November 26th
It's the birthday of the cartoonist Charles Schulz, (books by this author) born on this day in St. Paul, Minnesota (1922). When he was two days old, an uncle nicknamed him "Sparky," after a horse in a comic strip. Young Charles loved the comics, and every Sunday he and his dad read through all the funnies in six different newspapers. He was a shy, awkward kid, he skipped two grades, and he didn't have many friends. He got a C+ in a correspondence school art class, and even his high school yearbook wouldn't publish his drawings. But he decided to be a cartoonist anyway.
In 1947, when Schulz was 24, he started publishing a weekly comic strip called Li'l Folks in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. It featured a boy who loved Beethoven, a beagle dog, and a boy named Charlie Brown. He got $10 a week for his comic. In 1949, he asked the paper for two things: a pay increase, and to have Li'l Folks moved from the women's section to the comics section. The Pioneer Press denied both his requests, so he quit. He hadn't gotten any of his original artwork back, but he regularly cut out his strips from the paper, so he took his best clips and sent them to the United Features Syndicate. And on October 2, 1950, Peanuts made its national debut, complete with Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the Beethoven-loving Schroeder, along with Linus, Lucy, Sally, and Woodstock. In December of 1999, Schulz announced that he was going to retire for health reasons, and his last Peanuts strip was set for February 13, 2000. He died on February 12th.
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