‘Peanuts’ Creator Comes Out of His Shell

Good grief! Charlie Brown is 40 years old?

Yep. Charlie and the rest of the “Peanuts” gang hit the Big Four-O, a midlife plateau that usually sets off a good deal of soul searching in most folks. Just don’t expect to see it mentioned in the award-winning strip.

“A comic strip should not make self-conscious statements,” says Charles Schulz, 67, creator of the “Peanuts” characters who appear in more than 2,000 newspapers in 68 nations. “There will be nothing in the strip.”

But that hardly means the milestone will pass unnoticed. An exhibition is planned at the Louvre in Paris, and half time at the Super Bowl next January will feature a birthday extravaganza.

Most importantly, the story of Charlie, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus and friends can finally be told. The whole truth comes out in the shy cartoonist’s biography, “Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz,” due Thursday from Pharos Books.

The book by Rheta Grimsley Johnson is a first, says Phyllis Henrici of Pharos, a sister company of the Scripps Howard newspaper chain. Schulz draws for United Features Syndicate, a Scripps Howard subsidiary. “Publishers have wanted to do a biography of him for years, but he hasn’t wanted to authorize one,” she said.

What made the difference this time? “I liked her right away,” Schulz said of Johnson, a columnist for the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

Lured by Art Ad Schulz studied art when he was in high school, after he saw a “Do you like to draw?” advertisement. “The truth is, I wasn’t a very good student,” he said.

His first professional job was doing lettering for drawings in Timeless Topix, a Catholic comic book. He later taught at the Art Instruction School and sold cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post.

His cartoon feature, “Li’l Folks,” the start of Peanuts, was developed for St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1947. The strip was sold to a syndicate in 1950, and the name changed to “Peanuts.”

Although the book contains stories about all the strip’s characters, the most interesting is about a character never shown--the “little red-haired girl” who is Charlie Brown’s unrequited love.

“Peanuts” began syndication on Oct. 2, 1950, 19 days after Schulz’s proposal of marriage was turned down in his native St. Paul, Minn., by Donna Mae Wold, the original red-haired girl.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Schulz, who proposed five years after plowing across France in a half-track as an infantryman during World War II. “It’s something you never get over, but I think the only purpose in recounting the story was to show how experience prompts a cartoonist’s ideas.”

Johnson, whose book discloses that the artist suffers from depression, says Schulz’s life contains many rejections he translated to the strip. “Rejection is his specialty, losing his hobby. He has spent a lifetime perfecting failure,” she said.

Fighting Agoraphobia

At first, Johnson thought the artist was kidding about Wold’s turning him down. “He talked about it as if it took place last year,” she said.

Along with depression, the artist also has bouts of agoraphobia, the fear of being alone in public places from which escape might be difficult. “The sight of a hotel lobby, for example, puts Schulz in a sweat,” writes Johnson.

Such fears and troubles are too bad, says the author. Yet, there would not be Schulz’s “unique gift to the world without the sensitivity that so limits his personal life.”