Charlie Brown is named after a real person.

Charles Schulz with drawing of Charlie Brown

In 1950, a Minnesota art teacher granted permission for his co-worker, budding cartoonist Charles Schulz, to use his name for a character in a new comic strip. Taken aback by a sample drawing of the character, Charlie Brown asked, “Can’t you make him look a little more like Steve Canyon or Superman?”

Indeed, the soon-to-be-famous child protagonist of Peanuts looked nothing like the godlike Superman, and he also bore little resemblance to the young man who lent his name to the endeavor. Brown, a teacher at Art Instruction Schools in Minneapolis, did not sport a prominently bald head, nor did he own a wardrobe of zigzag-patterned shirts. Furthermore, unlike the sometimes sullen character who drew the ire of peers, the real Charlie Brown was outgoing and well liked.

Yet the flesh-and-blood version insisted there were more similarities to the pencil-and-ink creation than initially seemed, as his cheerful exterior masked a deep-seated insecurity. “Like Charlie Brown, when I get distressed or depressed I go into bed and pull the covers over my head,” he told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1979. “I’ve been known to stay there three or four days.”

Brown wasn’t the only Art Instruction Schools employee to see their name surface in Peanuts, as fellow teachers Linus Maurer and Frieda Rich had their monikers incorporated into the strip, too. There was also a petite redheaded woman in the accounting department named Donna Mae Johnson, who dated Schulz long enough to consider a marriage proposal from the cartoonist, before running off with another suitor. While a “Donna” never appeared in Peanuts, the specter of the heartbreak frequently returned in the form of shy Charlie Brown’s unrequited love interest, the mysterious Little Red-Haired Girl.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

Charles Schulz created other comic strips after "Peanuts."

From 1947 into 1950, Charles Schulz drew the weekly cartoon series Li'l Folks, essentially a Peanuts prototype with (nonrecurring) children characters and a dog that resembled Snoopy. But Schulz developed other comics, too — even after hitting it big with Peanuts. It's Only a Game, a strip syndicated from late 1957 into early 1959, revolved around the foibles of adults competing in activities such as golf, bowling, and bridge; although credited solely to Schulz, much of the artwork was delegated to his old Art Instruction Schools colleague Jim Sasseville. Additionally, Schulz churned out a single-panel strip titled Young Pillars from 1956 to 1965. Created for Youth, a religious magazine, Young Pillars featured the artist's telltale sketching and wit, albeit with jokes coming from wholesome teenagers who were devoted to the tenets of a church-centered life.