Category: Charles M. Schulz

The all-time greatest comic strip

Monte Story School

Novelist Monte Schulz’s follow-up to his dark, yet rollicking This Side of Jordan is The Last Rose of Summer, which should be out in December.

Monte has had a long association with the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. His father attended the conference for many years, as did Ray Bradbury. The conference ran into financial trouble and ended up in bankruptcy court. Monte made an offer and now he owns the conference, presumably along with all of the headaches that go with it.

WRITERS CONFERENCE SOLD: Monte Schulz, son of the late Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, has purchased the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robin Riblet, on Tuesday, June 8, approved the $27,000 sale. Monte plans to hold the next conference next June. There was no conference this year or last due to prior owner Marcia Meier’s bankruptcy.

And with apologies to Stephen Colbert, I think the title of this post qualifies for greatest pun of all time.

Daughters do the darndest things

Art Linkletter has died at age 97, and frankly I was somewhat surprised to realize that he was still alive. When Linkletter’s daughter Diane committed suicide — or, as some claim, was murdered — by falling from a sixth story window, I had recently turned fourteen. At the time it was reported that she was on an LSD trip. When my twin sister Jean and I heard the news, I said, “drugs do the darnedest things!” This elicited a tremendous laugh from Jean. Yeah, we were kids.*

I knew about Art Linkletter’s “Kids Say the Darndest Things” from his House Party show on TV, and I knew about LSD trips from watching Dragnet. “Kids Say the Darndest Things” had been around in one incarnation or another for many years, and by the late 60’s the format had grown tired and it was near the end of its run. But back in the 50’s, it was quite popular.

In 1957, Art Linkletter published a collection of his “Kids Say the Darndest Things” stories that was illustrated by Charles M. Schulz. Years ago, I found a copy in a used book store for 50-cents.

This is a TV commercial that Linkletter made with his daughter Diane not too long before her death.

A posthumous father-daughter collaboration was a record called “We Love You, Call Collect,” released after Diane was gone. I can only imagine how tortured Linkletter must have felt when he lost her.

I can’t say that Art Linkletter had a big influence on me, but I can admire how he didn’t shy away from discussing his daughter’s problems. I think back to watching Linkletter (b.1912), Lawrence Welk (b.1903), and Jack Webb (b.1920) in the 60s, and I see men who had trouble dealing with the youth culture that had taken over. After all, hadn’t the older generation regained control after the first wave of rebellion was beaten back in the late 50s? But when I think of Charles Schulz (b.1922), I see a man who was not only in tune with the times, he made them his own. The same thing can be said of Walter Cronkite (b.1916). Their strength was in their flexibility.

*Another example of my twisted adolescent humor was my Mr. Ed the talking horse joke. Imitating Mr. Ed, as voiced by Chill Wills, “Bend over, Wilbur!”