Peachy noted that the club members manning the Rotary Booth at Saturday's Community Affair at CrossPointe Center made a lot of business and public contacts and found that a number of people showed interest in possibly joining the club.

 Erich Eggers said he will be gone for the next three weeks and needed a replacement Sgt.-at-Arms. Harvey Smith volunteered to be the first week's replacement and Pat Beckel offered to be the following two weeks' replacement. Erich said he will be getting married and honeymooning in Maui. 

 

 

 

Everyone sang a round of Happy Birthday to Peachy Metzner, the only one present who said he had a May birthday. 

Mike Weir announced that the two best brass bands in Ohio will be holding a joint concert at the Masonic Center Auditorium in the Masonic Temple in Dayton, 525 Riverview Ave., May 17 at 4 p.m. It is free and open to the public and includes the Ohio Valley British Brass Band that Mike plays the tuba in, and the Brass Band of Columbus that Mike also plays in for contests in the U.S.A. and Canada. 

 

Ron Hollenbeck noted that the Sunshine Book Delivery Service is still in need of a person to help out with delivery of library books to local home-bound residents, beginning in August. Boyd Preston said there are usually about six people to deliver books to, and that it takes about an hour or an hour and fifteen minutes to deliver and pick up books they had from before. Ron has sent out messages via e-mail regarding the same.

 

 

 

 

Debe presented a slide show along with her oral presentation, with pictures of Charles (Sparky) Monroe Schulz and his family and cartoon family as they developed throughout the years.

Schulz was born Nov. 26, 1922, the only child of his parents. He had an uncle who called him Sparky after a cartoon character, and he became known as Sparky as a child. His dad Carl was a banker and his mother Dena was a homemaker. He was born in Minneapolis and grew up in St. Paul Minnesota and though they moved away for a while they moved back in 1927 to St. Paul because of the Depression.

 Schulz was witty and smart and was placed two grades ahead when they came back to the area, though that made him shy, isolated and withdrawn, much like his beloved cartoon character, Charlie Brown, whom he said had the same round face as he had. He had a dog Spike, and when he was about 15 his father wrote to Ripley's Believe it or Not about how the dog could eat tacks, pins, razor blades, etc., without any harm to himself. With the information was included a picture of Spike drawn by Sparky. The info appeared in the paper with Sparky's picture of Spike and helped spike Schulz's cartooning career, Debe said.

Sparky then took a correspondence course in cartooning and submitted many drawings to his high school year book, but was disappointed to find none were used.

His mother Dena died in 1943 at age 50 of cervical cancer.

Schulz served in the U.S. Army in Europe during the war and was only in combat at the end of the war, Debe said. He said when he went to shoot his machine gun, he discovered he forgot to load it and was only saved from death by the surrender of the German he faced. 

He attended an art instruction school and developed a cartoon called  L'il Folks that appeared in the Minnesota Tribune  and the St. Paul Pioneer Press and was sold to United Features as L'il Folks but soon became Peanuts because the L'il was used in other cartoons like L'il Abner. 

Debe said Schulz never liked the name Peanuts, and suggested Little Charlie Brown, but Peanuts stuck.

Schulz married the little red-haired girl of his cartoon cast, Joyce Halverson, in 1951. It was to be a rocky marriage that ended in 1972 after Schulz had an affair with a 25-year-old. He and his wife had three children and one adopted one-year old daughter, Meredith, who played the piano, much like Schroeder, his cartoon character who thinks Beethoven is the first president of the United States.

Lucy is the Queen of crabby, Linus, the group conscious, Sally (introduced in 1959), the one with a strong moral sense of fairness, who talks to school buildings when depressed, uttering such things as: who cares, why me, how should I know.

Snoopy started out as a four-legged dog, but then turned into a dog standing on two legs. Snoopy is perhaps best known as the WWI Flying Ace, Debe said. Schulz added that in 1965, the year A Charlie Brown Christmas aired on PBS. The show won various awards over the year and has become a holiday classic with its trademark jazz music, Debe said. The musical, You're a Good Man Charlie Brown, appeared in 1965 and in 1968, a year after Martin Luther King's assassination, Franklin was introduced as a new character. Putting a black child into the cartoon was not accepted at first by everyone, but Schulz told them, "You print, or I quit," Debe said. Woodstock was added in 1966 and Marcie in 1971. She was clearly Peppermint Patty's sidekick, Debe said. 

A year after his 1972 divorce Schulz married Jean Forsyth Clyde. In 1979 he found he had colon cancer and was forced to retire. He passed away in his sleep on Feb. 12, 2000. When his last strip was published it was with the stipulation that the cartoons could be rerun but no new characters or stories could be added. 

Debe said the cartoon once ran in 26,000 newspapers and that his books were translated into 25 languages. He won numerous awards and is the highest paid deceased person other than Elvis in the U.S. 

 He made more than 1.1 billion dollars in his lifetime and $32 million as a deceased person. "You were a Good Man Sparky Schulz," Debe said.

The Washington-Centerville library will have a traveling exhibit called Peanuts...Naturally, looking at the natural world through Peanuts comic strip objects, that will begin with a reception at 10:30 a.m. at the Woodbourne Library and a reception at noon at the Centerville Library, Saturday, May 30, with refreshments provided by the Friends of the Library. The exhibit is funded by the Dorothy R. Yeck Library Arts Endowment and organized by the Charles M. Schulz Museum, Santa Rosa, Calif. There will be seven different sections with large panels, memorabilia, and interactive activities for children, Debe said.The exhibit will run May 30-Aug. 30. Nature-related movies and various other nature-related activities will take place in conjunction with the nature theme of the exhibit throughout the summer, Debe said. The exhibit will take place concurrently at both libraries, so to see the entire exhibit, you should visit both libraries.