Sparky

by Beverly Gherman

  Sparky graduated from the art school on December 1, 1941, when he was nineteen. A few days later, on December 7, 1941, the United States entered the Second World War after the Japanese bombed the United States naval fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. During the two previous years, the German army had marched into Poland and other European countries. The United States was drawn into war in both Europe and Asia and began training young men to go overseas.

  Sparky was drafted into the army in November 1942. He was twenty years old when he left for training at nearby Fort Snelling in St. Paul.

  At about the same time, Sparky noticed his mother didn’t have her usual energy. Dena had always been his strongest supporter. It turned out she had been ill for several years with cervical cancer. At that time, most doctors did not tell their patients when they had an incurable disease. It was thought they would get depressed and give up hope. The doctor never told Dena what was wrong or that she would not get well. Sparky didn’t know anything either. He kept hoping she would get out of bed and be herself. But he heard her cries, especially during the night, when she was in pain. He hated leaving for training in the army while she was so sick.

  In February 1943, Sparky got a weekend pass to visit his mother. He stood at the side of her bed and watched her fitful sleep. Even Spike wasn’t allowed to lie on her bed any longer because his movement caused her pain. Dena told Sparky they should name their next dog Snoopy.

  SPARKY, HIS PARENTS, AND SPIKE / C. 1938

  SPARKY AND HIS PARENTS UPON HIS DEPARTURE FOR MILITARY TRAINING / C. 1940

  As Sparky was leaving to go back to his base, she said weakly, “I suppose we should say good-bye, because we probably never will see each other again.” She died the following day. After her funeral, Sparky went back to Fort Snelling feeling so badly he cried in his bunk that night. Later, he would remember what she had told him about naming his next dog and would use the name Snoopy for his famous beagle.

  (FOUR)

  Becoming a Man

  At first, Sparky was lonely in the army, but he soon made a close friend. Elmer Hagemeyer was older and had been a policeman before he joined the army. Elmer would have nothing to do with a nickname like Sparky. Instead he called his new friend Charlie. Their unit was sent to Camp Campbell in Kentucky to join the 20th Armored Division. They spent almost two years there, drilling and learning to use machine guns.

  Sparky was a good machine gunner and a good leader. He was soon promoted to staff sergeant and squad leader. He was gaining confidence he had never known and building muscles he had never had. Being in the army was a positive experience for him. The only thing he couldn’t adjust to was the coarse language of the other men. He tried to ignore it and made sure he never used ugly four-letter words.

  When other soldiers saw Sparky sketching, they asked him to decorate the letters they sent home, just as the kids in elementary school had asked him to draw on their binders. He illustrated his own letters to his dad, making fun of himself and the other soldiers.

  In February 1945, the unit was sent to Europe on the Brazil, a luxury liner that had been converted for military transport. It was Sparky’s first opportunity to see the ocean. After thirteen days of maneuvering to avoid enemy ships in the rough waters of the Atlantic Ocean, he was ready to land in France.

  From Rouen, France, they traveled to Germany in a half-track, a ten-ton fighting vehicle, large enough to hold his eleven-man squad. The wheels were covered with steel traction to keep the heavy half-track from getting stuck in mud. The men nicknamed it Sparky. Their orders were to prevent the Germans from blowing up any more bridges, so that the United States and the rest of the Allied Forces could move into Germany.

  Once, in a German village, Sparky found a suspicious barracks he thought might be a hiding place for enemy soldiers. He took a grenade from his belt and was ready to throw it into the doorway. Suddenly, a small dog entered the building. Sparky refrained from throwing the grenade. He couldn’t blow up an innocent dog. Later he said, “That dog never harmed anyone.”

  ARMY LETTER / C. 1944

  Sparky was awarded a Combat Infantryman Badge (CIB) for his excellence in combat. Throughout his life, if anyone asked him what he most valued, he always answered that the CIB was his most prized possession. It was recognized and highly regarded by other soldiers as the “fighter badge.” To Sparky, it meant he had been a brave soldier.

  In May 1945, the war in Europe ended. Sparky sailed back to the United States in early August. By the time he arrived in New York, an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. The war with Japan would soon be over. That meant he and his men would not be sent to fight against the Japanese army as they had feared.

  Sparky spent his first weeks back in the United States at Camp Shanks in New York, where he was processed out of the service. Before his discharge, he spent a short time in Lompoc, California, where he played golf and enjoyed the pleasant weather. He finally returned to St. Paul at the end of the year and immediately went to the barbershop. His father greeted him but didn’t stop cutting his customer’s hair.

  Even without the hugs of welcome, Sparky felt good about himself, and it showed in his confident appearance in photographs from those days. “I feel like somebody . . . I became a man,” he said about his time in the army.

  The good feelings “lasted about twelve minutes. And then I was back to being my regular self.” He knew he could not continue to live on the positive memories of his army service; it was time to decide what he should do with the rest of his life.

  SPARKY PLAYING BASEBALL IN THE ARMY / C. 1943

  (FIVE)

  Getting Down to Work

  After he was discharged from the army, Sparky moved into the family apartment with his father. He looked for jobs in town and sent off samples of a war story and two other strips to a New York comics publisher. When they rejected his work, Sparky sent it to other publishers. His father worried that Sparky might never find a decent job. As he talked to his customers in the barbershop, he wondered whether his son’s ambition to be a cartoonist would ever amount to anything.

  Sparky finally found a job lettering comic strips for a St. Paul company that produced Roman Catholic teaching aids. They needed him to do the lettering in three languages: English, Spanish, and French. They didn’t mind that Sparky couldn’t speak Spasnish or French. He lettered well and could simply copy the words they gave him. He was paid a dollar and fifty cents an hour.

  He was also offered a job at his old correspondence school, which had been renamed Art Instruction Schools. He was hired to evaluate students’ artwork. After studying a student’s drawings, Sparky wrote his criticisms—good and bad—to the student. For that, he was paid thirty-two dollars per week. He and the rest of the instructors sat at adjoining desks. Sometimes they drew amusing pictures that they shared with each other, laughed about, and then threw away. After a while, his fellow instructors became his friends and best critics. They shared books and music and art. He learned a great deal from them.

  He set up a studio in his parents’ old bedroom, trying to erase the memory of his mother dying in that very room. He pinned up drawings by his fellow instructors and made the room his own. Often he worked late into the night completing the lettering for the Catholic comics. Most days, after working at the Art Instruction Schools in Minneapolis, Sparky took a streetcar to St. Paul to drop off the lettering work he had completed and to pick up a new batch of cartoons to letter for the following day.

  During that time, Sparky was beginning to draw his own funny pictures of kids. He needed names, so he borrowed Linus from one of his friends at Art Instruction, Charlie Brown from another. He had already planned to use Shermy’s name for one of the boys.

  SPARKY WITH CHARLIE BROWN / C. 1958

  LI’L FOLKS CARTOON FROM THE ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS / 1948

  When he left samples of his work on his friends’ desks, he watched to see their reactions. If he saw them laughing, that was a
good sign. Most of the time, they encouraged him to keep drawing those kids. The fellows said his drawings “kept getting better” as he simplified the lines and stopped trying to add every detail.

  He even had one of his drawings published in the Catholic comics. It showed a boy giving his mother a birthday present and telling her “. . . if you don’t like it, the man said I could exchange it for a hockey puck.” The day it was published was Dena’s birthday, and that truly gave his success a special meaning.

  Sparky continued drawing comic panels of kids and sold them to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, which agreed to publish a weekly comic. It appeared on the women’s page, sometimes squeezed in between wedding announcements. In the strips, the girls usually complained about the boys or bashed them over their heads.

  He dreamed about having one of his single-panel cartoons published in the Saturday Evening Post, an extremely popular magazine sold all around the country. After sending them cartoon after cartoon, one was finally accepted. The magazine paid Sparky forty dollars.

  They used his full name on the page, “Charles Schulz,” instead of Sparky, but he was still Sparky to everyone who knew him. The magazine continued to publish his single-panel cartoons, but he was eager to find another newspaper or magazine that would publish his longer cartoons.

  He sent cartoons to United Feature Syndicate in New York City. The syndicate marketed many important newspaper comic strips and daily columns. Sparky waited and waited to hear from them. Weeks went by. Every day he rushed to the barbershop to see if any mail had come for him.

  Nothing. He was naive enough to think they would answer immediately. He had no idea they were swamped with cartoons submitted by artists from all across the country and could not answer all of them immediately. At last he received a letter from the syndicate inviting him to come to New York to show them more of his work.

  SPARKY’S CARTOON PUBLISHED IN THE SATURDAY EVENING POST / 1948

  (SIX)

  Losing the Red-Haired Girl

  On Sunday, June 11, 1950, Sparky gathered up his drawings and boarded the train to New York City. When he arrived, he registered at the Roosevelt Hotel. He was too excited to sleep that night and tossed and turned until early the next morning. With his drawings, he rushed through a drizzling rain to the syndicate offices in a skyscraper on East Forty-Second Street. It was so early that no one was there yet except the switchboard operator. She offered to hold on to his work while he had some breakfast.

  Sparky came back at ten o’clock. He discovered the men had been looking at his work before he returned. They liked it but said they wanted strips rather than two-panel cartoons. They asked him if he could draw a strip and develop the characters. Of course he could, he told them. They offered him a five-year contract with a fifty-fifty split of the profits.

  Without telling him, they also changed the name of the strip. They said he could not use the title Sparky had wanted, Li’l Folks, because another strip already had used a similar name. They liked Peanuts. Sparky didn’t. But he had very little power at that point. And he knew it. In order to have his work published, he had to be flexible. He didn’t get the name he wanted, but he had a contract. He was now a real cartoonist!

  On the train back to St. Paul, he treated himself to a steak dinner. He had done it! He couldn’t wait to tell Donna.

  Donna Mae Johnson worked in the accounting office at the art school. She had bright red hair and lovely blue eyes. Every day, Sparky arrived at school before she did and drew cartoons on her day’s appointment book so she would think of him all day. It was easier than trying to talk to her. In spite of his growing success, he still became tongue-tied in person.

  Gradually he built up the courage to invite Donna on a date. He took her to an ice-skating show and to see the ballet film The Red Shoes. They went on a picnic together and out to dinner. Sparky found Donna easy to talk to. The more time he spent with her, the more he liked her.

  In fact, Sparky liked Donna so much that he told her he wished he had an engagement ring to put on her finger. When she agreed to elope with him, Sparky gave it some thought, and then said he couldn’t do that to her parents. They would be too disappointed not to be present when she married.

  One afternoon, Sparky went to Donna’s house. They sat on the back porch steps and talked for a long time. He asked her to marry him in a proper wedding ceremony and told her they would live happily ever after, especially now that he had his own cartoon strip.

  SPARKY WITH DONNA, WHO INSPIRED HIS “RED-HAIRED GIRL” IN THE STRIP / C. 1950

  Donna said she had thought about it a lot, too, that she really liked him, but she couldn’t marry him. She had decided to marry a man with whom she had grown up, who went to her church and knew her better than anyone in the world. Sparky was devastated. He drove around the neighborhood for a half hour and then drove back to Donna’s house.

  He rang the bell, and when Donna came to the door, her eyes were red from crying. He asked her if she had changed her mind, but she told him she was still going to marry her long-time beau.

  Sparky realized he should have eloped with Donna when he had the chance and not worried about her parents’ feelings. It was the kind of disappointing moment Sparky would depict over and over in his comic strips. Little did Donna know, she would become his idealized red-haired girl.

  Sparky had learned that good guys don’t always win. Later he would say that Charlie Brown’s personality was born at that moment.

  (SEVEN)

  Growing Peanuts

  On October 2, 1950, Sparky’s first Peanuts strip ran in seven newspapers, including the local Star Tribune of Minneapolis and national papers like the Washington Post and Seattle Times. That day, he went out with one of his friends from the art school to buy all seven papers at a nearby newsstand. The vendor didn’t know what they were talking about when they asked for the papers carrying Peanuts. “We don’t sell peanuts!” the guy said. That made Sparky dislike the name of his strip even more. But when they finally found the right newspapers, it was amazing to see his strip in all of them, no matter what it was called.

  Everyone commented on how unique Peanuts was. It looked different than any other strip. It was not an action strip like Dick Tracy or Steve Canyon, whose characters were trying to solve world affairs or criminal cases. Peanuts was not cluttered with details. Sparky left white space so that his characters stood out. There was a horizon line, a few steps or maybe a curb for the kids to sit on.

  THE FIRST PEANUTS STRIP, “HERE COMES CHARLIE BROWN” / 1950

  Gradually, more newspapers added the Peanuts comic strip. The goal of the syndicate was to reach one hundred papers. Then it would mean the strips were making enough money to bring in a profit for the syndicate and for Sparky.

  There were only four children in the early strips: Charlie Brown, Shermy, Patty, and Violet. Plus Snoopy. Soon baby Schroeder was included. The following year the strip ran in twenty papers and in 1952 the Sunday strip was added—in color.

  Sparky showed his characters trying to solve problems. In those early strips, the story revolves around Charlie Brown. He worries because the girls are always picking on him. He wants to be tougher. In one strip, Violet wants to make a delicious mud pie, but nothing she adds tastes right. In another strip, Patty worries that she isn’t pretty. And Snoopy, the observer, watches the kids dealing with their daily concerns.

  In the fall of 1950, Sparky attended a party at the art school, where he met a friend’s sister, Joyce Halverson. He already had dated both of her older sisters. He especially liked their mother, Dorothy. The sisters teased him that he really wanted Dorothy to be his mother because he loved her pancakes.

  Joyce was divorced and had a one-year-old daughter, Meredith. When they started dating, Sparky was a bit overwhelmed by Joyce. Whereas Joyce was fun loving and had lots of energy, Sparky was quiet and restrained. But they shared an appreciation of music, and before Sparky knew it, he was in love.

  After dating a little mo
re than six months, Sparky and Joyce married on April 18, 1951, at the home of Joyce’s cousin in Minneapolis, overlooking picturesque Minnehaha Creek. He quickly adopted Meredith. Right after their wedding, Sparky’s father married his girlfriend, Annabelle. Carl said he had waited to see Sparky married first because he “didn’t want to leave [his son] alone.” They all lived together in Annabelle’s house in St. Paul, where Sparky worked on his strips on a card table in the basement.

  It wasn’t a perfect situation and before long, Joyce felt the need to get away from their humdrum Minnesota life and have time with her new husband. She convinced Sparky they should move to Colorado Springs, where they had spent their honeymoon. Sparky was desolate. He didn’t want to leave his friends, his father, and everything he knew in St. Paul. He liked his familiar life. It was comforting. Anything new terrified him. But he wanted to please his wife.

  Colorado Springs was rugged country surrounded by mountains. They moved into a small house in Bonneville, a new suburb of look-alike homes with low payments, perfect for a young army vet. The view of massive Pikes Peak through their living room window didn’t cost a cent. Joyce was in seventh heaven, because she could jump on a horse and ride for miles to get away from civilization. Sparky tried to work at home, but there were too many distractions inside and outside the house. Meredith was into everything, and the yard needed his attention. He finally realized he had to get an office.