Broken Hearts in the Dugout

You have hair like Terry Bradshaw and a head shaped like a football helmet.

Your kite doesn’t fly. The baseball team seldom wins. The Valentine never arrives. For 50 years, you’ve worn the same shirt. But you never blame others for your problems.

You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.

“Well, we’re all set for the picnic,” a Peanuts character says.

“Here’s the ice cream,” says a second kid, opening a container of ice cream.

“And here’s the cake,” another kid says, opening a cake box.

Off to the side stands Charlie Brown, cupping something in his hands.

“What are you holding in your hands, Charlie Brown?”

“Soup,” he says.

When Charles Schulz was in kindergarten, a teacher spotted a sketch he’d done and told him that someday he’d be an artist.

In high school, he took an art-school correspondence course. Cost his dad, a barber, 170 bucks.

Schulz’s first job was doing the lettering on comics drawn by other people. One day, he drew a cartoon of a young boy sitting on a curb and holding a baseball bat.

“Sparky, I think you should draw more of those little kids,” another illustrator advised him. “They’re pretty good.”

“It’s a high fly ball,” several Peanuts characters yell.

“Catch it, Charlie Brown!”

“Catch it, and the championship is ours!”

“Have you got it, Charlie Brown?”

“Don’t miss it!”

“Get under it, Charlie Brown!”

“Isn’t this exciting?”

“What if he drops it?”

“If he drops it, let’s all kick him.”

Schulz had five children of his own. They eventually grew up. But the Peanuts characters never did. They were stuck in the third grade forever.

Smart. Cruel. Sensitive. Sweet. They faked their way through book reports. Lied about missing homework. Forgot their lines in school plays. All skills they could use later in life. For third-graders, they acted a lot like adults.

“Oh, I won’t pull the ball away, Charlie Brown,” Lucy says. “I give you my bonded word.”

“All right, I’ll trust you,” Charlie Brown says. “I have an underlying faith in human nature. I believe that people who want to change can do so. And I believe that they should be given the chance to prove themselves.”

At the last second, of course, Lucy pulls the ball away, leaving Charlie flat on his back.

“Aaugh!” he says.

“Charlie Brown, your faith in human nature is an inspiration to all young people,” Lucy says.

This is how good Schulz’s work is. It holds up in mere words. No drawings required.

One moment, he’ll be quoting Rudyard Kipling. Another, he’s making fun of pop psychology.

He also had a way of fast-forwarding a conversation, the way a witty novelist or screenwriter might, skipping the obvious response and jumping to something else unexpectedly.

Most of all, he found humor in the tiny, vulnerable moments we all experience. His comic strips had more humanity than most of today’s movies.

And he did it mostly with his words.

“Tonight is Halloween,” Lucy tells Linus. “How come you’re not sitting out in a pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin and making a total, complete and absolute fool of yourself?”

“You have a nice way of wording things,” Linus says.

“Thank you,” Lucy says. “I work them out on little slips of paper beforehand.”

It is, in my mind, one of the longest creative bursts in American history. More than 18,000 comic strips, running daily for almost 50 years.

Like most Americans, I don’t remember a time when there wasn’t Peanuts. I don’t remember a time when Charles Schulz wasn’t at the top of the page.

And on Sunday, this grand run ends. Due to his much-publicized illness, Schulz’s last original comic strip appears this weekend, at the top of the comics page, where it has been forever.

“The bases are loaded again, and there’s still nobody out,” Schroeder tells Charlie Brown one spring day on the pitcher’s mound.

“So what do you think?” Charlie Brown finally asks.

“We live in difficult times,” Schroeder says.

So long, slugger.

Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. His e-mail address is chris.erskine@latimes.com.