Reading the Last Peanuts
Twenty-one years ago today, the world lost Charles Schulz.
It was a rare stormy day in northern California that day where Schulz had moved his family in the late 1950s. Newspaper editors across the country had already written their headlines coordinated to announce Schulz official retirement. In the early morning hours, however, they scrambled to insert an improbable addendum: the cartoonist had died overnight from complications of stage 4 cancer.
The terrible diagnosis had come earlier the previous fall. The forecast was dire. Retirement was Schulz’s only real option. But how could someone bring an end to the defining work of their life, then pushing fifty years? One thing was clear immediately: when Schulz stopped writing and drawing the Peanuts strip, that would be it. It was over and no one else would carry it on.
There had been plans for a whole series of interviews and events to commemorate Schulz’s career, but then the bad turned worse.
Due to his rapidly deteriorating medical situation, Schulz suffered a stroke. The effects lingered, making it difficult to collect his thoughts and put words in the correct order at times.
Schulz did manage to recover enough to sit down for one final interview. The family reached out to NBC’s Al Roker personally. Roker was a vocal and lifelong fan of Peanuts and had always been a favorite of the cartoonist. The family invited Roker and a crew to come out to Santa Rosa for one last conversation.
The man sitting in the chair across from Roker strained to be the affable, humble, witty celebrity he had been for decades, but the effort showed. Sometimes the words didn’t fully come out or end up in the right order. But despite the frustrations with his persistent condition, two emotions were clear to anyone watching Schulz.
One was a deep sadness. It seemed to be a sadness about many things. Sadness that Peanuts could not continue. Sadness that life was ending. The sobering weight of gratitude to all of the fans who had made his dream possible for so long.
But there was something perhaps even stronger under the surface of his sadness: a righteous anger. Resentment even. Schulz, quiet and modest as he was, was also a fighter. He had discovered that part of himself in the darkest days of his service in World War II. He had never lost it. And now, for all his will power, there was nothing left to do. He wouldn’t get to end Peanuts on his own accord. Cancer had foisted the end upon him.
“I never even let Charlie Brown kick the football,” he blurted to Roker in the closing minutes of the interview. There was an injustice to it all. Injustice to Charlie Brown, yes, but injustice to himself, too. He had devoted everyday of his life to this story, and now it too was snatched away like the football.
Roker asked him, finally, what he wanted to say to his fans. At this question, Schulz couldn’t contain it all anymore. “I hope I’ve made you proud,” he gasped before breaking into the weeping. As the interview concluded, there was no sound but the soft tears of a man at his end, distraught that he might not have done enough.
Schulz’s final word to the world lay just pages away from his death announcement. As millions of fans flipped to the colored comics pages of the Sunday newspaper, they found Charlie Brown speaking to someone on the phone: “No, I think he’s writing.” The words were haunting. Who was Charlie Brown talking to? Saint Peter? God himself?
In the next panel, Snoopy sat alone atop his doghouse pecking away at his typewriter. “Dear friends,” he began, fading into the artists’ own words, the only time he ever “broke the fourth wall” between writer and audience.
Peanuts had been the “fulfillment of my childhood ambition,” Schulz wrote. But the demands had become too much and the end was here. He thanked his editors, his fans, and then he turned to his creations, his children.
“Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy…” he closed, “how can I ever forget them?”
Looking out from the letter, readers could see a dozen snapshots of Peanuts most memorable moments, almost as though they were looking through the mind’s eye of the artist. There was the football and psychiatry booth and Peppermint Patty struggling in math and a baseball game and the flying ace and Woodstock prepping the ice…. and Charlie Brown, all alone.
That might have been something like what Schulz felt. Yet in his heart he knew, just as he told us, that we were all there together.
Peanuts had been all Charles Schulz’s, but in the end it really wasn’t. It was ours, too. And while the comic strip might not continue on the way it always had, it continued on with Schulz’s “dear friends.”
I’m glad to be a little part of that big family.
