You're A Good Man, Charles Schulz

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New York, New York

Like every American kid born in the last half-century, I grew up on Peanuts. Charlie Brown and the gang offered a daily dose of laughter and levity, even though I had nary a care in the world. However, my connection ran deeper than most of the boys and girls who read Peanuts while stuffing their faces with cereal because I knew the man behind the gang, Charles Schulz.

I knew Schulz in the way that kids grow to know people in their parents' circle. He and his wife, Jeanne, were friends with my folks in my hometown of Santa Rosa, California, the wine country burgh that Schulz, a Minnesota native, adopted in the late 1950s.

Two years after his death from cancer in 2000 at age 77, the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center opened in Santa Rosa. The first time I took my own gang, ages 15, 11, 9, and 5, I discovered a timeless wonder that continues to span the ages. I also discovered a desire to return without the kids so that I might take a longer, deeper look at the meaning of Peanuts.

What sticks with me about Charles Schulz was his modesty. He was rich beyond the wildest of dreams in every regard – fortune, fame, adulation, respect – and yet he exuded zero ego. He did not understand the fuss he created, which continues to rake in $35 million annually, ranking Schulz second only to Elvis on Forbes' list of the richest celebrities in Heaven. Schulz would not fit the definition of a modern celebrity, for he was not only exceptionally talented but also alarmingly humble. He was the anti-Trump.

Charles M. Schulz and America's pet pooch, Snoopy. photo credit: Brian Meyers

The understated design of the Schulz Museum reflects the Tao of Schulz. The building and the exhibits it houses are physically simplistic, just as the comic strip itself. Therein lies the genius of Peanuts. The austerity of Schulz's drawing, his clean lines and crisp lettering, open up an uncluttered space in which Schulz's simpleton children experience the most complex of human emotions: insecurity, frustration, longing, aspiration, friendship, kindness, and happiness, which Schulz so brilliantly defined when he wrote, "Happiness is a warm puppy."

The downstairs of the 27,000 square foot museum includes a gallery displaying more than 100 original strips (updated every few months), a 100-seat theater that shows Peanuts movies and related programs including a fascinating 1997 interview with Schulz by Charlie Rose, and two exquisite pieces by Japanese artist Yoshiteru Otani: a 7,000 lbs. "Morphing Snoopy" sculpture, and a 17' x 22' Charlie Brown and Lucy mural composed of Peanuts strips on 3,588 ceramic tiles.

There is also an exhibit hall, and on the recent afternoon I revisited the museum alone, I was treated to Woodstock: Small is Beautiful, which runs through October 23. Contemplating Woodstock's relationship with Snoopy it struck me that I had never questioned how or why a dog and a bird could be the closest of friends. Instead, as I suspect Schulz intended, I had only ever seen the purity of the friendship.

Upstairs there are biographical exhibits and mementos that chronicle Schulz's life and career; a vintage photo from his father's barbershop; the wall from his daughter's nursery on which Schulz painted a mural in 1951; a kite-eating tree and birdbath in the courtyard; memorabilia from Snoopy's Senior World Hockey Tournament. (The museum is located next door to the world-class ice arena that Schulz built for the town in 1969. An avid hockey player, he hosted and participated in the annual 64-team tournament, now in its 36th year.)

The one piece of memorabilia I found most compelling was Schulz's sketchbook from his stint in the military. Drafted at age 20 in 1943, Schulz served as a machine gun squad leader in Germany, France and Austria. Later he would write, tellingly, "The Army taught me all I needed to know about loneliness."

I poked my head in the educational center, where docents were teaching kids, and even a few older kids at heart, how to draw cartoons. I lingered longest in Schulz's studio, meticulously reassembled in the museum. Schulz conceived and crafted every strip solo, for the same reason, he explained in a looping video, "that Arnold Palmer doesn't have people hit his 9-irons." Knowing firsthand the feeling of being one man alone in a room with a blank page to fill, I felt the most profound respect and admiration for a man who touched millions by touching nerves deep in our innermost child.

A visit to the Schulz Museum is not only a trip through time but also, and more so, a trip through one's self. "Sparky," as Schulz's friends called him, would likely scoff at such retrospection. As his quote on the gallery wall reads, "Cartooning is still just drawing funny pictures."