Once there was a boy nicknamed Sparky. He wasn’t handsome, athletic, or popular. He had trouble in school—a lot of trouble. In fact, he failed every class in the eighth grade, and when he made it to high school, he got a zero in physics.
Sparky was shy. He didn’t ask a single girl out for a date the whole four years he was in high school because he was sure that no girl would accept. No one really disliked Sparky; they just ignored him.
However, Sparky has one talent; drawing cartoons. He was convinced his drawings were good, so he offered a series to be included in his high school yearbook. The editors turned him down. Sparky took a deep breath, drew more cartoons, and sent them to Walt Disney Studios. Disney turned him down.
Sparky decided that if no one cared about his cartoons, he would. He kept on drawing them. The lead character in his cartoons was a round-headed, painfully shy boy who didn’t do well in school, couldn’t talk to girls, and always struck out when he was at bat. That boy’s name is now known around the world: Charlie Brown.
Starting in 1950, Charlie Brown grew into Sparky’s alter ego. Along with his dog, Snoopy, his friend, Linus, and a host of other characters, Charlie Brown became the world’s best known comic strip character, eventually appearing in more than 2,000 newspapers for more than 50 years and spawning numerous award-winning television specials, an off-Broadway play, and tons of merchandise.
Sixteen years after Sparky’s death in February 2000, the Charlie Brown comic empire, Peanuts, produces more than $36 million annually.
Sparky’s passion and fire for his craft finally got him noticed, proving that he was a pretty darn good at something after all.
Schulz once characterized Peanuts—Snoopy’s fantasy life notwithstanding—as a study in disappointment. “All the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; and the football is always pulled away,” he said.
But if disappointment were all there was to “Peanuts,” the strip never would have enjoyed such enduring success and devotion.
In 2007, biographer David Michaelis published Schulz and Peanuts. In it he wrote: “Charlie Brown has to carry Charles Schulz’s spears, and the slings and arrows of the world, but I think Schulz found something in his own character early on, which was fortitude—which was the single quality he gave to Charlie Brown. …It’s his fortitude, his endurance, his willingness to do all this without self-pity that makes us love him and admire him.”
That, my friends, is an unquenchable fire!
“My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?” – Charles Schultz
Have an awe-full weekend!
William J. “Bill” Bacqué