"CACHING FOR PEANUTS"
A tribute to charles m. schulz
Charles Monroe
Schulz
(November 26, 1922 – February 12, 2000) was a 20th-century
American cartoonist best known for his Peanuts comic strip.
Life and career
Schulz was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Dena and Carl Schulz.
His nickname, "Sparky", was given by his uncle, after the horse
Spark Plug in the Barney Google comic strip.
He attended St. Paul's Richard Gordon Elementary School, where he
skipped two half-grades. As a result, he was the youngest in his
class when he attended St. Paul Central High years later, which may
have been the reason why he was so shy and isolated as a young
teenager. After his mother died in February, 1943, he was drafted
into the army and sent to Camp Campbell in Kentucky. He was then
shipped to Europe two years later to fight in World War II as an
infantry squad leader with the U.S. 20th Armored Division. After
leaving the United States Army in 1945, he took a job as an art
teacher at Art Instruction Inc., which he attended before he was
drafted.
His drawings were first published by Robert Ripley in his Ripley's
Believe It or Not!, then in a series of chronicles, and the
Saturday Evening Post. His first regular comic strip, Li'l Folks,
was published in 1947 by the St. Paul Pioneer Press; it was in this
strip that Charlie Brown first appeared, as well as a dog that
looked much like Snoopy. In 1950 he approached the United Features
Syndicate with his best strips from Li'l Folks, and Peanuts made
its first appearance on October 2, 1950. This strip became one of
the most popular comic strips of all time. He also had a
short-lived sports-oriented comic strip called It's Only a Game
(1957-1959), but abandoned that strip due to the demands of the
success of Peanuts.
He put a lot of his own life into Peanuts' main character, Charlie
Brown. For example:
* Schulz's father was a barber and his mother a housewife.
* Schulz also had a dog when he was a boy. Unlike Snoopy, Schulz's
dog Spike was a pointer). Eventually, it was revealed that Snoopy
had a desert-dwelling cousin... named Spike.
* Schulz was also shy and withdrawn.
* Schulz's "Little Red-Haired Girl" was Donna Johnson, an
accountant at Art Instruction Inc., with whom he had a
relationship. He asked her to marry him, but she refused. However,
they remained friends for the rest of his life.
Schulz lived and worked for almost 50 years in Santa Rosa,
California (Sonoma County). In 2000, the Sonoma County Board of
Supervisors rechristened the "Sonoma County - Charles M. Schulz
Airport" in his honor. The airport's amusing logo features Snoopy
in goggles and scarf, taking to the skies on top of his red
doghouse. The Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, opened August
17, 2002, celebrates his life's work and art of cartooning. A
bronze statue of Charlie Brown and Snoopy stands in Depot Park in
downtown Santa Rosa.
Schulz was married twice. He married his first wife, Joyce
Halverson, in 1951. They had five children, but divorced in 1972.
He later married Jean Forsyth Clyde in 1973, with whom he was
married for the rest of his life.
Schulz's father died in 1966 while visiting him, the same year his
first studio located west of Santa Rosa in Sebastopol, California,
burnt down.
Schulz touched on religious themes in his work, including the
classic television cartoon, A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), which
features the character Linus van Pelt, Charlie Brown's best friend,
in a show-stopper, quoting the King James Version of the Bible
(Luke 2:8-14) to demonstrate "what Christmas is all about." Schulz
had been active in the Church of God as a young adult and then
later taught Sunday school at a United Methodist Church, but his
religious views evolved over the years. By the late 1980s he told
one of his biographers (Rheta Grimsley Johnson, 1989) that he
identified with Secular Humanism. In the Sixties, Robert L. Short
interpreted certain themes and dialogues in Peanuts as being in
agreement with parts of Christian theology, as he (Short) explained
in his bestselling paperback book, The Gospel According to Peanuts.
Schulz did not endorse Short's specific interpretations and often
said that "the only theology is no theology."
Peanuts ran for nearly 50 years without interruption and had
appeared in over 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries. In November 1999
Schulz had a stroke, and later it was discovered that he had colon
cancer that had metastasized to his stomach. Because of the
chemotherapy and the fact he couldn't read or see clearly, he
announced his retirement on December 14, 1999, at the age of 77.
This was difficult for Schulz, and he was quoted as saying "I never
dreamed that this would happen to me. I always had the feeling that
I would stay with the strip until I was in my early eighties, or
something like that. But all of sudden it's gone. It's been taken
away from me. I did not take it away. This was taken away from
me."
The last original strip ran on February 13, 2000. Schulz had died
at 9:45 p.m., the night before in Santa Rosa of a heart attack.
Ironically, Schulz had always predicted that the strip would
outlive him (with his reason being comic strips are usually drawn a
few weeks before their publication.) As part of his will, Schulz
had requested that the Peanuts characters remain as authentic as
possible and that no new comic strips based on them be drawn. To
date his wishes have been honored, although reruns of the strip are
still being syndicated to newspapers. He is interred in Pleasant
Hills Cemetery, in Sebastopol.
He was also a fan of hockey and was inducted into the United States
Hockey Hall of Fame in 1993. On June 28, 1996, Schulz was honored
with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, right next to Walt
Disney's.
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The Cache is NOT at the
listed coordinates.....
Charlie Brown planned to go geocaching with his friend
Pigpen; but there is a problem. Pigpen is missing, and all
that was left behind is a piece of paper with some symbols on it.
Your job is to solve the code and complete the geocaching mission
for him.
This is a (4) stage multi cache. The code will get you
to stage 1. At stages 1-3 there is a 1" x 2-3/4" label with
coordinates to the next stage. The final cache has room for small
trade items. It is a small to medium sized container approx. 3"
wide x 6" long x 4" tall and incorporated into the environment.
There is no need to bushwhack. The walk from the first stage to the
Cache and back is approx. 1 mile. There is no need to travel into
the woods.
There is parking near the second and third stages that
makes this a much shorter cache if you don't want to do the long
hike during the hot summer months.
