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In the Charlie Brown pattern, Sparky's life was one good grief after another. School was a "harsh and strict jail." Sparky skipped a year in grade school, but later atoned for that triumph by flunking every course and being left back. His one pride was his drawing skill, and he proudly submitted some sketches to the high school yearbook; inevitably, they were rejected. He joined pickup baseball games, but his team almost always lost. "People are skeptical about Charlie Brown's losing a game 40 to nothing, but I distinctly remember a day when our team was beaten 40 to nothing." Sparky was afraid to talk to girls and did not have his first date until two years after graduating from high school. Once he overheard a friend of his mother's remark: "He's such a nice boy, isn't he?" Thought Sparky: "Oh boy, is that all I'll be all my life?"
Naturally, Sparky did not go to college: "It was obvious I wasn't smart enough." He was drafted into the army in 1943 and trained as a machine gunner, but he fluffed his one chance to use his weapon. While riding a half-track in the last days of the war, he spotted a couple of German soldiers, wheeled his gun into position and pulled the trigger. "It just went click." He had forgotten to load it.
After the war, Sparky returned to live in St. Paul with his widowed father. He also joined the nondenominational Church of God: "I was a lonesome young man, and the church gave me a place to go." In 1946 he finally landed a job lettering a comic magazine; later that same year, he went to teach at a Minneapolis art school. There he finally overcame his shyness long enough to ask Joyce Halverson, an instructor's pretty, blue-eyed sister, for a date. As Charlie Brown's luck would have it, Joyce slipped on a candy wrapper while they were skating and she tumbled on the ice. But she picked herself up unhurt, and soon they were married.
Sugar & Spice. In 1948, Sparky sold his first cartoon to the Saturday Evening Post: a smug little boy sitting on the end of a chaise longue with his feet propped on a footstool. Not long after, Sparky was hired to do a weekly cartoon panel that ran wherever the editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press could find room for it. Called Li'I Folks, the panel included some forerunners of Peanuts, but it was doomed. After turning it out for nearly a year, Sparky asked the editor for more money. His answer: "No." Then how about giving it a regular spot on the comics page? "No." Then maybe Schulz should stop drawing it altogether? Said the editor: "O.K., let's drop it."
That was Sparky's last spectacular mishap. In 1950, after many rejections by other syndicates, Li'I Folks was accepted by Manhattan's United Feature Syndicate as a comic strip. Over Sparky's protest, the syndicate renamed it Peanuts. "I wanted to keep Li'I Folks. I wanted a strip with dignity and significance. 'Peanuts' made it sound too insignificant."