He wasn’t Charles, or Chuck, or even Charlie.
No, to friends and family, he was Sparky, though the name on the building reads: The Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center.
This year marks twin milestones for the “Peanuts” cartoonist’s legacy: the museum’s 5th anniversary and the publication of David Michaelis’ “Schulz: A Biography,” the first definitive chronicle of his life and work.
Today, I’m just a tourist here, a writer carrying around a childhood filled with Charlie Brown bed sheets, plush Snoopy dolls and assorted “Peanuts” books.
Schulz, who died in 2000, carried his past with him too. The Minnesota native not only brought his Minneapolis/St. Paul childhood into the “Peanuts” strips, he imported the Midwest smack into the middle of Northern California.
“It’s not just a time warp, it’s a geography warp. . . . The Rockies vanish and you’re in the Midwest,” biographer Michaelis tells me.
Example: Schulz, who grew up loving ice skating and hockey, transplanted some of that Minnesota culture to Santa Rosa when he and his first wife, Joyce, built the Redwood Empire Ice Arena in 1969 as a community ice-sports center.
Schulz skated here with his children, just as neighborhood kids still do. For the last two decades of his life, Schulz had breakfast, lunch and tea nearly every day at the rink’s Warm Puppy Cafe, talking to fans and visitors, occasionally retreating to an upstairs office. The Schulz Museum, opened in 2002, adjoins the complex.
“We all act as if he’s still here. We get to do that,” says second wife Jean, whom he married in 1973. “It gives the museum more authenticity than if it were located in San Francisco.”
Though San Francisco, just 50 miles south of Santa Rosa, would have meant more visitors, more exposure, Jean says, “It wouldn’t be his museum. He had a pattern of life here. Once that ice arena was built, it was the center of his life.”
This is what I’m most struck by at the museum: a sense of life. Not only are Schulz’s strips on display but also his family history and his personal studio.
A family history exhibit tells of the uncle who nicknamed his 2-day-old nephew “Sparky” after Spark Plug, the horse character in the popular “Barney Google” comic strip.
Then, there are Schulz’s doodles, the launching pads for his three-panel parables. He called the sketches “probably the best thing I do,” though he threw most of them away.
Very few of the notebook paper doodles exist, most rescued from the trash and dutifully ironed flat by a secretary in the last few years of Schulz’s life, as plans for the museum came together.
But there’s more: a wall Schulz painted in 1951 for his daughter’s nursery, which features early versions of Charlie Brown and Snoopy.
Even the artist’s re-created studio feels as though he just got up for a cup of tea. It’s filled with classical records, countless books and personal trophies, including a basketball signed by NBA legend Julius Erving.
A television interview with Schulz plays in an endless loop on his desk.
“I think and I hope that a lot of readers recognize a little bit of themselves in Charlie Brown,” he says in the video, “because, after all, most of us are more acquainted with losing than we are winning.”
Chicago native Daniel Clowes, best known for his “Eightball” comics and the movies “Ghost World” and “Art School Confidential,” once visited the Schulz studio and describes it “like a religious experience, something I’ll never forget. I got to sit in his chair and saw scraps of paper from a strip he was still working on.”
“I find it odd that he didn’t stay in the Midwest, although as someone who moved from Chicago to the Bay Area, I can understand it’s hard to go back to the snow,” he says. “But you read the strip and you don’t think California . . . you think Minnesota, Indiana or Wisconsin.”
A Montana native myself, the kid in me always thought the “Peanuts” strip took place somewhere in the West, perhaps someplace near my snow-caked back yard.
My life seemed oddly parallel: “How’s it goin’, Charlie Brown?” was the joke greeting my grandpa and I shared for years. In junior high, while on the football team, I fell for a Little Redhaired Girl who rejected me.
Now, in later life — with little hair, a round face and a few extra pounds — I refrain from wearing yellow shirts with a single, jagged stripe across the middle.
Schulz’s characters felt so familiar, so intimate. This is, of course, why “Peanuts” became a cultural phenomenon. Schulz became America’s pop psychologist, mining our shared experiences and anxieties. It’s something I never considered as a child, but it’s chilling to contemplate as an adult.
“[In the strip,] he’s remembering his childhood, the unfairness on the playground,” Jean tells me. “People didn’t talk about that. You were just supposed to tough it out.”
Chip Kidd, who helped compile and design the 2001 book “Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz,” says it best: “Schulz did for cartooning what Bauhaus did for art. He could take human beings and reduce them into their most essential parts.”
For more information about the Schulz museum and its cartoonists-in-residency program, visit www.schulzmuseum.org or call 707-579-4452.
