Posted from Glen Ellen, CA
“If you read the strip, you would know me. Everything I am goes into the strip.” Charles M. Schulz
After visiting the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, I had the privilege and pleasure of interviewing Jean Schulz, widow of Charles M. Schulz, creator of the iconic and beloved comic strip Peanuts. Jeannie, who chairs the museum’s board, generously shared stories about her husband (nicknamed Sparky), his creative process, and the museum that bears his name.
This is part two of a two-part series.
Jean Schulz and a Peanuts book
The Roads Traveled: What has made Peanuts so successful?
Jean Schulz: It’s philosophical, and what we all are like. Sparky said you also can’t discount that it was just fun to look at. There’s a lot of variation. The characters are nice-looking without being too cute, and they have different expressions. He also valued the black and white space and the graphic quality of the strip.
TRT: Is Charlie Brown really Charles Schulz and vice versa? What about the other characters?
JS: Sparky is Charlie Brown. The way he comes across is because Sparky always had a little bit of insecurity. He was a small boy, and an only child. He wasn’t outgoing, but he wasn’t reclusive. He had friends and liked to play sports. His family lived a quiet life within a small circle, and that was his nature and his milieu. They did simple things like going downtown on a bus, and visiting relatives in the country, and all of those things were etched in his memory. Sparky was curious and observant, and wanted to learn more. Sparky also was a composite of all the characters. Snoopy is what you’d like to be. People like Snoopy because we all have the sense that if I’d been born then (for instance, 1918), I would do this (be a WWI flying ace). Sparky said Linus is his thoughtful, literary reference. Lucy is his crabby self. He used to call his oldest daughter “fussbudget” and that’s the word for Lucy.
TRT: Which character are you?
JS: I’ve said that Sally is my favorite. I’m not as ditsy, but maybe he thought I was. I used to call him My Sweet Babboo, and he used that for Sally.
A display at the museum highlights Schulz’s creative process
TRT: What was his technique for developing a strip?
JS: Sparky had a quirky, fertile mind. His ideas came from everything. If you said something, he could turn it into something funny. It was a process of tweaking the idea and manipulating it to fit into four panels of the strip, his primary format, with the fourth panel as the payoff. There’s a pattern to the comics, like a novel, like a short story. With a Peanuts strip there’s exposition, making it richer, then a sort of end, and then there’s the Peanuts end. It’s the fourth panel that makes the first three funny. The fourth panel is a twist, and often it’s Charlie Brown getting squished or put down. Sparky was a storyteller, and he used to say, “I’m the writer, the director, the everything with a comic strip.” He was suited for it, and he worked really hard and all the time. He was always thinking about a situation in general, and often one in particular. His characters were always in his mind in one way or another.
TRT: I read that he described his life as being one of rejection. What did he mean by that?
JS: He did have successes, but his personality was shy and modest rather than blustering, so that even a victory such as winning the Caddy Championship at the club where he caddied was really a small victory, not a great success that was going to make him a braggart. One might say he was a realist and recognized this was pretty insignificant in the larger world. He was extremely sensitive and remembered many, many slights, so I guess it is a combination of those traits.
TRT: An exhibit in the museum says that Charles Schulz knew he wanted to be a cartoonist when he was six years old.
JS: He and his dad read the comics on Saturday night, and more on Sunday. They would discuss them. Comics were what TV is to the next generation. Sparky’s life was like a fairy tale. When he was born, an uncle nicknamed him Sparky after a comic strip, he and his dad shared a love of comic strips, he lived his dream, and died on the day his last comic strip was published. That’s a good life.
Ever hopeful Charlie Brown as depicted on the museum’s tile mural
TRT: What was the inspiration behind Lucy never letting Charlie Brown kick the football?
JS: The way Sparky explained it, there was no eureka moment when it hit him that it would be great to have Lucy pull the football. He said that when he was a kid, the football holder would inevitably trick the kicker. So here you have him seeing a real life event, thinking back to being a kid, then thinking who in his “repertory company ” would fit the situation. Then you have the issue of it’s a popular strip and how do I do it again?
TRT: Who was the little red-haired girl?
JS: She was based on a woman he dated for a short time. He’d open the car door and let her in, and she’d punch the lock button down on his side and make a funny face at him. He put it in the comic years later.
Jean Schulz in the Strip Rotation Gallery showing the enlarged cartoon images
TRT: How unfortunate that he died before the museum opened. What was your thinking behind creating the museum?
JS: I knew it was important to save the strips and have people see his original work to learn something from them. There’s a lot revealed when seeing them blown up in size. It’s more impactful than reading them in newspapers. The museum was planned, and we talked about it. The basic things he knew, like putting his studio upstairs rather than downstairs because we didn’t want it to be first thing people saw and then think they’d seen everything. We also discussed that we wouldn’t have a computer station for children. It was very deliberate because Sparky said they can do that in lots of other places. He said what he did is paper, ink, pen, and pencil, and if children do something on a computer here they wouldn’t understand that. What he did is almost a dying art. I don’t know if there are many cartoonists who do their work on paper. Sparky hand-drew everything. The payoff with the museum is that people are taken back into their childhoods and discover things they didn’t know. It’s been a source of great satisfaction to me and to those who work here. I used to say if only one person comes in a day, we want it to be there for that one person.
TRT: Your bio says you’re a licensed pilot and do trapeze workouts. Tell me more about those activities.
JS: I flew from about 1965 to 1985 with my first husband, and in about six or seven air races with my mother as her co-pilot. Three were cross-country, and the others were one-day overnight races. After 1985, we had a jet with Sparky’s son as the pilot, and I flew in the simulator for that plane so I could maybe be a safety pilot. Trapeze is a longer story. It has become the thing I do on Saturdays, and I try not to let other things get in the way.
TRT: What would Charles Schulz be commenting about in Peanuts today?
JS: He’d be writing about Twitter and tweeting. He wouldn’t do it or understand why they do it. Don’t you think Woodstock would be the original tweeter?
TRT: What do you believe is Charles Schulz’s legacy?
JS: The legacy is creating characters that people can relate to in their own situations in life, good or bad. Somehow the Peanuts characters allow people to get some insight into themselves, or relieve pressures they’re having.