They sometimes say that good things come from humble beginnings, the problem is, we may not know anything about how things got their start.
Such was the case for a young cartoonist named Charles Schultz. Most people remember him as being the person behind the Peanuts comic strip that was so popular decades ago.
In fact, the Peanuts characters were so iconic, they are still remembered today. I think everybody could recognize Charlie Brown and Snoopy just by seeing them.
When Schultz first started out, however, he didn’t have a silver spoon in his mouth. His mother was riddled with cancer and his father was struggling to make ends meet as a barber.
Sometimes, things were so bad that Schultz would go hungry and he even reflected that in some of his comic strips later in life.
His talent as a cartoonist was seen very early and his teachers encouraged him to put some of his work in the school yearbook. He didn’t do it, but he did follow that path later in life.
He got a job in Art Instruction and began writing the comic strip, which would later become known as Peanuts.
He sent strips to various publications, including the Saturday Evening Post. He was rejected but that didn’t stop him. Even when Disney told him he wasn’t qualified to work as an animator, he kept pushing forward.
Eventually, he was able to start his weekly comic strip and it wasn’t long before he was syndicated in more than 400 papers. That comic strip continued to run until he died in 2000.
Interestingly, Charles Schultz passed away on the day before the last comic strip was run. It was a fitting end to the life of a man that touched us all in some way or another.
