A Wishy-Washy Time

Work's been crazy, and I'm feeling just a little worn down in general from a long week, so what do I do? I went to connect with my favorite blockhead.

The Charles M. Schulz Museum, centered around the cartoonist known world-wide through his Peanuts characters, and known to his closest friends as Sparky, is but an hour's drive away from my living quarters. I have always been a Peanuts fan and those jazzy scores by Vince Guaraldi, and as a kid, I related big time to the numero uno blockhead himself, Charlie Brown.

As I discovered, you can't walk around Santa Rosa, California, without seeing the influence of one the town's favorite sons somewhere, mainly through the life-size statues which are placed throughout town on street corners and sidewalks, as well as main public gathering places, including Sparky's favorite Coddingtown Mall, which was a favorite escape place when he needed to take a break from his work from his nearby studio.

From what I could gather at my time there at the museum, townfolk appreciated Schulz's penchant for just being as ordinary a guy as a super-famous cartoonist can be. My discussion with one of the very friendly volunteers at the museum, Rose, talked about his love of athletics, the trips to the mall to camp out mainly at the bookstore, and his dealings with other cartoonists, from Lynn Johnston (For Better Or Worse), Patrick McDonald (Mutts), and Stephan Patsis (Pearls Before Swine). She also touched on how he would try to at least give some constructive advice on budding cartoonists' work, no matter how wretched their work happened to be.

Schulz's real athletic love was hockey, which I imagine was imported from
his birthplace of Minnesota. In fact, the bio tape that's available on the
museum website and plays in a room filled with comfy beanbags and other casual foamball seats shows the cartoonist looking quite sprightly banging in a goal in his mid-70s during a seniors tourney game. In fact, he opened up the Redwood Empire Ice Arena back in 1969, which not only hosts regular skating and hockey leagues, but hosts concerts and can be rented out for birthday parties and similar events. I guess this also explains the decent selection of hockey supplies at the nearby gift shop.

Every second Saturday the museum has an guest Cartoonist-In-Residence, and I got to meet this month's invitee Pam Stalker who has worked on stuff like Oregon Trail 5, Strawberry Shortcake and the PowerPuff Girls. I caught her near the end of her time there, but even in that shortened session, I found the portfolios that she had brought over to be varied and quite well-done, and covering a wide-swath of animation and illustration works. More importantly, she was very pleasant to talk to, and I found it a little funny that I could relate to her in that we had trouble mastering the drawing pencils at first, being "number 2 pencil" sketchers. Of course in my case, I never did progress past that point like Ms. Stalker has (and then some to boot, obviously) and my regular sessions of sketching pretty much died once I left college.

This world-wide appeal for the Peanuts comics and cartoons was evident in the people I passed by looking at the exhibits. I heard many different languages spoken as I walked past, and the kind volunteer Rose mentioned that I'd probably want to check out the Beethoven exhibit due to open up later this year, since I actually lived in the area, unlike many of the people she offered her rich tidbits of Schulz history prior, who were visiting from greater distances.

Bottom line, I'd say anyone who has any soft spot for Peanuts characters and happens to be in the Santa Rosa area would definitely enjoy spending a few hours in Sparky's Museum. Don't bring a kite, however, or the kite-eating tree in the courtyard in the back might just do it's dirty work, as it has done many a time to our loveable but wishy-washy young Mr. Brown.