The Charles Schulz Museum and Snoopy's Hometown

Just north in Santa Rosa is a museum devoted to the most widely read comic strip in history. Charles Schulz, the cartoonist behind Peanuts and its cast of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, and Linus, moved to Sonoma County in nineteen fifty eight and lived and worked here for more than forty years, drawing the vast majority of his strips in a studio nearby. For most of his career he skated and sipped coffee at a Santa Rosa ice arena he helped build, and the town became inseparable from his work.

The Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center opened on August seventeenth, two thousand two, about two years after Schulz died, and holds the largest collection of original Peanuts strips in the world. Two works by the Japanese artist Yoshiteru Otani dominate the great hall.

One is a towering ceramic mural, more than twenty feet high, made from thousands of small tiles that from a distance form a single image of Lucy holding a football for Charlie Brown. The other is a carved wooden sculpture tracing the evolution of Snoopy's shape over the decades. For anyone who grew up with the strip, it is a pilgrimage to the place where the beagle on the doghouse was born.