Schulz remembers the early days in Minnesota, before he lived on 'Peanuts'

Approaching his 75th birthday celebration Wednesday, Charles Monroe Schulz could wax nostalgic about growing up as a barber's kid in the Twin Cities.

But forget about the back-yard ice rinks and the rumbling streetcars. Schulz would rather be frank.

"Those were some terrible times," he said the other day, after his admittedly shaky hand sketched out yet another Sunday "Peanuts" comic strip. More than 200 million readers will see his work today in 2,400 newspapers in 68 countries.

But the $20 million a year that Schulz grosses today can't erase the memory of too many pancake-dinner yesterdays. He always thought his parents really liked pancakes; now he realizes it was all they could afford.

From the studio in his sumptuous Santa Rosa home about an hour north of San Francisco, Schulz recently recalled the Depression, the rejections and "those early defeats you never get over."

School is war

Schulz was a 6-foot-tall, 136-pound outcast at St. Paul Central High School, and his cartoons were deemed unworthy for the senior yearbook in 1940.

"I don't know which was worse - the Army or Central High School," Schulz said. "I was a bland, stupid-looking kid who started off bad and failed everything and hated the whole time.

"Then my art teacher asked me to draw some school scenes for the annual. I was delighted and waited anxiously the last couple days of school until the yearbook came out - with none of my cartoons."

His mother, Dena, died of cancer just as her only child turned 20. And Schulz's father, Carl, nearly lost his 35-cents-a-cut, three-chair Family Barbershop during the Depression.

"At one point, he was seven months behind on the rent," Schulz said. "I asked him once how in the world he could keep that up, and he said the man who owns the building can't find anyone with money to rent the place, so he's glad for what he gets."

Then there was Schulz's love life. As a fledgling cartoonist at what is now Art Instruction Schools in Minneapolis, Schulz fell in love with a red-haired co-worker named Donna Johnson and promptly proposed.

She said: "No" and married a Minneapolis firefighter named Al Wold instead. Today, Al and Donna are celebrating his retirement on a vacation in England. Their 50-year anniversary is coming up in 2000.

"I loved that little girl but her mother convinced her I would never amount to anything," said Schulz, who immortalized Donna as the red-haired girl who frustrates his alter ego, Charlie Brown, as much as any kite-eating tree or quick-yanking football holder ever could.

"You never do get over your first love," Schulz said. "More than having your cartoons rejected or three-putting the 18th green, the whole of you is rejected when a woman says: `You're not worth it.' "

Birthday wish

Schulz plans to celebrate his 75th birthday much like the previous few: golf and dinner with his friends and some cake with his second wife, Jeannie, and his five grown children.

Schulz does have a secret birthday wish, though.

"My goal in life," he said, "is to meet Andrew Wyeth" - the 80-year-old Pennsylvania painter who won the 1990 Congressional Gold Medal, one of America's most highly regarded living artists.

"I'll never be an Andrew Wyeth, and that's kind of sad," Schulz said. "I wish what I did was fine art, but I doubt it is. It's well researched and authentically drawn, but I do not regard what I am doing as great art.

"Comic strips are too transient. Art is something so good it speaks to succeeding generations. . . . I doubt my strip will hold up for several generations to come."

Not that he's about to stop producing. After 47 years, Schulz still draws his own strip every day without the drafters and creative teams employed by some of his younger colleagues.

"Some days, I just look at my yellow attorney's pad all day and think of nothing, but today I finished two Sunday strips," he said.

His hands are getting shaky, but when the computer reduces his drawings, the quivering lines are hard to detect.

"I kind of prop one hand against the other," he said. "And it all comes a little slower."

He's 10 years past a typical retirement age, but has no plans to pull the plug on his moon-faced characters with their childish bodies and grownup anxeties.

"I'll keep drawing as long as I stay well - there's nothing else I know how to do," he said. "I enjoy - if you can use that word - drawing just like a pianist plays piano, a poet writes poems and a painter does watercolors. They do it because life wouldn't mean anything if they didn't. It's my life."

Largely ignored locally

Of all the Twin Cities' native artistic sons - from F . Scott Fitzgerald to LeRoy Neiman, from Prince to Garrison Keillor - Schulz might have put the biggest imprint of all in the collective psyche of American pop culture.

Through Linus, he gets credit for popularizing the term, "security blanket." His "Happiness is a warm puppy" line became '60s bumper-sticker fodder. He's inspired umpteen TV specials and a Broadway play, not to mention an amusement park at the Mall of America.

"But, incredibly, the state and the Twin Cities largely ignore him," said Dave Mruz, a Minneapolis art historian and cartoon buff. "It's unbelievable that his hometown has no permanent statues, no displays at the History Center, nothing to recognize him."

Well, almost nothing. Schulz's memorial plaque - along with those honoring Fitzgerald , aviator Charles Lindbergh, hockey coach Herb Brooks and politician Hubert Humphrey - recently moved seven blocks from St. Paul's old train depot to Town Square. And another plaque hangs in the hallway of Central High School's Hall of Fame.

"Nobody would have believed that when I went to school," he said. "At our 25th reunion, I was on the list of people nobody knew what happened to."

The last time he visited Minnesota, in 1994, Schulz went up to the apartment above O'Gara's Bar and Grill at Snelling and Selby Avs. where he lived as a child, and he sketched a Snoopy on the wall. Next to the oversized snout of a beagle known worldwide, Schulz drew a shaky little heart.

"I suppose we all go through phases in our lives," Schulz said. "I don't know that they were the best years. There were some good ones and some nasty ones. The streetcar track no longer runs out front and it's kind of sad the barbershop's not there. But that's home, nevertheless."

Charles M. Schulz
A Minnesota chronology

Nov. 26, 1922/ Charles Monroe Schulz is born in Flat No. 2 at 919 Chicago Av. S. in Minneapolis, the only child of St. Paul barber Carl Schulz and his wife, Dena.

1928/ Schulz's childhood home is at 1604 Dayton Av. in St. Paul. As a kindergartner at Mattocks School, Schulz draws a man shoveling snow with palm trees in the background and his teacher says: "Charles, someday you'll be an artist." (Relatives had recently moved to California and sent word of palm trees.) Schulz later attends Richard Gordon Elementary School.

1934/ The Schulzes are given a black and white mutt. "Spike was totally uncontrollable. He loved to ride in my father's car, though, so when he'd get loose, the only way you could get him to come would be to honk the horn. Spike and Snoopy have similar markings." 1936/ Schulz enters St. Paul Central High School, where he says he routinely flunked classes. "I even flunked dating, which was understandable, because who'd have gone out with me?"

By this time, his family moves to 473 Macalester St. in St. Paul. He works as a caddie at Highland Park Golf Club.

1941/ Schulz takes cartooning-by-mail courses from the Federal Schools, a Minneapolis correspondence program. His instructor, Frank Wing, gives him a C-plus in Division 5: "Drawing of Children."

1943/ Drafted into the Army, he serves as a infantryman, staff sergeant and machine gunner, although he never gets too close to the European front lines.

1945/ Schulz earns $85 a week as an instructor at the Federal Schools, now known as Art Instructions School. In the evenings, in the apartment he shared with his father over what is now O'Gara's bar in St. Paul, he letters other cartoonists' comics for Timeless Topix, owned by the Roman Catholic Church.

1947/ He sells a cartoon feature called Li'l Folks to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. It runs weekly for two years.

1948/ Schulz sells a panel to Saturday Evening Post for $40 of a young boy reading a book in a big easy chair. "I wanted to be somebody. All of us want to be somebody. I remember so well that first night I was able to say: `I am a cartoonist.

' " June 1950/ He boards a train from St. Paul to New York with a portfolio of cartoons. Signs a five-year deal with United Feature Syndicate, which calls for a 50-50 split of profits. When the syndicate names his strip "Peanuts," Schulz hates it because, "to me, `peanuts' means insignificant and unimportant."

Oct. 2, 1950/ "Peanuts" debuts in seven newspapers. Schulz lives at 5521 Oliver Av. S. in Minneapolis.

1952/ Strip spreads to 40 U.S. papers and one in Japan. Schulz teaches correspondence cartoon drawing classes and has a studio at the Bureau of Engraving, 500 S. 4th St.

1958/ With "Peanuts" now in 355 U.S. papers and 40 foreign dailies, Schulz moves from his home at 112 W. Minnehaha Pkwy. to Santa Rosa, Calif. He builds a 12-room house and studio on four acres with the address One Snoopy Place.

Fun facts about
Charles M. Schulz

Sniffy and the Red Baron?

Originally, Schulz was going to name the adorable beagle in his strip "Sniffy," which he modeled after his childhood mutt Spike. "I was walking around the Powers department store in Minneapolis and there was a little magazine stand. I saw a comic with a dog named Sniffy and thought, `Oh, no, there goes my dog's name.' Then I remembered a long time ago when my mother said: `If we ever have another dog, we should name it Snoopy.' "

Real-life inspirations

In his early cartoonist days at the Art Instruction Schools in Minneapolis, Schulz worked with people named Frieda Rich and Charlie Brown, who went on to become a probation officer for the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center. Schulz says he has transferred many of his own early frustrations into his main character, Charlie Brown. "Oh, definitely, the poor guy," Schulz said. "I worry about almost all there is to worry about. And because I worry, Charlie Brown has to worry." Both Frieda and Charlie have died, but another old Minneapolis pal, Linus Maurer, lives in southern California and talks with Schulz occasionally by phone.

Heckuva bird bath

As a childhood St. Paul Saints hockey fan and an ice skating aficionado, Schulz still skates frequently in Santa Rosa, where the city's ice arena fell on hard times in 1968. "The arena wasn't in great shape, and when I heard it was going to close, I said, `I wish there was something we could do about it,' " Schulz said. So, in 1969, Schulz built the Redwood Empire Arena, an architectural gem a block from his studio. That's one of the reasons he was inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame.

For more

If you want to visit Snoopy's Doghouse on the Internet, check out www.unitedmedia.com/comics/peanuts/

To learn more about Schulz, read "Good Grief! A Biography of Charles M. Schulz," by Rheta Grimsley Johnson.