On this day in 2000, the last Peanuts comic strip was published in newspapers, a day after creator Charles Schulz passed away at 77 years old.
Born in 1922, Schulz had been interested in drawing cartoons since his childhood, when he was an avid reader of the Sunday funnies. He made his first step in his career as a kid, when he managed to get a doodle of the family dog, Spike, published in Robert Ripley's Believe It or Not! feature in newspapers.
He'd begun to work odd jobs and submitting cartoons for publication until he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942. He was part of the unit that liberated those interned at the Dachau concentration camp, before being discharged in 1946.
A Minnesotan, Schulz managed to land a weekly panel in the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1947 for his comic Li'l Folks. From there his career took off. His comic was eventually syndicated across several newspapers in 1950, under the name Peanuts. By 1960, Charlie Brown and friends had become staples of American culture, appearing in ads, greeting cards, and, of course, many more newspapers.
There's a pretty long writeup on the history of Peanuts, published in 2020, celebrating the 70th anniversary of the comic strip on the website of the Schulz Museum.
