Last Updated: March 27, 2000
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Appreciation
You’re a good man, Charles Schulz
Of the hundreds of strips I’ve read, ‘Peanuts’ was
one of the few that touched my emotions in a small way every day
By Gregory Favre
Years ago our parish church would hold its summer fair, a two-day event
that drew almost everybody in town. Well, it was a small town.
There were cakewalks and board games, card games and spinning wheels
that landed on winning numbers. And the kids saved their pennies and nickels
for weeks in advance in anticipation of parlaying our small cache into
real paper money.
Gambling, of course, was illegal in Mississippi back in those days of
the early forties, long before the casino appeared on the land where my
brother and I used to ride our horses.
But this was for the church! The priests were the dealers and the sheriff
and deputies helped run the garnes.
My favorite was the one based on comic strips. There were about a dozen
names of strips on the table — Snuffy Smith, Dagwood, Annie, the Phantom,
Gasoline Alley, Dick Tracy, Terry and the Pirates and others. You placed
your nickel or dime and the wheel would spin and land on the name of the
winner.
I would go back and forth between the Phantom and Terry and the Pirates
most of the time because I loved those comics. The drawings were wonderful
in both and there was an exciting adventure each day.
Comics were indeed special. And for many of us, they still are. Boys
and girls may grow up to be men and women, but, if we are lucky, we carry
our love for comics into our adult years.
That’s why my heart was saddened by the news that Charles Schulz would
be discontinuing “Peanuts.”
For more than four decades in the newspaper business, I have had the
opportunity to read almost every new and old comic produced during that
time. Like so many editors, I have bought hundreds and rejected even more.
And every once in a while there was that single moment when one was
just so good that it made you tingle. It had to be like that for the editors
50 years ago when “Peanuts” hit their desks for the first time.
It was like that for me with “Calvin and Hobbes” and “The Far Side”
and “Doonesbury” and “For Better or For Worse.” And a few others.
My office walls are covered with cartoons and there is a room at home
that is the same. And perched highest is an original “Peanuts” signed by
Schulz, a gift from him that I always will cherish.
Great cartoonists, on the funny pages or the editorial pages, can trigger
our whole range of emotions. They can make us happy or sad, angry or mellow.
They touch us instantly, but the impact is often deep and lasting.
How many of us and our readers have a “Peanuts” or “Calvin” on our refrigerators?
How many can recite the words of the strips of yesteryear?
There was a particular “Peanuts” Sunday strip of long ago that I often
recall.
In it Charlie Brown and Linus are sitting on a bench and the little
red-headed girl is sitting on another bench.
Charlie looks at Linus and says, “If I wasn’t a nothing, I would go
talk to that little red-headed girl. If I was something and she was nothing,
I would go talk to her. If I was something and she was something, I would
go talk to her. If I was nothing and she was nothing, I would go talk to
her.”
Finally, Linus looks at Charlie quizzically and says, “For a nothing
Charlie Brown, you are really something.”
It’s no wonder that Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Snoopy, Woodstock, Peppermint
Patty, and others, have become a part of our lives, family members for
readers around the world.
And “good grief” and “you blockhead” and “happiness is a warm puppy,”
along with other phrases, are a part of our everyday language.
When President Carter left the White House and started teaching at Emory
University, he said he often used Peanuts examples in his lectures. “Charles
Schulz gave me the simplest and also the most profound illustrations of
complex points I wanted to make to my students,” he said.
Ask Mr. Schulz about his work and he says if fine art is like ballet,
then cartooning is like burlesque.
That may be true, but I will forever think of “Peanuts” as actor Samuel
L. Jackson once said about the strip: “The agony of persistence and the
glory of hope always shined through the lives of the characters and touched
a kid in me that walked a lot of the same paths.”
Millions have been touched in the same way, every day.
And for that we all can thank Charles (Sparky) Schulz, a gentle, funny
man who is really something.
Favre is vice president for news of The McClatchy Co. and a former
ASNE president.
