Classic Humor Almost 73, Charles Schulz Is Still Keeping Us In Touch With Life’s Subtleties

The 914 Radio pen point and a pot of India ink sit near his right hand. But he picks up a black Marks-a-Lot and, with a sureness unbetrayed by a barely trembling hand, makes a spontaneous, almost offhand, stroke across the page, curving up and down again.

It is The Dog. In less than five seconds, Charles Schulz has transformed a blank page into a piece of genuine Americana. Suitable for framing, valuable in the extreme, art in its purest form.

“Now Charlie Brown’s head,” he says, dismissing the work in front of him, “is a hard thing to draw.”

Forty-five years ago this month, 27-year-old art instructor Charles Schulz, working out of his stepmother’s basement, got his first syndication deal, putting his little round-faced boy and the boy’s dog in seven daily newspapers. He made $90 for his first month’s work.

At almost 73, Schulz now appears in almost 2,600 newspapers in 69 countries, reaching 200 million people a day. He has addressed the human condition more than 16,000 times, subtly teaching us about life’s subtleties without once making us resent the sermon.

“My one source of pride is I know what talent I have and I have not wasted it. That’s all a person can do.”

All he can do has made him rich. It has made him famous.

But it has not made him especially recognizable, which is good if you are Charles Schulz and your ordinariness is your stock in trade and your phone number is still listed.

It is even better if you are Charles Schulz and, despite your wealth and legend, you feel palpable sadness and loneliness, remembered fresh, no matter how old the scars, no matter how pretty the bandage.

Schulz is as close to real as legends get - gentle and courtly, bemused in his abiding melancholy, hip to his place in the universe.

It’s been a capricious universe, searing him with a refusal from a redheaded girl but giving him the love of two wives and five children. In this universe, he’s been denied the joy of publishing his art in his own high school yearbook yet, in time, saw his work hang in the Louvre.

It is, lastly, a universe in which a really good man really succeeded in the really important stuff, even while swearing that a life’s work of making others smile is fueled by the singular emotion of regret.

American culture in the latter half of the 20th century is stitched together with Schulz’s work and its spawn. He’s in Bartlett’s Quotations, on Broadway, in halftime shows, on baby bibs and in the vernacular with words like “blockhead” and descriptions like “Joe Cool.”

Some people, Schulz reminds, think he’s dead. That’ll keep you humble. So will the fact that newspapers - and the comics in them - are disposable yet always hungry products.

So when people ask him if he’s still doing the strip, Schulz asks rhetorically: “Did you see it in the paper this morning?” If you did, he is responsible.

Unlike other longstanding strips that are inked by ghost artists and written by fresh guys when the originators get tired or die, Charlie Brown dies when Charles Schulz retires or passes on.

It is in his contract, at the behest of his children. The television specials can go forward - he trusts those people - and there can be a rerunning of classic strips, but nothing new will issue forth from a pen pretending to be his. That someone else would pen Pigpen is as odd a notion to his children - and him - as asking who would paint Picassos after Picasso passed into the next life.

The Schulzian mix of humility and hubris is as much self-knowledge as it is charm. Yes, he knows he is the world’s most highly paid artist. No, he is not Picasso.

But, likewise, Picasso is not him. What Schulz does is not literature. But it’s not nothing either.

Though being nothing is bruisingly familiar.

Growing up in the heartland of St. Paul, Minn., he describes his life almost plaintively.

“I was a nothing in high school and I was regarded as nothing. I didn’t care much. School life didn’t interest me. But neighborhood life did.”

Hockey, baseball, hanging with your dog. A guy who lived up the street and around the corner played the violin. He’d read Schulz’s short stories; Schulz would listen to him play.

He had an uncle who encouraged his drawing. His parents, he says, didn’t know how to encourage him. But his mother did see the ad for the Art Instruction School - a correspondence school - and his father found the $160 to pay for it. Carl Schulz, a barber who probably never read a book in his life, did have a hard time keeping up the payments, though, standing from 8 in the morning to 6 at night, making 50 cents a haircut.

“I hoped,” says his only child, “that I could grow up to be as well-liked.”

Charles Schulz revolutionized the comics world in the ‘50s by simply departing from the action adventure and the soap opera and, instead, building relationships between characters who had little but their insecurities and each other.

Lynn Johnston, the creator of “For Better or For Worse” says Schulz speaks to the 5-year-old in us who reads the comics.

“He puts us in touch with who we’ve always been.”

In Schulz’s world, girls are strong and all children have intellect. In fact, Johnston can remember that as a child she argued with her grandfather who believed children could not think as deeply as Schulz presumed.

Johnston says that early in her cartooning career, Schulz called her at her studio and identified himself. She could not speak.

“You know,” he went on, a little uncertainly, “I do ‘Peanuts.”’

He told her he liked her work. She, like so many cartoonists before and since, then made what she calls “the pilgrimage to Santa Rosa” to see him. He asked if she wanted to stay in his spare room.

In the beginning, she says, when she surveyed her work, “I would ask myself, ‘How would Sparky feel about this?’

“And to some extent,” says the award-winning, 48-year-old cartoonist, “I still do that.”

What Schulz is most proud of, in his whole life, is that “I was a nothing kid who went into the Army as a nothing person. I worked my way up to being a good soldier.”

The Emmys are nice; the Peabody and the Reubens are equally gratifying. But if you ask him what is his most valued award, he points to something tacked to the far wall in his large studio, his Combat Infantry Badge, earned in Germany during World War II.

Cathy Guisewite says “Peanuts” is the only strip she remembers reading as a child. The creator of “Cathy,” Guisewite says she would not have made it on the pages of anybody’s newspaper if Charles Schulz had not blazed a trail that allowed cartoonists to write honestly of angst and vulnerability and anxiety and guilt.

She did not make what cartoonist Johnston calls “the pilgrimage to Santa Rosa” in the usual way. Early in her career, she came to San Francisco to speak at a cartoonists’ convention and Schulz, who had long since stopped going to such things, came to hear her.

He approached her and said he was an admirer.

“I’m sure I babbled incoherently,” says Guisewite. “I was standing in front of God, and God wanted to meet me.”

People like to make a lot of the fact that his father was a fan of the funnies. Don’t make too much of that, says Schulz, just say he read them.

People like to make a lot of Schulz’s genius. Don’t, he says, nothing he does is very calculated. The paper comes out every day and “sometimes you sell out to make the schedule.”

Like when he had Charlie Brown hit that home run and win a ball game in 1993. That started out innocently enough, with Schulz drawing Charlie turning cartwheels one day and, frankly, he couldn’t figure out why. So he gave Charlie Brown something to be happy about.

But happiness, he warns, isn’t so funny.

So Charlie’s pitcher turns out to be a girl, the great-granddaughter of Roy Hobbs (the home run hitter of Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural”). That was better but Schulz couldn’t let it be. Roy Hobbs, Charlie finds out, is fictional and the little girl grooved the ball anyway so it wasn’t a real home run.

Schulz is not so cynical as he used to be. But even at his most cynical, he could never make Charlie Brown do anything mean. But he can make him feel things as acutely as Schulz does.

Charlie Brown once woke up with a rash on his head that looked like baseball stitches. The rash stressed Charlie pretty bad so he decided to relax by going to camp and, to avoid all the embarrassment of having to explain the stitches, he wore a sack on his head.

Mr. Sack got a lot of respect, gained some popularity and was sought out for advice. But one day, Charlie took the sack off to examine his rash. It was gone so he decided to ditch the mask.

And once people saw him as he was, they paid him no mind.

That, says Schulz, was the best story line he ever thought up.

MEMO: See related story under the headline: Charles Schulz has earned more than peanuts