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Charles Monroe Schulz (November 26, 1922 –
February 12, 2000) was a 20th-century American cartoonist best known for
his Peanuts comic strip.
He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Dena
and Carl Schulz. His nickname "Sparky" was given by his uncle, after the
horse Spark Plug in the Barney Google comic strip.
He attended St. Paul's Richard Gordon
Elementary School, where he skipped two half-grades. As a result, he was
the youngest in his class when he attended St. Paul Central High years
later, which may have been the reason why he was so shy and isolated as
a young teenager. After his mother died in February, 1943, he was
drafted into the army and sent to Camp Campbell in Kentucky. He was then
shipped to Europe two years later to fight in World War II. After
leaving the United States Army in 1945, he took a job as an art teacher
at Art Instruction Inc., which he attended before he was drafted.
First published by Robert Ripley in his
Ripley's Believe It or Not!, then in a series of chronicles, The
Saturday Evening Post, his first regular comic strip, Li'l Folks was
published in 1947 by the St. Paul Pioneer Press. (It was in this strip
that Charlie Brown first appeared, as well as a dog that looked much
like Snoopy). In 1950 he approached the United Features Syndicate with
his best strips from Li'l Folks, and Peanuts made its first appearance
on October 2, 1950. This strip became one of the most popular comic
strips of all time. He also had a short-lived sports-oriented comic
strip called It's Only a Game (1957-1959), but abandoned that strip due
to the demands of the success of Peanuts.
He put a lot of his own life into Peanuts'
main character, Charlie Brown. For example:
Schulz's father was a barber and his mother
a housewife.
Schulz also had a dog when he was a boy.
Unlike Snoopy, Schulz's dog Spike was a pointer). Eventually, it was
revealed that Snoopy had a desert-dwelling cousin... named Spike.
Schulz was also shy and withdrawn.
Schulz's Little Red-Haired Girl was Donna
Johnson, an accountant at Art Instruction Inc., with whom he had a
relationship. He asked her to marry him, but she refused. However, they
remained friends for the rest of his life.
Schulz was married twice. He married his
first wife, Joyce Halverson, in 1951. They had five children, but
divorced in 1972. He later married Jean Forsyth Clyde in 1973, with whom
he was married for the rest of his life.
Schulz's father died in 1966 while visiting
him, the same year his studio in Sebastopol, California, burnt down.
Schulz touched on religious themes in his
work, including the classic television cartoon, A Charlie Brown
Christmas (1965), which features the character Linus van Pelt, Charlie
Brown's best friend, in a show-stopper, quoting the King James Version
of the Bible (Luke 2:8-14) to demonstrate "what Christmas is all about."
Schulz had been active in the Church of God as a young adult and then
later taught Sunday school at a United Methodist Church, but his
religious views evolved over the years. By the late 1980's he told one
of his biographers (Rheta Grimsley Johnson, 1989) that he identified
with Secular Humanism. In the Sixties, Robert L. Short interpreted
certain themes and dialogues in Peanuts as being in agreement with parts
of Christian theology, as he (Short) explained in his bestselling
paperback book, The Gospel According to Peanuts. Schulz did not endorse
Short's specific interpretations and often said that "the only theology
is no theology."
Peanuts ran for nearly 50 years without
interruption and had appeared in over 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries.
In November 1999 Schulz had a stroke, and later it was discovered that
he had colon cancer that had metastasized to his stomach. Because of the
chemotherapy and the fact he couldn't read or see clearly, he announced
his retirement on December 14, 1999, at the age of 77. This was
difficult for Schulz, and he was quoted as saying "I never dreamed that
this would happen to me. I always had the feeling that I would stay with
the strip until I was in my early eighties, or something like that. But
all of sudden it's gone. It's been taken away from me. I did not take it
away. This was taken away from me."
The last original strip ran on February 13,
2000. Schulz had died at 9:45 p.m., the night before in Santa Rosa,
California of a heart attack. Ironically, Schulz had always predicted
that the strip would outlive him (with his reason being comic strips are
usually drawn a few weeks before their publication.) As part of his
will, Schulz had requested that the Peanuts characters remain as
authentic as possible and that no new comic strips based on them be
drawn. To date his wishes have been honored, although reruns of the
strip are still being syndicated to newspapers. He is interred in
Pleasant Hills Cemetery, in Sebastopol, California.
On August 17, 2002, the Charles M. Schulz
Museum opened to the public in Santa Rosa.
He was also a fan of hockey and was
inducted into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame in 1993. On June 28,
1996, Schulz was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,
right next to Walt Disney's.
* * * *
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URL of Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Schultz
Date Article Copied:
August 26, 2005
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