Snoopy’s Legal Guardian

During 27 years of marriage to “Peanuts” creator Charles M. Schulz, Jeannie Schulz sat by her husband’s side at business dinners and sometimes visited his studio as he worked.

She was not his business partner, nor his creative “other half.” In the world of “Peanuts,” she had no title -- and that was fine with her.

Over the years, though, the cartoonist whom she and others called Sparky hinted that her relationship with his work might change one day. When I’m gone all this is yours, he would tell her. You can be anything you want.

“He was always kidding,” she said. “He kept everything he did light like that so you never really knew what he meant.”

Then, six years ago, Charles Schulz died at age 77. Jeannie Schulz was 60, a grandmother devoted to her family and charity work. But suddenly, she was also the new chief of Creative Associates, the $35-million-a-year enterprise that managed a cartoon heritage loved by millions.

Although Charles Schulz’s son Craig from a previous marriage would be there as president, she would be responsible for helping oversee decisions on everything from pro bono appearances of “Peanuts” characters to licensing agreements.

Before her husband’s death, she had taken the lead on the creation of a museum honoring his legacy. Now it, too, was left to her to complete.

Her resume seemed unequal to the task. But having once conquered fear in the air, she learned also to trust herself on the ground.

If daring were genetic it would be easy to understand Jeannie Schulz’s chutzpah.

In the 1960s -- before the women’s movement propelled women into places they had never gone before -- her then 50-year-old mother began pilot training. Jeannie took lessons as well, and mother and daughter flew as pilot and co-pilot in the Powder Puff Derby, a cross-country, all-women’s air race.

“She was always more of a liberated woman than a housewife,” Jeannie recalled.

In those early flying lessons Jeannie learned to handle her phobias as well as a plane. It wasn’t that she was so brave, she simply knew how to put fear in its place.

That’s how she ended up on a trapeze.

In 1990, when she saw others flying trapeze at a Club Med in Mexico, Schulz joined the line, setting aside her fear of heights. She was 50 and already a grandmother, but why not try? On the climb up the tall, steel ladder, she said, she looked down, petrified. All she could do was keep climbing. Standing on a platform at the top of the ladder, she was supposed to grab a bar, lean backward, hang upside down by her knees, swing herself out, then release into the arms of a “catcher.”

How on earth did I get myself into this? she thought, as she listened to the instructions.

She couldn’t do it. The best she could do was hang from the bar by her hands and then drop into a net below, humiliated. She looked at those who were flying and thought, They’re no better than I am, no stronger.

Back home in Santa Rosa, each time she took her grandchildren to the playground, she did pull-ups on the monkey bars, as if preparing for the next meeting with the schoolyard bully.

She was always tenacious. Born in England to German parents, Jean Forsyth was raised mostly in California. She had worked as a telephone operator in her younger years, had earned a degree in English literature from Sonoma State, and was a divorcee when she met Schulz.

They met at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena, the rink Schulz built in Santa Rosa.

In 1973 the two were married in a private ceremony at Schulz’s home in Santa Rosa. It was the second marriage for Schulz, who had been divorced from his first wife earlier that year.

While he was busy drawing, she was busy too.

There was an active family life -- she had two children from her previous marriage, and he had five. There were the charities and civic groups, including the League of Women Voters and Canine Companions for Independence, which supplies trained dogs to people with disabilities. There was the Schulz family philanthropy to the town: an ice skating show each Christmas, a baseball field and other donations.”He was pleased with what I was doing, and probably glad I was staying out of his hair,” she said.

But there were times when she influenced “Peanuts” without even trying. She is the reason Charlie Brown’s little sister, Sally, coos “my Sweet Babboo” to her crush, the blanket-toting Linus.

“I used to call Sparky ‘Sweet Babboo,’ and he took it for the comic strip,” she said. “Then I couldn’t use it anymore.”

Her years of flying with her mother became fodder for a 1975 strip with Peppermint Patty and Marcie “flying” atop Snoopy’s dog house.

“You didn’t give Sparky ideas, he took them,” she said.

*

In 1995, author and philosopher Sam Keen erected a trapeze.

With a teacher like Keen, there was no reason for Jeannie to give her fear of heights a front-row seat inside her mind.

But after about seven weeks of driving 20 miles to Keen’s Sonoma farm and ranch, Jeannie had not flown through the air with the greatest of ease. In fact, she hadn’t “flown” at all.

One day on the drive to the ranch, she told herself, I really don’t have to do this. That day, she tried once more to follow the instructions that were supposed to make her airborne. This time she flew into the arms of the catcher.

“At that point,” she said, “I was hooked.”

Trapeze demands focus and timing. You must trust your partner to catch you. Trapeze is in some ways a team effort, some ways an individual sport.

“It’s not like a baseball game where you feel bad if you strike out, or tennis where if you miss an overhead you’ve blown something,” Jeannie said. “Here the performance is your own.”

Trapeze was helping her learn to trust her body, to revel in its abilities -- age aside. This was not one of those loves, like golf, she shared with Sparky. It was hers alone.

She continued setting goals and reaching them.

“I wanted to do a knee hang [without a safety belt] for my 60th birthday,” she said, a feat that required, above all, courage.

While she practiced flying, she also practiced building.

Two longtime family friends -- Ed Anderson and Mark Cohen -- had been urging Schulz to create a museum, but Schulz had been reluctant. “It was that self-effacing way that he dealt with almost everything that was flattering,” Jeannie said. “That was his way ... to not set himself up for defeat.”

At a meeting of “Peanuts” licensees in Arizona in 1997, Jeannie broke through. Present was Yoshiteru Otani, a Japanese artist Schulz admired for his imaginative treatment of “Peanuts” characters, his whimsy and understanding.

Jeannie Schulz posed a question: What if Otani agreed to create works for the museum? The museum would be more than a repository of “Peanuts.” It would be a thoughtful celebration of Schulz’s art and its influence.

“Sparky simply said, ‘Yes,’ and that was enough for me to go ahead,” she recalled.

Otani was stunned by the invitation.

“Jean Schulz asked me if I could be involved in a museum which celebrates Schulz’s artwork,” Otani said through an interpreter. “I was as surprised when I was selected,” as if “Charlie Brown had kicked the ball that Lucy was holding.”

She began assembling a museum board. With Anderson and Cohen ,she visited the presidential libraries of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and the museum in Salinas celebrating author John Steinbeck.

They brought their observations back to Schulz, and he had the final word.

Computer stations were out. The cartoonist never used them, knew nothing about them.

The “happiest place on earth” ambience was out. “I don’t want this to be a Disneyland,” he said.

Schulz was adamant that the museum focus on the strip, not him. “If you want to know me,” he often said, “read my strip.”

That request spoke to his modesty, but also to his relationship with other “Peanuts” products. Beginning in the late 1950s, “Peanuts” characters entered the lucrative world of merchandising. But with the exception of the early books and film productions, such as “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” Charles Schulz was not their creator.

“He just wanted to be known for the thing he put so much effort into,” she said.

Charlie Brown and the gang debuted in U.S. newspapers on Oct. 2, 1950. From then on Schulz drew, inked and lettered the strip by himself, creating more than 18,000 strips. Schulz had been generous over the years, giving original strips to friends, or fans, or nonprofits that auctioned them at fundraisers. As news of the museum spread, some friends and fans returned the strips. Jeannie also began purchasing others from auction houses, off EBay and from private sellers. The early strips cost as much as $10,000.

By the fall of 1999, the building plans were complete, permits granted. Soon the board would select a museum director. To top it off, Jeannie had met her 60th birthday goal on the trapeze.

Then came November.

Doctors informed Schulz that he had cancer. On Nov. 16, while at his studio, he complained of pain in his legs. He was taken to a hospital, where emergency surgery cleared a blockage in the abdominal aorta.

Schulz later suffered a series of small strokes that left him partially blind. Reading was difficult, and though he could still draw, he was unable to keep up his strip-a-day schedule.

By the end of the year, Schulz announced his retirement and the end of the strip. Before his illness, Jeannie had practiced trapeze three times a week. Even now, with everything changing around her, she did not break the routine.

“Even when he was in the hospital, he’d say, ‘You go and do trapeze, I’m OK. It’s important for you.’ He knew that it was a big thing for me. And he was proud of me for doing it.”

At Keen’s ranch she continued to practice. Now trapeze was a refuge, a place to be bold, to revel in small victories and put aside, while in the air, everything happening below.

In January 2000, Schulz sat in on interviews for a museum director and expressed his preference. The evening of Feb. 12, he went for a skate at his arena. That night he died in his sleep with Jeannie at his side. The National Cartoonist Society website posted a drawing of Snoopy weeping. Schulz was buried in nearby Sebastopol.

Jeannie hardly had time to mourn -- the museum was underway and she had a legacy to tend.

“I’m a poor substitute, but I’m the only thing they’ve got and I take that seriously because I take his memory very seriously,” she said.

Now, she offers the final word on her husband’s genius: She approved a labyrinth in the shape of Snoopy’s head, a garden with a “kite-eating tree,” a timeline of Sparky’s life. She decided to recreate his studio, just as it had been when he died.

The Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, a nonprofit built with $8 million in private money, has been open to the public since August 2002.

Guests walk through a gallery filled with strips and view them as if looking at old pictures in a family photo album. There are historically based exhibits as well, such as “Top Dogs: Comic Canines Before and After Snoopy,” and a tribute to jazz musician Vince Guaraldi, father of the “Peanuts” sound.

“We have fine people running these things and they could run it without me,” Jeannie said, “but as long as I’m around there’s always small details that I’d like to know about.” She spends a portion of each day reviewing, photographing and cataloging new “Peanuts” products. “I periodically see things I don’t care for,” she said. And sometimes she rejects them, like the idea for an arcade “crane game,” in which players would manipulate large steel claws to grab a plush Snoopy. Most players, of course, would lose their money. In the version Jeannie ultimately approved, everyone who pays to play wins something.

Sometimes she still wonders what Sparky would say about all she’s done. Would he like it?

More often she sounds sure of herself, the voice of a woman who has learned to trust herself in the sky and on the ground.