My Life with Charlie Brown

Address to the National Cartoonists Society Convention

126 Address to the National Cartoonists Society Convention BRUCE BEATTIE, National Cartoonist Society President: I’d like to welcome all of you to the first of two wonderful seminars this morning . It’s my hope that the seminars become a regular feature of this convention. I know that we all come here to socialize, but we are all resources for one another, and I think we ought to start taking advantage of that. I can think of no person more qualified to be the leadoff speaker for this seminar program than Charles Schulz. He is the winner of two Reuben Awards, he has won numerous Peabody and Emmy awards, and he is the most widely syndicated cartoonist ever, with more than 2,300 newspapers. He has had more than 1,400 books published, selling more than 300 million copies in 26 languages—it’s just an extraordinary legacy. This all began about a few months ago when he was going to meet with me and [my wife] Karen at his Santa Rosa studio. I had expected to meet Charles Schulz for about 15 minutes; I had expected that we would have a couple of photos taken, and then we would be shuffled out the door. Instead, he spent the whole day with us. During the course of that day I began to get to know Sparky, and what impressed me about him was, after all of his accomplishments, he is still a cartoonist who is doing his daily cartoon. He goes into work 127 National Cartoonists Society Convention every day like us beginners, and what really impressed me about him was the passion and dedication he has for the work and the enthusiasm he has for his work. This is something some of us, I think, lose at times. We all want to become rich and successful, and sometimes we lose sight of the fact that what it is all really about is cartoon art. In short, I came away that day with Sparky an inspired cartoonist . I really mean that. That’s why I want to have him start the seminar program today, and I’m hoping that maybe a little of the inspiration he gave to me will rub off on you. b b b CHARLES SCHULZ: Last month, [my wife] Jeannie and I took a trip, and I played in the Dinah Shore golf tournament, and about the second or third evening they had a buffet dinner. We brought our food into a room and sat down at a round table and we introduced ourselves around. At one point, an elderly woman sitting on my left said, “‘Charles Schulz’—that’s kind of a nice name, isn’t it?” And I said, “I never really thought about it.” And she said, “Isn’t that the name of the fellow who’s the cartoonist?” Then she said, “He’s dead, isn’t he?” To compound the problem, three nights ago, some of the people from United Media dropped by Santa Rosa, and we all went out to dinner. Afterwards, we were passing out through the entrance, and the man at the counter stopped me and said, “There’s something I want to tell you—there were two or three ladies in there the other night who got into a big argument. One of them said you were dead, the other said, ‘No, he’s not!’” Well, even though I’ve been drawing for almost 45 years, I’m still here! Back when I used to work at a [cartoon] correspondence school, Art Instruction Inc. [in Minneapolis], it was a wonderful place to get started because the atmosphere was not unlike that of a newspaper office. All the instructors were very bright people; they were all ambitious, each of them had his or her desire whether it was to 129 National Cartoonists Society Convention be a fashion artist, or a cartoonist, or a painter. There was Walt Wilwerding , the portrait painter; Frank Wing, the old-time cartoonist, sat right in front of me, and he was the one who taught me if you’re going to draw something, draw it from life first—you can’t cartoon something until you know how to draw it accurately first. Anyway, he did a lot for me. Once I got started on the [Peanuts] strip I liked working there, because I could go downstairs to the stockroom, and I could...