The "Peanuts" gallery
Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts, died 23 years ago last month, yet his beloved characters live on as youthful as ever. Lee Cowan takes us to his hometown. Some people use a diary to pen their innermost thoughts. Charles Schultz, though, he had Peanuts instead. There's no better emotional outlet than kicking a football. It was a release for his emotions. This time I'm really going to kick it.
I'm going to kick the habit. This is the end of all my faults. He drew because he had to do it. Gee, I got a candy bar. Boy, I got three cookies. Hey, I got a package of gum. I got a rock.
Was he a happy person? Um, I think he was. His widow, Gene Schultz, paused. Well, because it's a complicated question. She married him back in 1973, but she says it wasn't until after his death, 23 years ago last month. Really all you need is about four or five pins and a pencil. That she realized the simple lines of those oh so familiar characters were actually quite complex. I've spent the last 22 years doing my penance and my penance is learning how hard he worked.
Was he a workaholic, you think? He pretty much was, yeah. Schultz created a world unlike anything we'd seen in the funny pages. Peanuts wasn't so much a comic strip as it was a mirror. A tale of adult angst told through children who never aged and a dog who imagined he could be anything. Peanuts first appeared in 1950 in only seven newspapers. It may not be art with a capital A, but it provides an awful lot of pleasure. By the 60s, the gang was on the cover of Time Magazine.
Apollo astronauts even named their spaceships after them. Sholly Brown, Houston, over. Schultz had knocked it out of the park. I got a hit! I got a hit! I finally got a hit! I mean think of the comics before then. They were all slapstick. People getting hit over the head or pies. This was something saying, hey I'm not happy, I wonder if you're not happy.
I'm feeling lonely, I'm feeling anxious, I'm heartbroken. Peanuts had all of that. Stefan Pastis is the mind behind the popular syndicated comic Pearls Before Swine. This is Rat. Rat is kind of the star of the strip, along with Pig. Pastis was an attorney who so wanted to follow in Charles Schultz's penstrokes that he tracked him down here. So this is it, huh? Yep.
This is it. At the Warm Puppy Cafe in Santa Rosa, California, where Schultz spent every morning having coffee and an English muffin. And I knelt on one knee by the side of the table. And in the worst opening line of all time, I said, Mr. Schultz, my name is Stefan Pastis, and I'm an attorney. And he turned white because he thought he was getting served with a subpoena. That moment turned into an hour of encouragement.
Sparky drew this from me. Pastis says it was a kindness that Sparky, as his friends called Schultz, shared with others too. If you did a cartooning tree, you would see we all come from that common trunk, and that trunk is Sparky. How many people do you think he influenced? All of them. You think? Yeah. This is from 1958, and here we see Snoopy on top of the doghouse. Benjamin L.
Clark is the curator of the Charles M. Schultz Museum and co-author of a book, celebrating the centennial of Schultz's birth with a look through 100 artifacts, like the Peabody Award that Schultz won for this. A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired right here on CBS back in 1965. Schultz had carefully curated the look of his characters, but now he had to figure out how they sounded, and he insisted they be voiced by real children. Charlie Brown. You're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem. And he said, no, let's get some real kids in here.
And it'll sound like kids. Like, okay, Sparky. Schultz always went to bat for the good of his characters. One especially. Hey, guess he just walked in over here. It's Franklin. Franklin first appeared in print in 1968, at a time when some states were still fighting desegregation.
And he showed Franklin in class with Peppermint Patty and some of the other kids. That's when the real pushback came. Newspapers threatened to drop him. But he didn't back down. He did not back down. Not one bit. You print it the way I draw it.
Over the course of 50 years, Schultz lovingly crafted nearly 18,000 peanut strips. So many, in fact, he nearly wore a hole, cleaned through his drafting table. How does that happen? I mean, I don't know. God, to think of all the strips that came off that. The very last strip Charles Schultz ever drew may have been the only one that made his fans cry. It was a formal goodbye, filled with gratitude. And then he left us too.
He dies as that last strip is on the presses. He dies in the middle of the night. It's so poetic and crazy, almost as though there wouldn't be a him without the strip. His table at the Warm Puppy Cafe sits empty now, forever reserved for the man who somehow distilled all our fears and foibles and frustrations, intergroup of kids, and one beloved beagle. He said, if you can draw something that strikes people and means something to them, that's a wonderful thing to be able to do.
CBS Sunday Morning, CBS News, news, peanuts, charlez m schulz, cartoon, charlie brown, snoopy, lee cowan