By: Virginie Boone

The Sonoma County airport is named for him, so is a museum and ice rink. Peanuts creator Charles M. Schultz spent 42 years living and working in Sonoma County, with “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” one of his most famous works.

Schultz, during his lifetime, kept an airplane at the airport and was an avid aviator. Snoopy, of course, loved flying too.

Schultz was born in 1922 in Minnesota and given the nickname Sparky at a young age. In 1929 the family moved west to Needles, California. The move was said to be prompted by a young cousin’s tuberculosis, which would fare better in a desert climate. Schultz later incorporated Needles into many of his comic strips, particularly those built around Snoopy’s brother Spike, who lived alone in the desert with coyotes and cactus.

Their time in the desert was alas short-lived, and Schultz moved back to Minnesota in time for elementary school. This is also where he developed his lifelong passion for ice hockey.

He wrote the Peanuts comic strip from 1950 until his retirement in 1999, with Snoopy based on his childhood dog, Spike, as well as an earlier family Boston Bull Terrier called Snooky. The first drawing of Spike/Snoopy appeared in a Ripley’s Believe It or Not newspaper feature in 1937. After serving time in the army, he returned home in 1945 and started selling his cartoons to The Saturday Evening Post as well as a weekly comic called Sparky’s Lil’ Folks, which ran in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

The first Peanuts debuted across seven national newspapers on October 2, 1950 and featured a four-panel cartoon of children with large heads… and a dog. The rest was history. By the turn of the century, Peanuts was syndicated in 2,600 newspapers all over the world, with books available in 25 languages.

The growing Schultz family would arrive in Sonoma County in June 1958, Charles, his wife Joyce, and five children, landing on a 28-acre property in Sebastopol known as the Coffee Grounds. The home had a photographer’s studio, which Schultz turned into his office, and the family eventually added a miniature golf course, swimming pool and horse stables.

With the growing success of the Peanuts characters, soon Ford came calling, wanting Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest to help advertise Ford products, namely the Ford Falcon. The use of animation soon led to the television specials we all grew up with, starting with “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in 1965, which won an Emmy Award.

In 1966, came “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” wherein Linus forgoes parties and trick-or-treating to sit alone in a pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin. It’s also the first time on film, viewers were able to see Snoopy as the World War I flying ace and Lucy pull away a football from the hapless Charlie Brown. But most importantly, it was the first Halloween special ever broadcast on television, becoming a Halloween tradition over generations.

“Pop culture can feel like religion when you’re a kid, a shared set of heroes and poses, attitudes, moods and jokes,” wrote Rich Cohen in The New York Times in 2019. “For my father, who was born in 1933, it was a tone set by the two Franks – Sinatra and Capra. In my formative years… my general outlook on life, though fueled by David Letterman and Bruce Springsteen, was anchored by ‘Peanuts,” the world drawn by cartoonist Charles Schultz. It was a faith related by parable, the classic text being the 1966 TV special, ‘It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”

Rooted in Sonoma County by then, the Schultz family opened the Redwood Empire Ice Arena in Santa Rosa in 1969. The character Woodstock came along in 1970 shortly after the seminal Woodstock Festival.

The Schultz’s divorced in 1972. Charles worked out of the ice arena for a time before building One Snoopy Place, a new studio. He remarried, to Jean Forsyth, in 1973. The first Snoopy’s Senior Hockey Tournament brought skaters from all over the world to Santa Rosa in 1975. In 1984, the first annual Woodstock Open Golf Tournament took place in Oakmont, a couples-only tournament that raised money for Home Hospice of Sonoma County.

So while it’s easy to remember Schultz through the Sonoma County airport, the museum and more, now is a good time to remember the classics, and believe in your own Great Pumpkin.

“To me, the sincerity in ‘The Great Pumpkin’ is key and is what has drawn me to its magic year after year,” Cohen continued. “It’s what you believe but also the sincerity of that belief that can give your life meaning. Sincere belief can order an otherwise formless succession of days, and it is meaningful days, collected together, that add up to a meaningful life.”

Photo By: Charles M. Schulz Museum