December 31, 1999

CHARLIE BROWN, POGO AND ME

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

I first met Charlie Brown one summer day in the mid-1950s when I was visiting a place in California called the Devil's Post Pile with my mother, my father and my big sister.

The Devil's Post Pile got its name from some dramatic volcanic action that had occurred there millions of years ago, resulting in a massive upthrusting of stone shafts that looked like an array of Brobdignagian fenceposts. Even more exciting was the pumice that lay everywhere - puffy volcanic rock that floated when you put it in the river.

Floating rocks!

Charlie Brown was a boy a lot like me - about my age and, like me, living in a highly self-contained neighborhood community of children. Like me, he was in the early years of school, and, like me, his emotional life seemed to be a somewhat perplexing mix of happiness and melancholy. The other kids liked him, yet often he wasn't sure if they liked him enough.

Charlie Brown lived inside a paperback book my parents had bought me, simply titled “Peanuts," a collection of the daily strips Charles Schulz had been producing since 1950.

Getting to know Charlie Brown through repeated re-readings, I may have felt some pangs of guilt over the fact that I was two-timing old friends of mine named Churchy la Femme and Howland Owl.

Churchy and Howland were characters I already knew extremely well from paperback books of Pogo comic strips written and drawn by Walt Kelly, who, like Schulz, had begun his daily newspaper labors around the time I was born.

Pogo's world was in many ways the diametric opposite of Charlie Brown's. Charlie Brown and his friends (except Snoopy the beagle) were human, while Pogo himself was a possum and his friends were all animals - Churchy the turtle, Albert the cigar-smoking alligator, Beauregard the dog, Mamselle Hepzibah the skunk. And while Charlie Brown lived in a perfectly conventional post-war American neighborhood, Pogo and his pals lived in the lush expanse of the Okefenokee Swamp, somewhere in the borderlands of Florida and Georgia.

Charlie Brown and the other Peanuts children spoke in grammatical, economic English, one or two short sentences per panel. Pogo himself was a marsupial of few words, but his swamp compatriots were given to speaking in fractured run-on sentences fraught with slang that seemed to evolve from one panel to the next.

In a sense, Kelly's critters had taught me how to read. I was so fascinated by their print antics in my pre-literate stage that I forced grownups to read me the words over and over again until I had them memorized.

Charlie Brown and I became pals there at the Devil's Post Pile, but a bit later, when Schulz introduced a character called Linus who had a bossy sister, a philosophical turn of mind, hair that wouldn't comb and a ratty old blanket he wouldn't let go of, I really found my soulmate.

But then a very strange thing happened. I became an adolescent, a college student, a young adult and a middle-aged adult, while Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy and the others stayed the same - forever children.

Then, just as I was preparing myself mentally for my 50th birthday, Charles Schulz announced that he would retire the strip due to illness.

I had lost Walt Kelly and his creations many years earlier. But maybe it was no accident that in the last year or so, after long ago having lost the habit of reading daily comic strips, I rediscovered Peanuts and paid dally visits to that old neighborhood.

Which left me with one perception: Charles Schulz was the best. Right to the end, his boys and girls proved sweet and true to themselves while their creator danced them through the panels of their world with effortless grace.

On the afternoon of my 50th birthday, I lay down for a nap and turned to Peanuts in the newspaper. Linus and Lucy's little brother, Rerun, who shares with Linus the uncombable-hair gene, discovered a basketball in the snow, picked it up and took it inside. "So when you get older," Rerun said to the ball, sitting with it in a comfy chair, "maybe I'll take you to a nice warm gymnasium."

I laughed out loud. A few minutes later, the book on Australian prehistory I was reading dropped out of my hands and I fell asleep under the ratty old blanket my wife can't convince me to get rid of, and I dreamed about rocks floating on a river in California.

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

back to top