Day Trip: Schultz Museum

By Kalpana Mohan

Good Grief, Charlie Brown! You’ve Got Your Own Museum!
At the sparkling women’s restroom in the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, I flush in comic relief. Charlie Brown and his other nutty pals greet me from cartoon tiles above the toilet tank. Definitely worth the hour drive from San Francisco, Sonoma County’s Peanuts museum is a trip that will make parents and kids chuckle.

"There’s no way I can crane my neck high enough to read all those cartoons" my 8-year-old son gasped as we stepped into the museum’s Great Hall. Some 3,588 black-and-white ceramic cartoon strips – a 17-by-22-foot image designed by Japanese architect Yoshiteru Otani – form the heads of Lucy and Charlie on the main wall. The 27,000-square-foot museum, which opened in August 2002, has a contemporary interior that combines wood, glass and skylights to make a warm place where children – and noise – are welcome.

Recall the famous Schulz one-liner? "Try not to have a good time ... this is supposed to be educational." Well, the kids and I tried hard not to have a good time, but it was impossible. This was fun, and there was so much to learn. For example, we learned that, like his creation, Charlie Brown, Schulz took disappointments in stride and did exactly what he liked to do.

We also saw how Schulz, brilliant as he was, labored over his art. On view are some sketches he threw in the trash, which his secretary took home, ironed out and preserved for posterity. Stationed by the Snoopy Gallery on the second floor is a re-creation of Schulz’s wood-paneled office, including the crow-quill pen, chair and drawing board he used every day.

Also on display is a changing tableau of hundreds of original Peanuts strips by the only American comic-strip artist to merit a retrospective at the Louvre in Paris. When Schulz died at age 77 in February 2000, his work had been translated into 40 languages and his strips were read daily by 355 million people in 2,600 papers in 75 countries and 21 languages.

What has been the big appeal of Charlie Brown and the gang? The topics Schulz dealt with in his comic strip often were important and serious to adults, even though on the surface they seemed like children's issues. Children also appreciated Peanuts because, finally, someone was taking them seriously and not belittling them," observed San Francisco-based political cartoonist and animator Mark Fiore, who recalled trying as a child to draw Schulz’s Snoopy and the doghouse.

In a museum designed with pint-sized visitors, you can take many breaks from viewing the exhibits. Walk by the Snoopy Labyrinth – a 51-by-51-foot labyrinth in the shape of Snoopy's head – on the museum grounds; sit on the benches by Snoopy’s ears and nose and take in the ambience. My kids wouldn’t leave without watching a video. You catch Peanuts television specials from noon to 4 p.m. at the 100-seat auditorium inside the museum. Upstairs, in the sunlit art studio, kids and adults can sketch – and stretch – using cartooning instruction books, paper and supplies provided by the museum.

As we drove back home we decided that the Peanuts gang is a skeptical lot, except, perhaps, for Peppermint Patty and Linus. Yet, in the Peanuts’ world, psychiatric help is always around the corner – at just 5 cents a question. And the doctor is always in.

At home, I whined that I had dinner to make, dishes to wash and laundry to do. But then I remembered Peppermint Patty, who, seconds after discovering a D-minus on her test, said: "I’m just glad I have my health."

When You Go...

Directions from 101 North:

Take the Guerneville Road-Steele Lane exit, the exit after College Avenue. At the signal after exiting Highway 101, turn left onto Steele Lane and go under the freeway overpass. Get into the extreme right lane, and stay in the right lane as it becomes West Steele Lane. On the right, you will see the Redwood Empire Ice Arena and Snoopy’s Gallery and Gift Shop set back among the trees. The museum is at West Steele and Hardies lanes, just past the ice arena.

From Bay Area Parent, April 2003.