"I'M DYING, AND ALL I HEAR ARE INSULTS!!" THE LARGELY MIDWESTERN PHILOSOPHY OF CHARLIE BROWN

SCHRODER: "What happened?"

LINUS: "Charlie Brown got hit with a line drive!"

VIOLET: "Does anyone know first aid?"

LUCY: "it's probably not serious. Second or third aid will do."

LINUS: "quick! Take this handkerchief and soak it in cold water!"

LUCY: [long pause] "you've got to be kidding! With a head like Charlie Brown's, you'd need a bedsheet!"

CHARLIE BROWN: [still lying flat on back]: I'm dying! And all I hear are insults!! What happened?"

---from A Boy Named Charlie Brown


The very first Peanuts cartoon strip, 10/2/1950


"Sparky Shulz (b. 11/26/22) was a shy, self-conscious kid with bad skin, too light to play football, not tall enough for basketball, the only child of Carl and Dena Schulz of St. Paul, a painful student at St. Paul Central High School, failing at everything, wanting to talk to girls and not knowing how, tormented by teachers and other bullies, finding solace at the movies, sitting in the lovely dark and watching Victor McLaglen in Lost Patrol and Gary Cooper in Beau Geste and Laurel and Hardy and Tarzan, and reading the funny papers, Popeye and Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs. Hundreds of other St. Paul boys were in the same boat, whether Sparky knew it or not, and negotiated the white waters of adolescence and came out into the calm pond of Actuarial or Home Loans or Homeiletics, but Sparky had a good hand for drawing with a pencil, at least compared to other kids at Central High he did, and when his mom saw an ad for a University of Minnesota extension class in cartooning, he enrolled in it, and that, as they say, was that."

---Garrison Keillor
introduction to The Complete Peanuts Vol. I: 1950 to 1952

I've finished with the audio version of the definitive biography of Charles Schulz. While this version has been abridged on audio, there was far more information about the man than I’d ever taken in before. I learned that there really was a real person named Charles Brown, that Snoopy was somewhat modeled after a real dog that Sparky had in his childhood, that his parents were generally distant from him (his mother, dying of cervical cancer that no one ever talked about said to Charles, “I guess we should say goodbye,I guess we’ll never see each other again” and then died the following day) and that Schulz actually hated the name “Peanuts” for his strip, which was more-or-less chosen for him.

I learned that Mr. Schulz had 5 children that he was about as distant from them as his parents were from him, that he and his wife often didn’t get along and there was a point where Sparky had an affair. When confronted by his wife, he apparently said nothing and when she demanded,"don't you even feel sorry about it?", Sparky apparently said, "no."

Sparky loved ice skating and baseball and though he might have described himself to be as wishy-washy as the Charlie he drew, when it came to sports--especially baseball--the young Sparky was as competitive and aggressive as any professional ball player. This no doubt explains why the only thing that Charlie Brown has ever really risen to in the world is being manager of his baseball team.

I've got hundreds of memories of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Peppermint Patty, Lucy, Sally, Violet, Schroder, Pig-Pen, Franklin and the rest of the Peanuts gang, so it's hard to say where in my timeline the first exposure to the strip was. I THINK, though I can't be certain, it was the Christmas special. A Charlie Brown Christmas was first broadcast in 1965 so it's possible that my parents already knew about C.B. by the time I came along a few years later in '68 and made a point of tuning it in one Christmas season.

I do know that I've always loved C.B., have watched every special and feature length flick, including the little-known Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show (a series of animated vinettes based on the strips), had pop-up Peanuts books and small Hallmark books, figurines, magnets, cards, posters and movies. I LOVE Peanuts.

The interesting question, of course, is WHY? What exactly in Peanuts resonates with me so much that I watch the specials, read the books and the daily & Sunday strips? Better yet: what is it in Peanuts that resonates with MOST of us, for if the strip didn't call out to readers so much, there would be no interest in having every single strip ever drawn, from '50 to '00, bound in volumes and published over a period of 12 1/2 years.

Think of that: 2 volumes a year, 25 volumes in toto, from 2004 through 'till 2016. Other than the works of Shakespeare, I can't think of any other author who would have such a following wherein such a publishing would either be WANTED or economically feasible to print. Clearly, SOMETHING about Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang calls out to us and is plugged into the Collective Unconscious.

For me, I think part of it is the underdog effect. Charlie is described as “Sisyphus in a striped shirt” by the Chicago Reader. I don't think that's EXACTLY what Charlie Brown is, for that conjures up images of horrible, endless toil intent on punishing someone. It implies that Charlie is somehow deserving of punishment and that the universe is out to get him personally, which I don't think is the case. Better to call him what the Wiki article calls him, a "lovable loser, possessed of endless determination and stubbornness, but who is ultimately dominated by his anxieties and shortcomings, and is often dominated and taken advantage of by his peers."

To that extent, we've all got a lil' bit o' Charlie in us, ESPECIALLY those of us who are the ones who didn't quite fit in as kids (or even adults). The losers, nerds and loners who got picked on a lot as kids are the ones, I've found, who most identify with Charlie. Those of us who have gotten our kites stuck in trees, been dissed by friends or wished for more friends than we felt like we already had or simply played a really bad season of baseball feel some alignment with Good Ol' Charlie Brown.

Garrison Keillor, in his introduction to Vol. I in the Complete Peanuts series writes a good deal about Shulz's upbringing in the Midwest, and he hints that part of Charlie's appeal is what you might call a sort of Midwestern philosophy:

"Peanuts is more about St. Paul than it is about Santa Rosa, I'd say. Snow falls on Snoopy's doghouse. The beautiful modesty and understatement of the strip strikes us as Midwestern. Charlie Brown is a stoic like us. He doesn't imagine that some magical book or herb or 12-step program is going to turn him into Charles Green. And it's the Great Pumpkin who comes at Halloween, not the Blissful Artichoke or the sacred Asparagus."

In as much as I've done research on this, I have found that Midwesterners are bigger fans of Peanuts than Southerners or Easterners or West Coast dwellers. Garrison Keillor is known to Southerners, but his appeal isn't the same to folken down there as, say, Lewis Grizzard or Roy Blount Jr. (though, interestingly enough, Mr. Blount has frequently been on Keillor's radio show, and the two of them do a wonderful tribute to one of the most well-known Southern authors, Mark Twain. Still, when I was teaching in Florida, I was shocked at how few children OR adults were part of the extended Peanuts gang). There's something in Peanuts that resonates with the Midwestern mind a bit more than other parts of the country. Not that Peanuts is exclusively ours, for other countries love Charlie and Linus and Snoopy as well, but Charlie's roots are clearly here in the Midwest.

I grew up in what WAS a teeny little town in the Midwest on the shores of Lake Erie, which also is in the geometric center of the Rust Belt. For the most part, Charlie Brown's hometown could've been my own: the houses, the "thinking wall*" that the characters are often stand about and lean on, the well-built red doghouse in the spacious back yard-- any of these things could have come out of my hometown during the time I spent there in my childhood.
Similarly, the stoicism mentioned by Keillor was part of my childhood, that "pull yerself up by yer bootstraps" thinking wherein self-pity was not only NOT encouraged, it was actively stomped out. Perhaps this is why Charlie Brown, while given to occasional bouts of woe-is-me and visits to Lucy's Psychiatric Help Booth, keeps getting up and trying again; keeps flying that kite, keeps pitching that baseball game, even though his odds of winning THIS time are slim.

In A Boy Named Charlie Brown Charlie competes in a spelling bee and is the 1st Runner Up, flubbing not a difficult word but the word "beagle", the breed of his own dog. Of course, his friends at home give cries of AAAARRRGH! in frustration, and he comes home to no fanfare whatsoever, and spends the whole next day in bed with the blinds drawn.

When Linus comes to visit after school Charlie says that he's never getting out of bed for as long as he lives. Linus rubs it in a bit by saying that Charlie must feel like he's let everyone down, but he concludes with this lil' bit of Midwestern philosophy: "you know what, Charlie Brown? The world didn't come to an end."

No, it didn't, and Charlie sits up in bed, clearly thinking about this, and slowly gets dressed and goes out into the world where his friends are engaged in their normal routines, including yanking away the football that he tries to kick at the very end of the movie. "Welcome home, Charlie Brown" says Lucy, looking down over Charlie's prone form.

It's certainly not the last time Charlie takes a lot of flak and a fair amount of blame in the history of the strip. Indeed, in In It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown Lucy yanks the football away during the homecoming game right in front of all the fans when Charlie's team desperately needs a fieldgoal to win, and somehow Charlie gets blamed for this. The boy does his level best and even in front of a few hundred fans on his own home-turf the ball gets whipped away from him and he blames himself. What's more, he still goes to the Homecoming Dance and gets to finally kiss his sweetheart, The Little Red-Haired Girl, but doesn't remember any of it.

Does this sound like anyone else's life other than just mine? I identify with Charlie because in my own childhood all sorts of C.B.'ish stuff happened to me, sometimes more than once in one day. The big difference 'tween Charlie and me was that I didn't always have the energy to keep trying; a lot of the time I just wanted to plain ol' give up. While I can understand Charlie's anger and frustration at having the tree eat his kite and his resolve to "just stand here for the rest of my life", I probably would have simply given up and never flown a kite again.

To that end, perhaps I've failed as a Midwesterner, but I shall always hold a special place in my heart for Charlie.


*as it turns out, you don't have to go looking TOO far for Schulz inspirations in his strip. His characters are based, quite largely in fact, on himself and people he knew, and in the case of the low wall, the inspiration for this was a female friend and college of his who stood only about 4' tall. She'd come up to Sparky's desk when he was working and lean on it, her elbows about the exact height of the Peanuts gang when THEY lean on the Thinking Wall.