More Than Peanuts
by Rick Marschall
I am capable of sharing memories wherein I am not a hero but a
goat; when “the right time and place” felt like times and places I would have
traded for anonymity. But the worst days in the fields of comics and cartoons
and history are better than long summer days picking and chopping cotton.
Almost as bad, in fact, as that analogy.
The first jobs I had in cartooning were after college, actually
during college, too, freelancing – but after a passel of duties on papers in
New Jersey and Connecticut where I drew political cartoons and illustrations;
edited a weekend magazine; and wrote a political column, I felt it was time to
climb the ladder to another goal, to edit comics for a newspaper syndicate.
The late Sid Goldberg was General Manager of United Feature
Syndicate. He had been a protege of syndication pioneer John Wheeler, who had
lived near me in Connecticut. “Back in the day” for John was ghost-writing
newspaper columns for the great New York Giants pitcher Christy Matthewson
around 1910; and stealing Bud Fisher and Mutt and Jeff away from William
Randolph Hearst. At the time of this story he had just passed away, but I
remained close with his charming wife Tee.
Wheeler had mentored Sid at the North American Newspaper Alliance,
even so far as offering the avuncular advice during the recent (1972)
presidential campaign to rein his wife in; she had committed political tricks
like infiltrating the McGovern press entourage. Mrs Goldberg was, and is,
Lucianne, who today manages the essential, eponymous political website, and
among whose trophies was persuading Linda Tripp to persuade Monica Lewinski to
record Bill Clinton’s erotic phone calls and to save her blue dress with his,
um, evidence on it. (Jonah Goldberg, of National Review and cable news,
is their son.)
End of tangent. Tee Wheeler warmly recommended me to Sid, and I
was hired at United Features. Editing comics was only a portion of my duties. I
reviewed submissions, edited columns and puzzles, and – not alone – routinely
shorted the brand-new computer terminals by unwittingly generating static
electricity. Hardly any papers then took electronic submissions, but UFS wanted
to be in the vanguard.
One of the thrills of editing the strips (Nancy, Tarzan,
Captain and the Kids) was editing Peanuts. The parsing of the
word “editing” is what nearly got me canned… almost finished in the strip
business before I started.
I had met Charles Schulz a few times, but not to know him. At the
syndicate, people said from Day One, “Don’t call Schulz,” “Don’t bother
Sparky,” his nickname. I wondered if it were his celebrity – strange, because
he was always affable, even modest – and I regularly talked to other artists
about gags, typos, deadlines, and such. But Sparky was off-limits.
The reason, it turned out, was that Schulz was then engaged in a
battle with United Features: ownership; royalty splits; licensing;
merchandising; everything. It had dragged on for 13 months. United might have
folded its tent without Peanuts.
A batch of his strips arrived and a Sunday page, a classic
baseball gag, featured Charlie Brown instructing Lucy to fold her umbrella in
center field; of course she ignored him; a fly ball was hit to her… and it
perfectly spiked itself on the top of the umbrella. She calmly walked to the
pitcher’s mound and delivered it to Charlie Brown. In classic Peanuts
structure, the gag had one more panel – Charlie Brown looked at the reader to
say, “I can’t even criticize good.”
The printed version of the
first and third versions of the 1975 Peanuts Sunday, April 20, a day
that will live in infamy.
After chuckling, I wanted to save Sparky from 10,000 letters from
English teachers. Any other cartoonist, I would have made a phone call. “I
can’t even criticize well,” I would have said; “no offense.” BUT all
those warnings to Leave Sparky Alone rattled in my head.
So I had the bullpen letter the correct word in Schulz’s style…
and production began. After the engravings were made, color guides processed,
proof sheets – as well as, in those prehistoric days – paper mats and zinc
engraving plates, all were sent out to 2000 newspapers around the country.
Postal envelopes, not e-mails or even faxes.
A week or so later there was a hubbub in the office, people racing
around with frightened looks on their faces. Whispers. A succession of people
handing a phone to each other. What happened was that Sparky received his set
of proofs out in Santa Rosa. And he was not happy. Like a school principal or a
scout master, he dressed down everyone, from the syndicate president to,
eventually, me.
Of course I confessed to being the editorial bad guy; I had been
fingered by everyone, anyway. Not boastfully but as a supreme logician, Charles
M Schulz asked me if I thought he achieved his place in the business without
knowing how to write a gag. In that moment I pictured myself as one of the kids
in his strip being lectured by a blaring adult trombone – wide-eyed, mouth in a
squiggle, beads of sweat flying.
There was no defense – except internally (and rather futilely) at
the office – that I had towed the “Don’t call Sparky!” line. The fallout
respected the Corollary: “Keep Sparky happy!” In emergency mode, United
corrected and engraved the first Sunday page; made new mats and plates;
contacted every client newspaper; and sent out, one by one, often Special
Delivery, the corrected material. I believe there were several sovereign
nations around the world whose national GDP was less than the costs of that
correction.
… or, as I might call it, Marschall’s Editorial Dicta – always
better to check; Mr Bell invented the phone for a purpose; and… Keep the
Sparkys Happy.
Sid understood, indulgent as always. Whether Sparky remembered me
as the specific culprit in the episode, I never knew. I never asked him in
subsequent years, in many meetings, over several projects. I mean, I am dumb
but I am not stupid. If you expected an ending like, “Years later I reminded
Sparky of that incident, and we had a good laugh over milk and cookies...” –
you will be disappointed. That is not the ending.
But, as Paul Harvey used to say, Now you know the rest of the
story.
Later halcyon days. I went on
to collaborate on several projects with Charles Schulz. He wrote pieces for
books of mine; I interviewed him for the final issue of the old Nemo
magazine (and an Italian book, pirated but with our names on the cover) and,
pictured in this photograph, I flew to Paris when he was awarded the French
government’s Award of Arts, ca 1988.
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