The Press: Child's Garden of Reverses

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Charlie's Alter Ego. No one is more awed by Charlie Brown's newspaper popularity than lanky (5 ft. 11 in.), crew-cut Charlie Schulz, who makes $90,000 a year from the fictional brood. Artist Schulz feels that he is not only young Charlie's creator but also his soulmate. A St. Paul barber's son who somehow graduated from high school after flunking algebra, Latin, English, physics—and, he says, dating—wartime Machine Gunner Schulz was coasting happily along as a $65-a-week correspondence-school art teacher when a sheaf of his cartoons landed him a contract with United Features in 1950. He neither drinks,* smokes nor cusses, teaches Sunday school at St. Paul's Fundamentalist Church of God. Schulz confesses that many a notion for Peanuts is planted by his own four youngsters (a fifth is on the way) and a retriever as droopy as Snoopy.

Nonetheless imaginative and deft. Artist Schulz manages to turn out Peanuts in 25 hours a week and has launched a new thrice-weekly strip, based on adult foibles, called It's Only a Game. To letter writers who impute deep psychological compulsions to his charges, he insists that the strip is only "funny pictures." On the other hand. Charlie Brown's alter ego has never recovered from the shock of learning that United Features had fastened so "insignificant" a name as Peanuts on his handiwork. To this day, when asked what he does for a living. Artist Schulz replies loftily: "I draw a little comic strip about a guy called Charlie Brown."