mauldin, and the strip mentioned Mauldin's World War II cartoons. Schulz also credited George Herriman of Krazy Kat, Roy Crane of Wash Tubbs, Elzie C. Segar of Thimble Theatre, and Percy Crosby of Skippy. He discussed several of them in a 1994 address to fellow cartoonists.

  His biographer Rheta Grimsley Johnson thought the search for a single source was futile. She wrote, "It would be impossible to narrow down three or two or even one direct influence on Schulz's personal drawing style." Of the finished look, she added, "It is purely his with no clear forerunners and no subsequent pretenders."

  Jim Davis, creator of Garfield, occupied a stranger place. Biographer David Michaelis wrote that Schulz considered Davis his greatest rival. Schulz disliked Davis's low, broad-appeal approach and was jealous when Garfield eclipsed Peanuts in popularity.

  Yet Schulz kept helping him. He advised the younger cartoonist on merchandising and franchising, passing along the strategy he had built around Snoopy, and Davis came to regard Schulz as a valuable mentor.

  One piece of that help changed the look of Garfield. While the two men worked on their television specials in adjacent rooms, Davis was struggling to fit Garfield's obese, four-legged body into physical gags. He asked Schulz for ideas, and Schulz sketched a slimmer, pot-bellied cat who walked on two legs. Davis has used that design in its basic form ever since.

  Schulz showed respect for other cartoonists in small ways. For the 1994 special You're in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown, he gave Franklin the last name Armstrong, in homage to Robb Armstrong, creator of Jump Start. Armstrong later collaborated with Schulz's sons on Welcome Home, Franklin, part of the Apple TV+ series Snoopy Presents.

  The Footrot Flats creator Murray Ball earned Schulz's strong respect, and the two influenced each other throughout their careers. Schulz is also regarded as an influence on cartoonists including Matt Groening and Dav Pilkey.

  8530313356

• 7. Ice, Home, and Faith

  ›

  In April 1951, Schulz married Joyce Halverson, who was not related to his mother's family. He adopted her daughter, Meredith Hodges, and the family moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, later that year. Their son Monte was born in February 1952, and three more children, Craig, Amy and Jill, were born later in Minnesota.

  The family lived in Minneapolis until 1958 and then moved to Sebastopol, California, where Schulz built his first studio. His father died while visiting in 1966, the same year the studio burned down. By 1969 Schulz had moved to Santa Rosa, California, where he lived and worked until his death.

  By Thanksgiving of 1970 his marriage was strained, and the couple divorced in 1972. In September 1973 he married Jean Forsyth Clyde, whom he had met when she brought her daughter to his hockey rink. They stayed married for 27 years.

  That rink was the Redwood Empire Ice Arena, which Schulz built and owned in Santa Rosa. It opened in 1969 and included a snack bar called The Warm Puppy Cafe. In 1975 he started Snoopy's Senior World Hockey Tournament there, and in 1998 he hosted the first Over-75 Hockey Tournament. His daughter Amy modeled the figure skating in the 1980 special She's a Good Skate, Charlie Brown.

  Danger reached the Santa Rosa house on the 8th of May 1988. Two gunmen in ski masks walked in through an unlocked door, planning to kidnap Jean. The attempt failed when Jill drove up, and the men fled. Sonoma County Sheriff Dick Michaelsen said, "It was obviously an attempted kidnap-ransom. This was a targeted criminal act. They knew exactly who the victims were." Neither Schulz nor Jean was hurt.

  Faith ran through his life and his work. Schulz was brought up Lutheran, was active in the Church of God as a young adult, and later taught Sunday school at a United Methodist Church. In A Charlie Brown Christmas, Linus quotes Luke 2 to explain "what Christmas is all about," and Schulz said Linus represented his spiritual side.

  Jean described the years after the army. Sparky came home lonely, a pastor invited him to church, and for four or five years he attended Bible study and services three times a week. He said he had read the Bible through three times.

  Later he drifted from organized religion. From the late 1980s he told interviewers, "I do not go to church anymore... I guess you might say I've come around to secular humanism, an obligation I believe all humans have to others and the world we live in." Jean said of his beliefs, "God was very important to him, but in a very deep way, in a very mysterious way."

  4554535551

• 8. The Last Strip

  ›

  In July 1981, Schulz had heart bypass surgery, and President Ronald Reagan phoned him in the hospital to wish him a quick recovery. During the 1980s he complained that "sometimes my hand shakes so much I have to hold my wrist to draw." Many assumed he had Parkinson's disease, but a letter from his physician stated he had essential tremor, which beta blockers alleviated. He kept drawing the strip alone, and the lines grew noticeably shakier.

  In November 1999, Schulz suffered several small strokes and a blocked aorta, and doctors then found colorectal cancer that had metastasized. Chemotherapy and failing eyesight left him unable to continue. He announced his retirement on the 14th of December 1999. On The Today Show he told Al Roker, "I never dreamed that this was what would happen to me. I always had the feeling that I would probably stay with the strip until I was in my early eighties. But all of a sudden it's gone. It's been taken away from me. I did not take this away from me."

  Asked whether Charlie Brown would finally kick the football in the last strip, Schulz first answered, "Oh, no. Definitely not. I couldn't have Charlie Brown kick that football; that would be a terrible disservice to him after nearly half a century."

  Schulz died in his sleep of a heart attack at his Santa Rosa home on the 12th of February 2000, at the age of 77. The last original Peanuts strip was published the following day. He had predicted the strip would outlive him because strips were usually drawn weeks before publication. He was buried at Pleasant Hills Cemetery in Sebastopol, California.

  On the 27th of May, more than 40 syndicated cartoonists paid homage by working his characters into over 100 comic strips that day. Jim Davis did so in Garfield and Scott Adams in Dilbert.

  United Feature Syndicate kept ownership of the strip, but Schulz asked that no other artist ever draw it. The syndicate honored his wishes and syndicated reruns instead. Because Schulz considered other media separate from the strip, new television specials and comic books have been made since his death.

  Honors kept arriving. On the 10th of February 2000, two days before he died, Congressman Mike Thompson introduced a bill to award Schulz the Congressional Gold Medal. It passed the Senate unanimously on the 2nd of May, President Bill Clinton signed it on the 20th of June 2000, and Jean accepted the medal on the 7th of June 2001.

  Space carried his characters further. Schulz, a proponent of crewed spaceflight, was honored when Apollo 10 named its command module Charlie Brown and its lunar module Snoopy. It launched on the 18th of May 1969. NASA still gives the Silver Snoopy award for outstanding achievements related to human flight safety or mission success.

  On the 1st of July 1983, Camp Snoopy opened at Knott's Berry Farm. The Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center opened in Santa Rosa in August 2002, two blocks from his former studio. In St. Paul, Peanuts on Parade began in 2000 with 101 five-foot statues of Snoopy placed around the city.

  In a 2007 interview, Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, said that "in countless ways, Schulz blazed the wide trail that most every cartoonist since has tried to follow." In October 2017, the Tubbs Fire destroyed Schulz's Santa Rosa home. On the 26th of November 2022, over 75 American syndicated cartoonists honored him on what would have been his 100th birthday.

  5758777392