Happy Birthday, Charles Schulz

Tomorrow is Charles Schulz' 87th birthday.

Ted Dawson, one of the Three Men in a Tub blog, shares the photo below. It's an ice sculpture, that was created in Schulz's hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota almost ten years ago, to commemorate the very last PEANUTS Sunday strip on February 13, 2000.



As you may remember, Mr. Schulz passed away the day before his last strip was to run. It was on the news that morning, just as the Sunday papers were delivered.

The sculpture became not just a tribute to the newspaper comic strip, but also the focal point for fans to stop and honor this great cartoonist. People heaped cards and flowers in remembrance of the man and his Charlie Brown and Snoopy and all of those moments that have stuck with us.

Like so many people I know, I grew up with the newspaper strip, the CBS specials and the collections. It was so cool that the libraries in the small towns I grew up in (Iowa City, Lawrence, KS) stocked those PEANUTS paperbacks. I learned words from Lucy, like "psychological" and "real estate." I tried to copy the drawings when I was a kid, too. Schulz's simple style was deceptively hard to reproduce!

Happy Birthday, Charles Schulz: an American original.