Peanuts Are Just Li’l Folks

Hey everybody. Welcome to Retell Seller, an ephemera podcast where I uncover forgotten stories and the ephemera people leave behind. I’m Angie a reseller of 10 years, and I’ll share one of those snippets with you. Let’s see what today’s find has to say.

So last week’s episode was about Garfield and the newspaper clippings I’d had for years and this week we’re talking about another comic strip great, Charlie Brown, which was not originally planned this way, but I was making my usual rounds at one of my favorite thrift stores, not finding much except for a few vintage linens.

And as I was heading towards the register, I saw an end cap with multiple clear resealable bags, hanging on hooks, and the first thing that caught my eye were some Charlie Brown Easter themed die cut bulletin board decorations. The first bag had two cutouts, one pastel colored image of Charlie Brown standing outside on a small patch of green grass with a single yellow tulip popping out of the ground.

He’s smiling and holding a blue and pink zigzag striped Easter egg with a speech bubble overhead saying, “One Good Egg Deserves Another.”

The second cutout in the bag is the same pastel colors where Charlie is standing in front of a yellow mailbox, which is the same size as him, on a wooden post surrounded by greenery and flowers.

He has the mailbox door open and lots of pink, purple, blue, and yellow colored eggs are spilling out, causing a pile up. Charlie seems irritated, looking up and saying “Good Grief”.

As I thumbed through all of the bags, I saw a few more Peanuts characters along with non Peanuts Easter themed cutouts which were of cute, fluffy rabbits and baby chicks.

And once home I organized everything and ended up with 19 of the Peanuts, mainly Woodstock, and 19 of the baby chicks and rabbit kits.

Also to see all of the cuteness I’m talking about, be sure to check out Retell Seller’s YouTube channel, where I post videos to go alongside the podcast. Some podcasts you just gotta see. So don’t forget to subscribe while you’re over there.

Many are marked hallmark along with dates and the Peanuts specific decorations had the addition of being stamped with United Feature Syndicate and Schulz’s signature. The dates on the Charlie Brown pieces range from 1950 to 1965, I found a website that I’ll link to in the show notes talking about how the date can be one of the most misunderstood markings of Peanuts memorabilia.

And after reading it, I’m not sure I understand it much better. I think simply put that just because something is dated 1950 doesn’t mean that’s when it came out. The 1950 refers to the copyright date for when Charlie was first used in publication. Each character has their own copyright dates like

Schroeder debuted in 1951. Lucy and Linus were 52. Snoopy was 58 and Woodstock 1970.

The site goes on to say after 1994, copyright was no longer needed.

One of the images I have dated 1958 and 1965 is of Snoopy at a table and on the table is an Easter basket filled with eggs and a bow on the handle. There’s four glasses each filled with a different color, pink, yellow, blue, and orange, half a dozen white eggs and a few crayons. Snoopy is holding an egg dipper, and on the dipper is a half orange, half yellow, little unnamed yellow bird.

Both are smiling at each other and that little bird, in 1965, didn’t even have a name yet, and a few years later, in 1970, he becomes Woodstock. The dates, if I’m understanding what I read before of 1958, refer to the original copyright date of Snoopy and the 1965 date is the renewal of it.

I think all of the cards I have are the cutest, but THE cutest, may be the one of Snoopy and Lucy.

It’s the perfect blue colored background with Snoopy holding an Easter basket filled with eggs in his right hand, extending his left hand out with a single yellow and pink egg to give to Lucy. Lucy’s wearing a purple dress and is sticking her tongue out in disgust as Snoopy lays a big kiss on her. There’s yellow writing above them saying SMACK! with a pink heart above it.

So, this card dated 1952 and 1958 would refer to Lucy’s copyright date of 52, and again, 1958 being Snoopy’s original copyright date. But when this card or any others came out originally, I guess I can’t say, although Hallmark didn’t team up with Schulz until 1960, so the couple of cards I have dated 1950 with a Hallmark stamp means it’s actually probably sometime around 1960 or after.

There’s a podcast in which they talk about all things Peanuts, and it’s called You Don’t Know Peanuts, so I’ll link to the Hallmark Peanuts relationship episode in the show notes.

But the partnership with Hallmark came about when a group of Hallmark employees from the editorial department along with Arnold Shapiro, the product manager approached Schulz saying they thought Peanuts would appeal to Hallmark consumers, and Charles did enjoy the thought of working with Hallmark.

Throughout the conversation, they realized that J.C. Hall, who was the founder of Hallmark and Schulz, had a lot in common. Hall said of Schulz that he was a “magician with a pencil” and Schulz, felt the same of Hallmark and loved what they were doing, and would say how they think of a lot of things that he wished he’d thought of to put into his own strips.

Instead of describing all of the pieces I have though, I’ll be putting them in the YouTube video, letting them scroll on by, as I talk a bit about Charles Schulz himself.

So going way back, Charles was born on November 26th, 1922, to Carl and Dina Schulz. His dad was a barber and his mom a waitress until becoming a homemaker full-time. Charles admired his parents for the life they’d built. They had only third grade educations and his dad, picking up various jobs, including things like pitching hay, allowed him to eventually buy his own barbershop.

Charles was nicknamed Sparky due to his uncle, pretty much declaring he shall be named Sparky based on a comic strip about a racehorse. And I just love the connection with how he later became one of the most well-known comic strip creators of all time.

He always enjoyed drawing and many were of his dog spike, who would later become what sparked the idea of Snoopy’s brother who lived in the desert. And the desert idea came from a short time when he was around six, when Charles and his family lived in Needles, California.

At 14, Charles’ dad sent a letter to Ripley’s, Believe it or Not, describing how the family dog had some strange eating habits that he never physically suffered from eating. Included with the letter was a drawing by Sparky.

It was a side view image of his black and white dog. Sitting next to the dog are the words “Drawn by Sparky” with an arrow drawn towards the dog, and underneath it says “A hunting dog that eats pins, tacks, screws, and razor blades. Is owned by CF Schulz, St. Paul Minn.”

On the Schulz Museum’s website. They have a timeline of his life and one section mentioned one of his teachers in his junior year of high school, Ms. Paro, had saved one of Charles’s pencil drawings, which she’d kept for 25 years. She returned it to him with a message that said, “Happy New Year, and thanks for Peanuts, M Parro.”

She said at a later point, the “drawings were spectacular because they were things you wouldn’t even think of. That means his mind was working every minute. He isn’t worried about what’s going on in the paper, it’s in his mind. It’s got to come out”

After high school, he worked jobs mainly making deliveries and alongside would also submit cartoons to magazines, but nothing would come of it.

And when Charles was 20, he was drafted into the US Army to serve in World War II, and within days of leaving, his mom, who had been sick for some time, died of cervical cancer at the age of 48. In 1975, he was quoted as saying, “The Army taught me all I needed to know about loneliness.”

When he got out of the army, he saw it as an opportunity to do the things he really wanted to do. And what we now know as Peanuts was due to Charles having submitted his comic to United Feature Syndicate in hopes of being distributed nationally.

In the late forties, Charles had already been running a comic strip out of his own local newspaper, and it was called Li’l Folks, LI, apostrophe L. And once United Feature Syndicate decided to run with Charles’ submission, it also meant it came with some stipulations.

The major change was they didn’t call the name Li’l folks because they thought it was too similar to other comics at the time.

One being called Little folks spelled out, L-I-T-T-L-E, and Li’l Abner, LI, apostrophe L.

So they changed it to Peanuts, which Charles never liked throughout his entire life.

United Feature Syndicate looked at Peanuts as being the peanut gallery from the Howdy Doody Show, but Schulz thought it was ridiculous and made it too insignificant.

I found Schulz’s life to be fascinating. There’s so much more information about him.

Here are just a few things I came across. He had coached a woman’s softball team called The Bureaucrats. He played hockey and opened Snoopy’s Home Ice Arena in Santa Rosa, California.

He’d had heart surgery at one point and drew his frustrations out on the hospital wall. He’d painted a mural for his daughter on her bedroom wall, and once the Schulz family moved away, it was sold several times.

In 1979, the new homeowners Stanley and Polly found out the Schulz family had lived there, and that the mural had been painted over. Polly reached out to Charles to see what type of paint he’d used so it could be uncovered, and it took her three months to reveal the eight by 12 foot wall painting.

It was removed from the home, cleaned up further, and now it’s displayed at the Schulz Museum.

Charles suffered from everything that we all have at one point or another. Separation, loss, death, loneliness, feelings of worthlessness, and it showed up in the smartest and gentlest of ways among a group of young kids, who had, in many ways lived the life of one man. As a friend told the times after Schulz’s death, “I think that one of the things that afforded Sparky his greatness was his unwillingness to turn his back on the pain.”

That to me is a beautiful thing to recognize in someone. Really.

He’d gone to bed on the night of February 12th, 2000, and didn’t wake up. He died just hours before the final peanut strip was published. And it was basically a letter to everyone telling them he was no longer able to fulfill the demands of the daily strip.

Time magazine said, “as soon as he ceased to be a cartoonist, he ceased to be.”

Thank you for joining me. As I shared a snippet of the past, I’d love to know if it connected with you in some way. Did it spark a memory or make you see something differently? If so, consider sharing it. Be sure to check out the show notes for additional info, links and ways to connect. It’s not nostalgia, it’s human.

Until next time, may you find something worth holding onto.

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