And so, 25 years have gone by. At one strip per day, that comes to almost 10,000 comic strips. Actually, this is not so much when you consider the longevity of many other comic features. Employees receive wristwatches if they have put in this much time with a company, but a comic-strip artist just keeps on drawing. (Somehow a comic-strip artist is never regarded as an employee.) I have been asked many times if I ever dreamed that Peanuts would become as successful as it is, and I think I always surprise people when I say, “Well, frankly, I guess I did expect it, because, after all, it was something I had planned for since I was six years old.” Obviously I did not know that Snoopy was going to go to the moon, and I did not know that the phrase “happiness is a warm puppy” would prompt hundreds of other such definitions, and I did not know that the term “security blanket” would become part of the American language; but I did have the hope that I would be able to contribute something to a profession that I can say now I have loved all my life.
It is important to me, when I am discussing comic strips, to make certain that everyone knows that I do not regard what I am doing as Great Art. I am certainly not ashamed of the work I do, nor do I apologize for being involved in a field that is generally regarded as occupying a very low rung on the entertainment ladder. I am all too aware of the fact that when a reviewer for a sophisticated journal wishes to downgrade the latest Broadway play, one of the worst things he can say about it is that it has a comic-strip plot. This is also true for movie reviewers, but I tend to believe that movies, as a whole, really do not rank that much higher than comic strips as an art form. The comic strip can be an extremely creative form of endeavor. On its highest level, we find a wonderful combination of writing and drawing, generally done by one writer. But there are several factors that work against comic strips, preventing them from becoming a true art form in the mind of the public. In the first place, they are reproduced with the express purpose of helping publishers sell their publications. The paper on which they appear is not of the best quality, so the reproductions lose much of the beauty of the originals. The artist is also forced to serve many masters—he must please the syndicate editor, as well as the countless editors who purchase his comic strip. The strip is not always exhibited in the best place, but is forced to compete on the same page with other strips that may be printed larger or enjoy a better position. And there are always annoying things like copyright stickers, which can break up the pleasing design of a panel, or the intrusion of titles into first panels in order to save space. The true artist, working on his canvas, does not have to put up with such desecrations.
There is a trend these days to try to prove that comic strips are true art by exhibiting them in galleries, either for people simply to enjoy viewing, or for customers to purchase. It seems to me that although this is a laudable effort, it is begging the question, because how we distinguish something doesn’t matter nearly as much as the purpose it serves. The comic strip serves its purpose in an admirable way, for there is no medium that can compete with it for readership or for longevity. There are numerous comic strips that have been enjoyed by as many as 60 million readers a day, for a period of fifty years. Having a large audience does not, of course, prove that something is necessarily good, and I subscribe to the theory that only a creation that speaks to succeeding generations can truly be labeled art. Unfortunately, very few comic strips seem to do this.
In my earliest recollections of drawing I seem to be at a small blackboard with a paper roller at the top on which are printed the ABC’s. It was from this roller that I was able to learn the alphabet before I began kindergarten, and I know that I drew constantly on the blackboard and had it for many years.
It may have been on the first day at kindergarten, or at least during the first week, when the teacher handed out big crayons and huge sheets of white wrapping paper and told us to lie on the floor and draw something. Several of my mother’s relatives had recently moved from Twin Cities to Needles, California, and I had heard my mother reading a letter from one of them telling of the sandstorms in Needles and also describing the tall palm trees. So when the teacher told us to draw whatever came to our minds, being familiar with the Minnesota snowstorms I drew a man shoveling snow, but then added a palm tree to the background.
I recall being somewhat puzzled when I was drawing the snow shovel because I was not quite sure how to put it in proper perspective. I knew that drawing the shovel square was not right, but I didn’t know how to solve the problem. At any rate, it didn’t seem to bother the teacher. She came around during the project, looked down at my drawing, and said, “Someday, Charles, you’re going to be an artist.”
I never knew what family problems caused us to make the move, but in 1930, when I was six years old, my mother and father and I drove from St. Paul to Needles in a 1928 Ford. I believe the trip took us almost two weeks. We remained in Needles for almost a year and I suppose there were some happy times, but I think my dad was disillusioned with what he saw. He had intended to continue northwest and settle in Sacramento, but somehow he never made the final move. After a year, we moved back to St. Paul and he repurchased his barbershop. I have memories of the trip to Needles, but I don’t remember a single thing about the return trip to St. Paul. We settled in a neighborhood about two blocks from my dad’s barbershop and most of my playtime life revolved around the yard of the grade school across the street from our apartment. In the wintertime we played in the deep snow, and in the summertime we either played baseball in the schoolyard or used its sandy wastes as the Sahara Desert when inspired by seeing movies such as The Lost Patrol with Victor McLaglen.
I was drawing cartoons during those years but created very few original characters. Most of the time I copied Buck Rogers or Walt Disney figures, or some of the characters in Tim Tyler’s Luck. I was fascinated by the animals in this feature.
Early influences on my work were many. I continued to be a great fan of all the Disney characters when I was in grade school, and I also enjoyed Popeye and Wimpy very much. I used to decorate my loose-leaf binders with drawings of Mickey Mouse, The Three Little Pigs, and Popeye, and whenever friends in class would see these cartoons, I would be asked to draw them on their notebooks as well. I used to buy every Big Little Book and comic magazine that came out and study all of the various cartoonists’ techniques. When I reached high school age, the work of Milt Caniff and Al Capp influenced me considerably, as well as that of some of the earlier cartoonists such as Clare Briggs (“When a Fella Needs a Friend”). I also thought there was no one who drew funnier and more warm-hearted cartoons than J. R. Williams. But the man who influenced me the most was Roy Crane with his drawings of Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy. His rollicking style laid the groundwork for many cartoonists who followed him. A book collection of Krazy Kat was published sometime in the late 1940s, which did much to inspire me to create a feature that went beyond the mere actions of ordinary children. After World War II, I began to study the Krazy Kat strip for the first time, for during my younger years I never had the opportunity to see a newspaper that carried it.
Also in my high school years, I became a Sherlock Holmes fanatic and used to buy scrapbooks at the local five-and-dime and fill them with Sherlock Holmes stories in comic-book form. A friend of mine named Shermy was one of my faithful readers, and when I started Peanuts I used his name for one of the original characters.
My scholastic career got off to a good start when I was very young. I received a special diploma in the second grade for being the outstanding boy student, and in the third and fifth grades I was moved ahead so suddenly that I was the smallest kid in the class. Somehow, I survived the early years of grade school, but when I entered junior high school, I failed everything in sight. High school proved not much better. There was no doubt I was absolutely the worst physics student in the history of St. Paul Central High School. It was not until I became a senior that I earned any respectable grades at all. I have often felt that some semblance of maturity began to arrive at last. I saved that final report card because it was the only one that seemed to justify those long years of agony.
While I was a senior, my very fine teacher of illustration, Miss Minette Paro, invited me to draw a series of cartoons about some of the activities around school for our senior annual. I was delighted to do this and set about it quickly, and promptly presented the drawings to Miss Paro. She seemed pleased with them, and I looked forward to the publishing of our yearbook, where I expected finally to see my cartoons on the printed page. The last day of school arrived and I thumbed anxiously through the annual, but found none of my drawings. To this day, I do not know why they were rejected. I have enjoyed a certain revenge, however, for ever since Peanuts was created I have received a steady stream of requests from high schools around the country to use the characters in their yearbooks. Eventually I accumulated a stack tall enough to reach the ceiling.
I think it is important for adults to consider what they were doing and what their attitudes were when they were the age their own children are now. There is no other real way of understanding the problems of children.
Charlie Brown’s father is a barber, which is autobiographical, for our family’s life revolved around the long hours my dad spent in his barbershop. He loved his work very much. I recall him telling me once that he really enjoyed getting up in the morning and going off to work. He was always in the barbershop by 8:00 in the morning, and during the 1930s he always worked until at least 6:30, and on Friday and Saturday nights, many times, until 8:00 or 9:00. He had one day off each week, Sunday, and his favorite sport was fishing. Occasionally, he would take my mother and me to a night baseball game or a hockey game, but fishing was always his main interest. It must have been disappointing to have a son who preferred golf.
Frequently in the evenings I went to the barbershop to wait for him to finish work and then walk home with him. He loved to read the comic strips, and we discussed them together and worried about what was going to happen next to certain of the characters. On Saturday evening, I would run up to the local drugstore at 9:00 when then Sunday pages were delivered and buy the two Minneapolis papers. The next morning, the two St. Paul papers would be delivered, so we had four comic sections to read. Several years later, when I became a delivery boy for one of the local printing firms, I used to pass the windows of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and look in where I could see the huge presses and the Sunday funnies tumbling down across the rollers. I wondered if I would ever see my own comics on those presses.
My mother also encouraged me in my drawing but, sadly, never lived to see any of my work published. She died a long, lingering death from cancer, when I was twenty, and it was a loss from which I sometimes believe I never recovered. Today it is a source of astonishment to me that I am older than she was when she died, and realizing this saddens me even more.
When I was thirteen, we were given a black-and-white dog who turned out to be the forerunner of Snoopy. He was a mixed breed and slightly larger than the beagle Snoopy is supposed to be. He probably had a little pointer in him and some other kind of hound, but he was a wild creature; I don’t believe he was ever completely tamed. He had a “vocabulary” of understanding of approximately fifty words, and he loved to ride in the car. He waited all day for my dad to come home from the barbershop, and on Saturday evenings, just before 9:00, he always put his paws on my dad’s chair to let him know it was time to get in the car and make the short drive up to the store to buy those newspapers. When I decided to put the dog in Peanuts, I used the general appearance of Spike, with similar markings. I had decided that the dog in the strip was to be named Sniffy, until one day, just before the strip was actually to be published, I was walking past a newsstand and glanced down at the rows of comic magazines. There I saw one about a dog named Sniffy, so I had to go back to my room and think of another name. Fortunately, before I even got home, I recalled my mother once saying that if we ever had another dog, we should name him Snoopy.
Not long ago I was looking through The Art of Walt Disney, a beautiful book, and there was a list of names that had been considered for The Seven Dwarfs. Lo and behold, one of the names that had been considered, but turned down, was Snoopy.
In my childhood, sports played a reasonably strong role, although they were strictly the sandlot variety. There was no organized Little League for us, even though we were all quite fanatical about baseball. Living in Minnesota restricted much of our sports activity, for the warmer seasons were short and clearly defined. Spring meant the coming of the marble season, and I loved playing marbles. When the baseball season came, we organized our own team and challenged those of other neighborhoods. We rarely had good fields for our games, and it was always our dream to play on a smooth infield and actually have a backstop behind the catcher so we wouldn’t have to chase the foul balls. All too often, we would have to lift a manhole cover and lower someone to retrieve a baseball that had rolled along the curb and down into the sewer. We played a little tackle football, but more often touch football, as it was clearly less rough and did not have to be played on soft ground. In Minnesota, almost everyone knows how to skate, but I didn’t actually learn on a real skating rink. Every sidewalk in front of every school had a sheet of ice at least ten feet long worn smooth from the kids sliding on it. It was on such a patch of ice, no longer than ten feet or wider than three feet, that I learned to skate. To play hockey on a real rink was a hopeless dream. Our hockey was usually played on a very tiny rink in one of our backyards, or in the street where we simply ran around with shoes rather than skates. The goals were two large clumps of snow, which were easily destroyed by inconsiderate drivers. I had always wanted to play golf, and had seen a series of Bobby Jones movie shorts when I was nine years old. There was no one to show me the game, and it was not until I was fifteen that I had a chance to try it. Immediately I fell totally in love with golf. I could think of almost nothing else for the next few years. I still wanted to be a cartoonist, but I also dreamed of becoming a great amateur golfer. Unfortunately, I never won anything except the caddy championship of Highland Park.
There are certain seasons in our lives that each of us can recall, and there are others that disappear from our memories like the melting snow. When I was fourteen, I had a summer that I shall always remember. We had organized our own neighborhood baseball team, but we never played on a strict schedule, for we didn’t know when we could find another team to play. I lived about a block from a grade school called Maddocks in St. Paul where there was a rather large crushed-rock playground, which did have two baseball backstops, but no fences. A hard-hit ground ball could elude the second baseman or shortstop and very easily roll into the out-field so fast that none of the outfielders would be able to stop it, and it would be quite possible for a fast runner to beat it out for a home run. This field could also make sliding into second base reasonably painful if you were not careful. Fortunately, it was smooth enough so ground balls hit to the infielders did not take too many bad bounces.
A man named Harry (I never knew his last name) was the playground director that summer. He saw our interest in playing baseball and came up with the idea that we should organize four teams and have a summer league. This was the most exciting news that had come to any of us in a long time. There were two games each Tuesday and Thursday and I could hardly wait for them to begin. One game was to start at 9:00 between two of the teams, and the other game was to start at 10:30 between the other two teams. I was always at the field by 7:30 with all of my equipment, waiting for something to happen. Our team came in first place that year, probably because we practiced more than the other teams, and one day I actually pitched a no-hit, no-run game. It was a great summer and I wish that there was some way I could let that man, whom we knew only as Harry, know how much I appreciated it.
We knew little about Harry because boys that age are never quite that interested in people older than they. At my mother’s suggestion, all the boys on our team chipped in and brought him a cake one day to demonstrate our appreciation for what he had done for us. He was a gentle man, probably not more than twenty-three or twenty-four, and I doubt if he was married. This was probably only a temporary job for him during times when it was difficult to find work, but he did his job well and he gave all of us a happy summer.
I have always tried to dig beneath the surface in my sports cartoons by drawing upon an intimate knowledge of the games. The challenges to be faced in sports work marvelously as a caricature of the challenges that we face in the more serious aspects of our lives. Anytime I experienced a crushing defeat in bowling, or had a bad night at bridge, or failed to qualify in the opening round of a golf tournament, I was able to transfer my frustrations to poor Charlie Brown. And when Charlie Brown has tried to analyze his own difficulties in life, he has always been able to express them best in sports terms.
During my senior year in high school, my mother showed me an ad that read: “Do you like to draw? Send in for our free talent test.” This was my introduction to Art Instruction Schools, Inc., the correspondence school known at that time as Federal Schools. It was and still is located in Minneapolis, and even though, after signing up for the course, I could have taken my drawing there in person, I did all of the lessons by mail, as I would have had I lived several states away, for I was not that proud of my work.
I could have gone to one of several resident schools in the Twin Cities, but it was this correspondence course’s emphasis upon cartooning that won me. The entire course came to approximately $170, and I remember my father having difficulty keeping up with the payments. I recall being quite worried when he received dunning letters, and when I expressed these worries to him he said not to become too concerned. I realized then that during those later Depression days he had become accustomed to owing people money. I eventually completed the course, and he eventually paid for it.
The two years following high school were extremely difficult, for this was the time that my mother was suffering so much with her illness. I was drafted during the month of February, in 1943, and spent several weeks at the induction center at Fort Snelling, Minnesota. We were allowed to go home on the weekends, and I recall how one Sunday evening, just before I had to return to Fort Snelling across the river from St. Paul, I went into the bedroom to say goodbye to my mother. She was lying in bed, very ill, and she said to me, “Yes, I suppose we should say good-bye because we probably will never see each other again.” She died the next day and our tiny family was torn apart. I was shipped down to Camp Campbell, Kentucky, and my dad was left to try to put his life back together. He continued to work daily in the barbershop and finally accumulated a total of forty-five years working in the same place.
All of the summer-camp ideas that I have drawn are a result of my having absolutely no desire as a child to be sent away to a summer camp. To me, that was the equivalent to being drafted. When World War II came along, I met it with the same lack of enthusiasm. The three years I spent in the army taught me all I needed to know about loneliness, and my sympathy for the loneliness that all of us experience is dropped heavily upon poor Charlie Brown. I know what it is to have to spend days, evenings, and weekend by myself, and I also know how uncomfortable anxiety can be. I worry about almost all there is in life to worry about, and because I worry, Charlie Brown has to worry. I suppose our anxieties increase as we become responsible for more people. Perhaps some form of maturity should take care of this, but in my case it didn’t. At any rate, I place the source of many of my problems on those three years in the army. The lack of any timetable or any idea as to when any of us would get out was almost unbearable. We used to sit around in the evenings and talk about things like this, and we were completely convinced that we were going to be in for the rest of our lives. The war seemed to have no end in sight. Yet, in spite of this, I recall a particular evening when I was on guard duty at the motor pool at the far end of the camp that is now called Fort Campbell, in the southern part of Kentucky; it was a beautiful summer evening, there was no one around in this area of the camp, and it was my job simply to see that no one interfered with any of the vehicles in that part of the motor pool, or tried to take any of them out of that particular gate. The only person in the world I had to worry about was my father, and I knew that he could take care of himself. As I sat there in the tiny guard shack, I seemed to be at complete peace with the world. Still, I knew for sure that I did not want to be where I was.
My mind has gone back to that hour many times, and I have tried to analyze why I should have been so at peace at that time. This is the kind of examination that produces some of the pages in Peanuts, but of course it is covered up by little cartoon characters, using dialogue that is at once condensed and exaggerated. Why does the cartoonist see something funny in all of these anxieties? Is it because the cartoonist is afraid of complete commitment? Perhaps this is why so many draw about political or social problems rather than try to run for political office or participate in social work. Perhaps it demonstrates a certain character trait, as with the person who makes what starts out to be a serious statement, but then, realizing what he has said, qualifies it or steps back slightly, adding a self-conscious chuckle.
When I was just out of high school, I started to submit cartoons to most of the major magazines, as all the ambitious amateurs do, but received only the ordinary rejection slips and no encouragement. After World War II, however, I set about in earnest to sell my work. I visited several places in the Twin Cities to try to get some job in whatever art department might be able to use my limited talents, but I was unsuccessful. I was almost hired one day to letter tombstones and was glad when the man did not call me back the next day, for I had already begun to worry what my friends might say when I told them about my new job. One day, however, with my collection of sample comic strips in hand, I visited the offices of Timeless Topix, the publishers of a series of Catholic comic magazines. The art director, Roman Baltes, seemed to like my lettering and said, “I think I may have something for you to do.” He gave me several comic-book pages that had already been drawn by others but with the balloons left blank, and he told me that I should fill in the dialogue. This was my first job, but soon after I took it I was also hired by Art Instruction. For the next year, I lettered comic pages for Timeless Topix, working sometimes until past midnight, getting up early the next morning, taking a streetcar to downtown St. Paul, leaving the work outside the door of Mr. Baltes’ office, and then going over to Minneapolis to work at the correspondence school.
My job there was to correct some of the basic lessons, and it introduced me to a roomful of people who did much to affect my later life. The instructors at this correspondence school were bright, and the atmosphere in the large room was invigorating. Each person there seemed to have a special interest in some phase of commercial art or cartooning, and some even painting. The head of the department was Walter J. Wilwerding, a famous magazine illustrator of that period. Directly in front of me sat a man named Frank Wing who had drawn a special feature called “Yesterdays,” which ran for a short time during the 1930s. He was a perfectionist at drawing things as they appeared, and I believe he did much to inspire me. He taught me the importance of drawing accurately, and even though I felt he was somewhat disappointed in me—and disapproved of my eventual drawing style—there is no doubt that I learned much from him. Almost nothing I draw now, in what is sometimes a quite extreme style, is not based on a real knowledge of how to draw that object, whether it be a shoe, a doghouse, or a child’s hand. Cartooning, after all, is simply good design. In learning how to design a human hand after knowing how to draw it properly, one produces a good cartoon.
Some of the people who worked at Art Instruction Schools with me have remained friends all of these years, and I have used the names of several in the strip. Charlie Brown was named after my very good friend, Charlie Brown, whose desk was across the room. I recall perfectly the day he came over and first looked at the little cartoon face that had been named after him. “Is that what he looks like?” he expressed with dismay. The characters of Linus and Frieda were also named after friends of mine who were instructors.
Those were days filled with hilarity, for there was always someone with a good joke, or laughter from some innocent mistake made by one of the students. It was not unusual for us to receive drawings of thumbs, and whenever we pulled such a drawing from its envelope we realized once again a student had misunderstood the expression “making a thumbnail sketch.” Another confusion came over the instruction to “experiment with matchstick figures”; students would actually send paper matchsticks glued to a sheet of paper.
There were many of us on the staff of Art Instruction who had ambitions to go on to other things, and I used my spare time, after completing the regular lesson criticisms, to work on my own cartoons. I tried never to let a week go by without having something in the mail working for me. During one period of time, from 1948 to 1950, I submitted cartoons regularly to the Saturday Evening Post, and sold fifteen of them. I was never able to break into any of the other magazines.
These were strongly formative years, and my ability to think of ideas and to present them properly was improving steadily. It seemed that it would be only a matter of time before I would be able to sell some type of marketable feature to a syndicate. I am still convinced that my eventual success was due largely to what I have called “the invigorating atmosphere” in the department of instruction at the correspondence school. I suppose it would be similar to that of a newspaper office. I had always dreamed of someday having a desk in a newspaper office, but it never came about.
It was an exciting time for me because I was involved in the very sort of thing I wished to do. I not only lettered the complete Timeless Topix in English, but would do the French and Spanish translations without having any idea as to what the balloons were saying. One day Roman bought a page of little panel cartoons that I had drawn and titled “Just Keep Laughing.” One of the cartoons showed a small boy who looked prophetically like Schroeder sitting on the curb with a baseball bat in his hands talking to a little girl who looked prophetically like Patty. He was saying, “I think I could learn to love you, Judy, if your batting average was a little higher.” Frank Wing, my fellow instructor at Art Instruction, said, “Sparky, I think you should draw more of those little kids. They are pretty good.” So I concentrated on creating a group of samples and eventually sold them as a weekly feature called Li’l Folks to the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
I was making regular trips to Chicago to try to sell a comic feature and was always gratified to talk with Mr. John Dille, Jr., at his National Newspaper Syndicate, for he was invariably kind and patient with me. This was not always true at some of the other syndicates. I dropped into the Chicago Sun one day and showed my work to Walt Ditzen, who was then their comic editor, and he was very impressed with what he saw. I recall him exclaiming, “I certainly cannot say no to this. We’ll have to take it in to the president.” We went into the man’s office; he barely looked at the work and abruptly said, “No.”
At this time I was also becoming a little more gregarious and was learning how to talk with people. When I first used to board the morning Zephyr and ride it to Chicago, I would make the entire trip without talking to anyone. Little by little, however, I was getting rid of my shyness and feelings of inferiority, and learning how to strike up acquaintances on the train and talk to people. Two conversations in the dining car remain with me. I was seated across from a nicely, but conservatively, dressed gentleman one time on my way to Chicago; we introduced ourselves, and he asked me about the nature of my trip. After I had explained a little about myself, he told me that he was a Methodist minister, to which I replied, “Yes, I sort of figured you were a minister.” As I was saying this I knew, as we all too frequently do in such situations, that I was saying the wrong thing, but it came out before I could stop myself. Then, of course, I had to explain why I had deduced that he was a minister without offending him, even though the conclusion could be just as flattering as insulting. On my return trip to St. Paul, I struck up a conversation with another extremely interesting man who turned out to be the publisher of a small music magazine. Because I was just beginning to become acquainted with classical music, and because I was so interested in the entire subject, yet so clearly a layman, I had much to ask him. I had recently purchased Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, and had fallen in love with its many melodic passages. I asked him what he thought of Harold in Italy. He considered this for several moments before looking at me and saying, “Well, the human ear is a strange thing.” I didn’t dare ask him what he meant. I had the feeling it would be better not to know.
I continued to mail my work out to major syndicates. One day I opened up a letter from one syndicate that turned me down, and then opened another letter from the director of NEA in Cleveland saying he liked my work very much. Arrangements were made during the next few months for me to start drawing a Sunday feature for NEA, but at the last minute their editors changed their minds and I had to start all over. In the spring of 1950 I accumulated a batch of some of the better cartoons I had been drawing for the St. Paul paper and mailed them off to United Feature Syndicate in New York. I don’t know how much time went by without my hearing from them, but I’m sure it was at least six weeks. Convinced that my drawings had been lost in the mail, I finally wrote them a letter, describing the drawings I had sent and asking them if they could recall receiving anything similar. If not, I wanted to know so that I could put a tracer on the lost cartoons. Instead, I received a very nice letter from Jim Freeman, their editorial director, who said they were very interested in my work and would I care to come to New York and talk about it.
That was an exciting trip. When I arrived at the Syndicate offices early in the morning, no one other than the receptionist was there. I had brought along a new comic strip I had been working on, rather than the panel cartoons that United Feature had seen. I simply wanted to give them a better view of my work. I told the receptionist that I had not had breakfast yet, so I would go out and eat and then return. When I got back to the Syndicate offices, they had already decided they would rather publish the strip than the panel. This made me very happy, for I preferred the strip myself. I returned to Minneapolis filled with great hope for the future and asked a certain girl to marry me. When she turned me down and married someone else, there was no doubt that Charlie Brown was on his way. Losers get started early.
Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts Jubilee: My Life and Art with Charlie Brown and Others (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), 11-36.