A Pilgrimage to the Shrine of My Youth

Having traveled to Northern California twice in the last 10 days you'd think I'd grown tired of the travel by now. Well, you'd be correct, but there's still one trip to go. Early this morning I'm on the road again for another 1,000 mile round-trip to Rohnert Park, this time to pick up the girl from college and bring her home for the summer. She's ready to come home and we're ready to have her here. I'm sure that by August she'll be ready to go back, but for now, she's had enough of college life.

I decided to treat myself a little bit on this trip. When I was a kid I was a huge fan of the Peanuts comic strip. I cut the daily strips out of the newspaper and pasted them in a scrapbook, one of the best presents you could give me was a new Peanuts book (which I still have), and when A Charlie Brown's Christmas was first televised I thought I'd died and gone to heaven (though it was a little jarring to hear their voices after hearing them only in my head for years). In the 5th grade I proposed an idea to my teacher - let's do a play using Peanuts cartoons as the script! She didn't go for it, but a couple of years later "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" opened on Broadway (sadly, I didn't get any credit for the idea).

And, I must admit, I shed a tear or two that sad Sunday morning in 2000 when I heard on the car radio that cartoonist Charles Schulz had died the night before. His work had been a big part of my young life. In a weird cosmic touch, his last Sunday strip appeared in the papers that very morning (I have it in my files). It's an amazing testament to his work that eight years after his death Peanuts strips still run daily in thousands of newspapers.

Schulz lived and worked just outside of Santa Rosa, CA, not far from my daughter's school, and more than one building at Sonoma State University is named for him thanks to generous donations from the Schulz family. My wife and I got smoothies on Sunday in the Charlie Brown Cafe, and the new Music Center currently under construction will include the Schroeder Recital Hall, named for the Beethoven-loving piano prodigy who regularly spurned Lucy's romantic advances.

In Santa Rosa you can now find the Charles M. Schulz Museum, a shrine to the legacy of the man and his work. Since I have the afternoon open, I'm going to visit the museum and pay my respects to my childhood hero. I'm looking forward to it. I'll try to post some photos later.

You can view the museum's introductory film at this link (requires Windows Media Player).