Charles Schulz and the Good Grief City
Near Santa Rosa, California
On the night of February twelfth, two thousand, Charles Schulz died in his sleep at his home in Santa Rosa, at the age of seventy-seven. The following morning, the last Peanuts Sunday strip he had ever drawn appeared in newspapers worldwide. It had been prepared weeks earlier. The timing was, by any standard, uncanny: the man who had created Charlie Brown left the world on the same night his final strip went to press.
Schulz had moved to Sonoma County in nineteen fifty-eight, eight years after Peanuts made its debut in seven newspapers and began its improbable climb to becoming the most widely syndicated comic strip in history. He settled first in Sebastopol, where he built a studio that burned down in nineteen sixty-six. He moved to Santa Rosa, built a new studio, and stayed.
In nineteen sixty-nine, he opened the Redwood Empire Ice Arena on the northwest side of the city, designing it in a Swiss Alps village style. He called it Snoopy's Home Ice, though its formal name was the Redwood Empire Ice Arena. Schulz was a serious hockey player, not merely an enthusiast. He played a pickup game there every Tuesday night with his sons and members of the local hockey community. In nineteen seventy-five, he established Snoopy's Senior World Hockey Tournament at the rink. In nineteen eighty-one, he received the Lester Patrick Trophy for outstanding service to the sport in the United States, an honor shared with players and coaches who had spent careers inside the game.
By the time of his death, Peanuts ran in more than two thousand six hundred newspapers in seventy-five countries, read by roughly three hundred fifty-five million people in twenty-one languages. It had run every day without interruption for nearly fifty years. The strip was, in some technical sense, the most successful work of commercial art in the history of newspapers.
The Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center opened in Santa Rosa in August of two thousand two, across the street from the arena where he played hockey. It sits on Hardies Lane, which the city renamed in his honor.
