This Day in Cultural History

January 3, 2000 – The final Peanuts daily cartoon strip appeared, leaving with a dying fall. Almost literally: Less than six weeks later, a stunned world would mourn the passing of Charles Schulz through colon cancer.

By and large, I stopped reading the strip after the early 1980s. An essay in my college newspaper only a couple of years before noted that the thrill had left the Peanuts gang. No way, I thought.

But over time, increasingly forced to the conclusion that Woodstock was a wuss and that the cartoon was no longer required reading, I was forced to agree with the writer that Charles Schulz had lost his way. I wasn’t surprised, then, to learn from reviews of David Michaelis’ recent biography, Schulz and Peanuts, that the creator of Charlie Brown and Co. suffered from deep-seated melancholy, even after his work had reached readers in some 75 countries and 21 languages. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether this depression traced back to childhood abandonment, the struggle to produce “every single one of the 17,897 strips” without assistants, or some other cause – the work reflected the struggle.

Actually, I’m happier now to read the “Classic Peanuts” strip in my Sunday paper that now bids fair to run forever, like a cartoon counterpart to “I Love Lucy.” It’s a bit like wanting to remember an elderly relative at a younger, more vibrant age.

And vibrant it was. There was a reason that the mascot at St. Cecilia football games – the pet beagle of the convent – was named Snoopy; why You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown became an unexpected musical hit; or why the holiday “Peanuts” specials, featuring the evocative jazz compositions of pianist Vince Guaraldi (departed this life all too soon), became such a beloved part of the “Wonder Years” of baby boomers. Whether it was Charlie Brown silently, perpetually holding the torch for “the little red-headed girl,” or Snoopy giddily doing battle with the Red Baron from his doghouse, Schulz captured the universal inner feelings of all ages, masterfully condensed into his troupe of youngsters.

Just how universal became to me when I visited the Twin Cities several years ago. As I walked through downtown St. Paul, searching for the statue of F. Scott Fitzgerald, I was astonished to find dozens of Snoopy characters all around, like the one in the picture above. Before he died, Schulz had granted permission to erect the statues to the sculpture-manufacturing company Tivoli Too. In fact, poor Scott was completely lost in the shuffle of not only dozens of cartoon characters, but even more tourists coming from all over the world to see Schulz’s creations – 450,000 in the first year alone. Scott had stayed lifesize, but the Peanuts crew had leaped from the crowded frames of the strip to become larger than life.