YouSaid · the spoken record

Charles Schulz

lines on the record: 39
first: 2020-11-19
most recent: 2020-11-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Awakened, I was extremely depressed. Naturally it is not easy to disregard something like this, to forget it all and start thinking of funny cartoons for the daily pressures of life affect us all. I have talked to many people who have agreed that they find themselves feeling angry throughout much of the day. The mere routine of having to deal with customers or company people in superior positions is enough to make the working day difficult. Sometimes simply reading the morning paper or watching the news is enough to discourage anyone. We become angry with ourselves, with our family, our fellow workers, with people we meet in stores and of course with the government. It takes a good deal of maturity to be able to set all this anger aside and carry on with your daily work.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And finally, I'll close on this. This is Charles Schultz as an older, successful gentleman just telling us to carry on with your daily work. Every profession and every type of work has its difficulties. And one of the most difficult aspects of creating a comic strip is attempting to sustain a certain quality of day-to-day schedule that never ends. Trying not only to maintain that level, but to improve the features as the months go by, in spite of the problems one may be having in one's life, makes cartooning a very demanding profession. I believe the ability to sustain a certain quality in spite of everything is one of the elements that separates the good features from the weaker ones. I went through one strange phase of my life where I became quite disturbed by dreams, which occurred to me irregularly over a period of several weeks.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to please yourself is, you know, don't really listen to if you believe in what you're doing and you love what you're doing. Critics don't really know they can't possibly know your work better than you know it. I used to have in the early days of founders like this almost every single book there was like this section I called Critics Don't Oh shit This is a very example of this so he's talking about you know this other guy's insulting him and he says 20 years ago in an interview Al Cap said Peanuts has just about run its course now little kids talking like adults little kids don't talk like adults. Adults don't even talk like that So he's just criticizing you know Charles Charles' life work and he says anyway that was 20 years ago and since then I've added 1,500 newspapers”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's it. Those are the people to watch out for. The older you get, well, it took me forty years to discover that. And now on gratitude. I was talking to a friend the other day and I said, you know, cartoonists have nothing to complain about. This is all we ever wanted to do all of our lives. And we finally have a chance to do it. We can live any place we want to. We can work any hours we want to. And they send us money. And another piece of advice from the same speeches I would summarize is you should aim to please yourself. I never give my work to somebody else and say, what do you think about that? I just don't trust anybody. If I think it's funny or if I think it's silly, I send it in because I'm just trying to please myself. I never try to please a certain audience. I think that's disastrous. There's no way in the world you can anticipate what your reader is going to like or dislike. And kind of an extension of that you should just be.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other entertainment endeavors, so he's talking about why he'd much rather draw a cartoon and say work on a movie or television, having to work with hundreds of people to get an idea where he can just go in when he pleases as he pleases and create something directly from his mind to his hand. He finds that very, very satisfying. So when he's 36 years into his career, he writes an essay that I think he's eminently qualified to write. It's called On Staying Power. How are you still doing the same thing? And I'm just going to give you the main, to me, the main takeaway happens in two paragraphs. And it's asking ourselves, like, what are we uniquely? What are you uniquely qualified to do? To have staying power, you must be willing to accommodate yourself to the task. I have never maintained that a comic strip is great art. It simply happens to be something I feel uniquely qualified to do.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been criticized many times for this, although for reasons that I cannot accept. So we also see a fierce independence of mine in that statement, right? My best answer to such critics is always that the feature itself has not suffered because of our extracurricular activities. I have drawn every one of the 10,000 strips that have appeared, and I've thought of every idea. Not once did I let our other activities interfere with our main product, which is the comic strip. It has always been a mystery to me how we can be accused of overcommercializing something that is basically a commercial product. But it really does not matter what you are called or where your work is placed as long as it brings some kind of joy to some person someplace. That's another great sentence. To create something out of nothing is a wonderful experience. To take a blank piece of paper and draw characters that people love and worry about is extremely satisfying.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go to work every day and I draw funny pictures, and I do that every day over a long period of time. It could be a superstition, but I guess it is really that I don't want anyone to think about what I do is that much work. It is one of the few situations in life where I feel totally secure. This goes back to, talks about he has a hard time traveling, he calls himself agoraphobic. His studio, he likes it because he's in complete control. When I sit behind the drawing board, I feel that I am in command. I am comfortable in my studio, and I'm reasonably proud of many of the things that I've drawn. I think that I've done my share toward contributing to the advancement of our profession, and this also makes me proud. We have covered the world, this is interesting. He's talking about the criticism he gets because peanuts was so heavily merchandise, which that's where a lot of his money comes from. We have covered the world with licensed productions, everything from sweatshirts to lunchboxes to toothbrushes.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tiny way. I think he says on it takes 16 seconds a day to read a comic strip. Now he talks a little bit about why he feels he succeeds. He's writing this, I think he's almost 60. If you should ask me why I've been successful at peanuts, I would have to admit that being highly competitive has played a strong role. I must admit that I would rather win than lose. In the thing that I do best, which is drawing a comic strip, it is important that I win. I still enjoy, so the summary here is I succeed because I'm competitive and I love what I do. I still enjoy going to work each day. Though friends who know me well can testify to the fact that I never actually use the term work. If I have to say that I will not be free to do something on a certain day, I will always put it. I have to go to the studio and draw funny pictures. Again, it goes back to he does not over complicate things. Like back to the basics.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why he feels cartooning is such a reward, the most wonderful part of the business is knowing that you are reaching people and communicating with them. This is what makes cartooning such a rewarding profession. So when I read that, actually my favorite quote, if you're thinking about it's a quote from Richard Branson and it's just the best description of what a business actually is that I've ever heard. And he says, a business is simply an idea to make other people's lives better. So in the case of Charles Schultz, he really likes cartooning. But his cartoons, there's people that wrote to him that have been reading his cartoons for 40 years on a weekly basis. And they talk about the impact they have in their life, how they identify with certain characters' personality, all this other stuff. So again, his idea is I'm going to pursue something I love. And at the same time, I get to pursue what I love. I also get to make other people's lives better, even if it's in a small, you know, very”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have never had anyone work as an assistant on the actual comic strip or comic pages, partly because I feel there would not be much for them to do. The drawing is relatively simple because of the style I have adopted, and I have too much pride to use anyone else's ideas. And this goes back to just keep it simple, stupid. Go back to the basics. There are days when I would like to draw something very philosophical and meaningful or something to touch the hearts of everyone, and I find it absolutely impossible. One solution I use at these times is simply go back to the basics. Cartooning is, after all, drawing funny pictures. That's something a cartoonist should never forget. If a cartoonist remains with his own medium, if he does not let himself become carried too far afield and always remember that his business is to draw funny pictures, then I believe he will have a minimum of bad days. Then he talks a little bit about”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Highlighted, and I think it's fantastic. I grew up with only one real career desire in life, and that was someday to draw my own comic strip. This goes more into his schedule, the way he sets up his work, and it's actually titled Creativity, so how he gets his ideas. Surroundings play a definitive role in my kind of creativity. I found from experience that it's best to work in one single place and have a regular routine. I feel more comfortable”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I can find it. I think it was out of stock, but I have to check again. One favorite is my last million readers by a mill something. I like this book because it relates stories of early newspaper wars and beginnings of careers of various newspaper columnists and cartoonists. The last question, what advice would you give to our class about reading? Read, read, read. The more you read, the easier reading will become. The more you read, the more knowledge you will gain. And finally, reading is enjoyable. There are so many places you can visit, experiences you can experience, and people you can meet all through reading. Okay, so there's another essay where he goes into great detail about how to develop a comic strip. Really, this is on how to develop any kind of work. So it says one of the hardest things for a beginner to do is merely get started on his first set of comic strips. It's strange that most people who have ambitions in the cartoon field are not willing to put in the great amount of work that many other people do in comparison.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“End of this essay. He's doing there's another, there's a QA, so it's questions about reading that children frequently ask. And I'm just going to do some highlights here. This is going to be quick. Here's one question. How does reading help with your career or hobbies? His answer. Reading helps me to gain knowledge that helps me in creating my comic strip. Number, the numbers don't matter. Another question What is your favorite book as an adult? One favorite is my last million readers by Emil Guevar. I don't know how to pronounce that last name. It's a biography and I actually looked for this. I might read it.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Living in Minneapolis. I met a man who played the viola. I thought this said violin. I hope that wasn't a spelling error. I assume there's an instrument called the Viola who played the viola for the Minneapolis Symphony. And in one of our talks, he said to me, you know, playing the Viola to me is a lot like religion. And I thought, that's nonsense. What does he mean by that? But as the years went by, I could almost say that drawing a comic strip for me became a lot like a religion because it helps me survive from day to day. It's an interesting thought. I always have this to fall back on. When everything seems hopeless and all of that, I know I can come to the studio and think. Here is where I'm at home. This is where I belong in this room drawing pictures.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Forty to fifty million dollars a year. The cumulative earnings of peanuts is well over a billion dollars. And again, I bring that up as because one, it's weird that his insecurity is like, I don't know anything about financial matters. But two, I think he hits on this. All I knew is cartooning. Again, I go back to the Alan Watts quote where he talks about anybody can be interested in something. If you're interested in something, there's chances are that other people are too. Well, he's not, Alan Watts was giving advice on work, not necessarily how to produce a business, but this idea, Charles Schultz is extremely interested in cartooning. Guess what? I think the book says something like 90 at the time he's writing. I think this is in the 1960s, 1970s, 90 to 100 million Americans were reading the comics every week, which was insane. So I just like that idea. You don't have to be a financial wizard, but if you know something, if you're interested in something and you can attract other people like mine,”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At different times I've had trouble travelling and have become almost agoraphobic. I'm always insecure. I think I'll always be an anxious person. Somebody asked me in an interview recently, what are you anxious about? And I said, if I knew I wouldn't be anxious anymore. I have some very good friends in different professions, and I was just with four or five of them a couple weeks ago. One of them was having a birthday and we all went out to lunch, and I suddenly realized that I felt a little bit out of place. See, I'm not a businessman. I don't know anything about financial affairs or banking or what attorneys do or things like that. All I know is cartooning, golf, hockey, books and reading, and a few more things like that. So it's a joy to me when I find somebody that I can relate to. So I want to stop there because this is also sometimes it's beneficial when you see you can step outside of yourself and you see.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you also have to make an effort to stay open to the world. I read a lot. I don't read simply for research or to get ideas. I read because I enjoy it. Let me just stop and interrupt there real quick. It's interesting that he talks about because he never went to college, he was insecure, even when he's an adult, you know, that, oh, this person has a college degree that I'm talking to. They must be smarter than me. So he talks about constantly reading and trying to do pursue self-education. And I thought that was just really great advice. And then obviously, you know, the idea that just because somebody went to college and the other person didn't, that the person went to college de facto smarter is ridiculous. Going back to this, maybe the real secret to not getting too old is to not grow up. I'm not a complete grown-up. Really. Remember, 73 when he's writing this. I find that I still feel out of place most of the time. This is more of his Charlie Brown tendencies than everyone away.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“interest in others and forgetting about yourself. I have found that simply asking other people about themselves can be quite fascinating. I gave a lecture once to a group of high school students and I said this is just really great advice from an older gentleman. Go home tonight and ask your parents where they met. Ask your dad what he did in the war. Ask your mom if she went to the high school prom. Talk to your grandmother and don't just let things die. Pursue the questioning. Do it now before it's too late. It's this kind of thinking that promotes cartoon ideas. Anybody can think of shallow cartoon situations, but I'm always trying to pursue something a little bit deeper. I suppose we're all at the mercy of the medium in which we work, and a comic strip doesn't give you that much room for a topic like death, but it can be there if you work at it.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I draw from day to day. You see, I work just as hard now, if not harder than I ever have. I think I'm more particular about what I do. My drawing is so much better now, in spite of the fact that I keep reading an article that I'm not as good as I used to be, and that some people even say that I should quit now before the strip deteriorates. But that's not nonsense. I think of a person maintains decent health and can handle the grind, then this is one of those professions where you should get better all the time. So he's 73. I think he dies five years after he's writing these words. I also have a great fear of becoming boring. There are a lot of boring people around. You and I talk about this double entendre. Avoid boring people. I think it's just great advice. There are a lot of boring people around, and unfortunately, I think older people can become boring very easily. The way to prevent all that is by maintaining an”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“73 year old Charles Schultz. All right, let's go. An astounding thing has been happening to me in the last couple of years. People come up to me and say, are you still drawing the strip? I want to say to them, good grief. Who else in the world do you think is drawing it? I would never let anybody take over. And I have it in my contract that if I die, then my strip dies. People also ask me if there's any message or theme to peanuts. I suppose it might be that Charlie Brown, in spite of always losing, never gives up. It's interesting. Charlie Brown never gives up. And if you can work on the same thing for 50 years, clearly you can say the same about yourself. But really, I never think about that. I just think, and this is what I mean about this theme that goes over and over in the book, just stick to the basics. Stick to the basics over a long period of time and everything else will take care of itself. But I never really think about that. I just think about how I'm going to get two or three more good ideas.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and he invested in Teledyne, which is the wonderfully successful company that Henry Singleton founded. But he says something that's very interesting, and it's going to echo what Charles Schultz, just the same advice. He's like, that's not where you get ideas. You get ideas from sitting in a room alone doing the work, right? So he says, Henry reminds me of de Gaulle. He has a singleness of purpose”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so this is a little bit about where his ideas come from. He's talking about character Snoopy and then his brother Spike and where Spike lives. So I admitted that. But he says, but I didn't get my idea of his surroundings from childhood memories. Mine is just a cartoon desert, a made-up place. He grew up, obviously, in Minneapolis. It was cold, snowed all the time, and Spike lives in a desert. So he's like, I just made that up. And this is the important part. Most comic strip ideas are like that. They come from sitting in a room alone and drawing seven days a week as I've done for 40 years. Now there's two things that those two sentences made me think of. Let me grab. One comes from another book. One second. Okay, so this is from the book Distant Force, which is on Henry Singleton. I think I covered maybe early 100s and founders. You can find it, though. It's called Distant Force. This is Arthur Rock. Arthur Rock was a venture capitalist. He was one of the first investors into Apple.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's comparing and contrasting the way he feels about his work to the way I think most people feel about their work, right? It's like, oh, why don't you just work in these little short bursts? Then you have to do anything for a while. All right, so he says, it took me until last year to realize what an odds statement that really is. You don't work all of your life to do something, so you don't have to do it. I could talk about Beethoven knocking out a few fast symphonies so he could take some time off. Or Picasso grinding out a dozen paintings so he could go away. But the comparison would obviously be pompous. So this idea, that's the most important sentence. Let me read it again. You don't work all of your life to do something, so you don't have to do it.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years now, and of course, have had many strangers visit my studio. They look at all the books in my room and then look at my drawing board and express amazement that this is the actual board at which I sit and draw the strips. Inevitably, the conversation turns to how far ahead I work. When they learn about the six week daily strip deadline, so he's got to turn for the one that appears on the Monday through Friday newspaper, he's got to turn that in six weeks early. The 12 weeks on the one that appears Sunday, the bigger obviously paper, he has to do that 12 weeks in advance. A visitor almost never fails to remark, gee, you could work really hard, couldn't you, and get several months ahead and then take time off. This is the most important part of this section, which I love. Being, as I said, a slow learner, it took me until last year to realize what an odd statement that really is. Now, the reason I think this is so important because”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, moving on to the next essay. I love this part because he's really, it kind of echoes that paragraph I talked about at the very beginning that I found so interesting, the fact that he could work on something almost every day for 50 years. The body of work, you know, 17,000 plus comic strips. And I feel 30 years, this is, let's see, what, 35 years into his career, it's another way to explain the same concept. The fact that you can tell that he found something he loved to do, which is so rare for humans to find in their lives, which is really bizarre if you think about it, because work is going to take up, what, half of our conscious the time they were actually awake. You sleep eight hours a day, work eight hours a day, have eight hours a day to yourself, and you have 16 awake hours thereabouts, and half of them you're probably spending working. So he says, sometimes it takes me a long time to come to certain conclusions. I've been drawing the peanut strip for almost 35 years.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I received a nice letter from Jim Freeman, their editorial director who said they were very interested in my work and would I care to come to New York and talk about it. When I got to the back, so it's really funny that happens there. So he goes to York, he arrives too early at the syndicate office. No one's there except the receptionist. He's like, okay, well, I haven't had breakfast yet. I guess I'll just go have breakfast and come back and then we'll have the meeting. By the time he gets back, the meeting is already over and they decided to offer him a deal. When I got back to the syndicate offices, they had already decided they would publish a strip. This made me very happy. I returned to Minneapolis, filled with great hope for the future, and asked a certain girl to marry me. When she turned me down and married someone else, there was no doubt that Charlie Brown was on his way. Losers get started early, and that actually becomes a storyline in peanuts.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was getting rid of my shyness and feelings of inferiority and learning how to strike up acquaintances on the train and talk to people. So more in his career prehistory and this idea of just always keeping something developing in the mail, I continued to mail my workout to a major syndicate. One day I opened up a letter from one syndicate that turned me down, and the next day opened up one from a director who said he liked my work very much. Arrangements were made during the next few months for me to start drawing a Sunday feature, but at the last minute their editors changed their minds and I had to start all over. I accumulated a batch of some of the better cartoons I had been drawing for this deal that fell through and mailed them off to United Features Syndicate in New York. This is the one this is his finally big break. I don't know how much time went by without me hearing from them, but I'm sure it was at least six weeks. I can convince them my drawings had been lost in the mail. I finally wrote them a letter describing the drawings I had sent and asking them if they could recall receiving anything similar.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So little folks is going to run for two years, and it's going to morph into peanuts. It's going to be renamed, the character is going to be developed. But this basic idea, he just keeps working on for a few years and eventually that changes into what's going to be his life's work. I was making regular trips to Chicago to try to sell comic features. I dropped into the Chicago sun one day and showed my work to Walt Ditson. He talks about this guy over and over again. I think this is the single most important influence on his career, who was then their comic editor. And he was very impressed with what he saw. I recall him exclaiming, I certainly cannot say no to this. We'll have to take it to the president. We went into the man's office, he barely looked at the work and abruptly said no. At this time I was also becoming a little more gregarious and was learning how to talk with people. When I first used to board the morning train to ride to Chicago, I would make the entire trip without talking to anyone. Little by little, however,”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Department of Instruction at the correspondent school. It was an exciting time for me because I was involved in the very sort of thing I wished to do. And part of the reason I think that he talks about why this is so invigorating is because all the instructors were trying to do the same thing. So they would collaborate, they would share ideas. In fact, a lot of the characters named in Peanuts are named, their first names are from fellow friends and instructors during this time of his life. And he's really young, early 20s is when this is all happening. And one of his friends and fellows instructors actually encourages him to submit, which is eventually going to become peanuts. So it says Frank Wing, my fellow instructor at Art Instructor, said Sparky, that Schultz's nickname. Everybody calls him Sparky. Sparky, I think you should draw more of those little kits. They are pretty good. So I concentrated on creating a group of samples and eventually sold them as a weekly feature called the Little Folks.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To different syndicates, the people that actually get comic strips in the newspapers. And he never lets a week go by where, again, he has like a store of value for his work. I made it. I send it off. I forget about it. And then I create something new. And then I repeat that over and over and over again. This is how he winds up breaking into being a cartoonist and signing the syndicate deal for what becomes peanuts. I submitted cartoons regularly to the Saturday evening post and sold 15 of them. These are like one-off occasions. These are not strips I run over and over again. These were strongly formative years and my ability to think of ideas and to present them properly was improving steadily. It seemed that it would only be a matter of time before I'd be able to sell some type of marketable feature to a syndicate. I'm still convinced that my eventual success was due largely to what I have called the invigorating atmosphere in the”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so he graduates from that course. He actually starts teaching at that art school. And while he's doing that, he's trying to pursue his own career in being a cartoonist on nights and weekends and any of his free time. So the next section, I consider this the prehistory of his career. There were many of us on the staff at the art introduction school who had ambitions to do other things. And I used my spare time to work on my own cartoons. I tried never to let a week go by without having something in the mail working for me. So this is a sentence that appears multiple times in the book over many decades are separating all these essays that he's writing. But this idea that you should always have something in the, we have to use it as a metaphor, obviously, but he's like, you should always have something in the male working. So he makes maybe a few comic strips, sends them off in the mail. What he means is he's sending those off.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is during the Great Depression. I realized then that during those depression days he had become accustomed to owing people money. The following two years of high school works, excuse me, the two years following high school were extremely difficult for this time my mother was suffering so much with her illness. I was drafted into the Army in 1943 to serve in World War II. I went into the bedroom. This is just sad, man. I went to the bedroom to say goodbye to my mother. She was lying in bed, very ill, and she said to me, Yes, I suppose we should say goodbye because we will probably never see each other again. She died the next day”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now we get to the point where he decides to pursue this as a career, and he does this really early. He says, during my senior year in high school, my mother showed me an ad that read, Do you like to draw, send in for a free talent test? This was my introduction to art introduction schools incorporated, the correspondent school. So this is what he does instead of college. He says, I could have taken my drawing there in person, but I did all of the lessons by mail. Now here gives you an insight into why would he do that. There's some people that have to do the college courses by mail, but this is actually located in Minneapolis where his family was at the time. He says, I did that because I was not proud of my work. So we see that lingering Charlie Brown-esque insecurity there. The entire course came to $170 and I remember my father having difficulty keeping up with the”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only 52 when he's writing those words. So she died really young. So in this next section, he's actually talking about a lot of the storylines that he gets from Peanuts actually came from his own childhood. But this is just a fantastic sentence. I just want to read it to you as a standalone. There are certain seasons in our lives that each of us can recall. And there are others that disappear from our memories like the melting snow.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any days off, he'd go to work early in the morning. I think he'd try to be done by like three or four in the afternoon, but it's something he did every day. I wonder how much of his dad's schedule had an influence on him. He loved to read the comic strips, his father that is, and we discussed them together and worried about what was going to happen next to certain of the characters. And he talks about his dad a lot more in the essays than his mom, and we're going to see why because his mom had tragically died of cancer. He says, my mother also encouraged me in my drawing, but sadly never lived to see any of my work published. She died a long, lingering death from cancer when I was twenty and was a loss from which I sometimes believe I never recovered. So he is writing those words about thirty two years after she died.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially with my daughter. I think it is important for adults to consider what they were doing and what their attitudes were when they were the age their own children are now. There is no other real way of understanding the problems of children. Charlie Brown's father is a barber, which is autobiographical, for our family's life revolved around the long hours my dad spent in the barbershop. He loved his work very much. I recall him telling me once that he really enjoyed getting up in the morning and going off to work. He was always in the barbershop by eight in the morning, and during the nineteen thirties he always worked until at least six thirty at night, and on Friday and Saturday nights many times he was working till eight or nine at night. He had one day off each week, Sunday. I would say that it's very interesting now that looking back on that paragraph because it follows his, I don't think Charles”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cartoons in the early years, but created very few original characters, so he would just copy. This is how we learn, right? We imitate first. Most of the time I copied Buck Rogers or Walt Disney figures. He talks about the huge influence that Walt Disney had on his life. I used to buy every big little book in comic magazine that came out and study all the various cartoonist techniques. In my high school years, I became a Sherlock Holmes fanatic and used to buy scrapbooks at the local Fivendime and fill them with Sherlock Holmes stories and comic book form. That's actually really smart. Essentially, he's converting the story in one medium into the medium that he's going to work in. A friend of mine was named Shermie. A friend of mine named Shermy was one of my faithful readers. And when I started peanuts, I used his name for one of the original characters. Now he talks a little bit about his parents here. I think, and this is actually really good advice and something I try to do with...”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the reason this is surprising is because he talks about Charlie Brown is kind of like a loser. It's his words. That's the way Charles describes Charlie Brown. And he's very insecure. Nothing ever goes right. And he says that the inspiration from that came from his own insecurity. He grew up very awkward, unsure of himself, didn't know where he fit. And so Charlie Brown has the same way Charles Schultz felt when he was a child is the way Charlie Brown is drawn and conveyed to the reader of the comic strip. So I thought that was very interesting juxtaposition there in the sense that he's insecure. He's not sure of himself, but he knew that he was going to be successful being a cartoonist. I don't know how to reconcile that. I don't know if you can reconcile that. I just thought it was very interesting observation I wanted to share with you. And in this moving on into this essay, he talks about his early influences and then his memory of his parents. So he says, I was drawn.”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did have the hope that I would be able to contribute something to a profession that I can now say that I have loved all my life. So the interesting point to me was that he only ever had one goal in life. He wanted to be a cartoonist since the time he started falling in love with reading comics at six, didn't go to college, decided to go to art school instead, was writing, drawing comics the entire time of his childhood. But the reason I changed the note on the page was This was surprising to me because in this book It's very similar to a few podcasts ago with the Catherine Graham autobiography where I said it was kind of like you're reading a diary or a very personal journal of somebody because they're revealing like emotional states that I don't think most people reveal to the”
2020-11-19 · Founders · #154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source