Charles Schulz comics have had a lasting effect on American popular culture and in commemoration of this, the Charles Schulz museum partnered with the United States Postal Services to run an official stamp line containing Peanuts characters.

On Sept. 29, 2022, at the Charles Schulz museum located in Santa Rosa, a free first-day-first-issue stamp dedication ceremony commemorating Shulz’s 100th birthday took place. The event drew in an upwards of 500 people, with lines extending around the block.

When asked about why they were there, one of the attendees of the event said, “I grew up reading his strips in the newspaper, I always enjoyed how he made people smile every day.”

During the event, there were several guest speakers including the U.S.P.S. Strategy Senior V.P.:  Luke Grossman, the director of the museum: Gina Huntsinger, Chief Director of Charles M. Schulz Creative Properties: Paige Broddock, Schulz’s widow: Jean Schulz, and Snoopy himself.

Event speakers discussed how timeless Schulz’s work is, and how these stamps help to uphold the legacy of his work. 

According to Huntsinger, “Charles Schulz really represents American culture in a lot of ways, and so does the postage stamp, so it’s a nice combination of the two.”

Born on Nov. 26th, 1922, Schulz created the popular Peanuts comic strips, which served as inspiration for visual artists worldwide, and explored the human condition in ways that appealed to fans, young and old alike. 

When asked about what made his strips so special, Huntsinger said ,” When he first got the comic strip, the comics had much larger spaces, and they only gave him a small space about the size of a postage stamp. So he had to do the smallest, most minimal stories, but actually it was to his benefit because he was so poignant and minimalistic that it just caught us. He spoke to us in a way that captured our humanity, just being a human, what is it like to fail, what is it like to be crabby one day?”

Many of his strips centered around subjects such as friendship, failure, and resilience, and discussed them in a comedic tone, something which many people related to.

Furthermore, the prolonged popularity of these strips made them into an American icon and helped them become an essential part of visual history.

In regards to this, Huntsinger said,“ It was all about the things we feel inside ourselves, I mean we all feel it [imperfection], but we never talk about it. He did this day after day year after year, for about fifty years, he ran almost 18,000 [comic strips]. It just became a part of peoples’ lives, sort of slowly, like a scarf moving a mountain, it changed our popular culture in some ways.”

In celebration of  his centennial, the Charles Schulz museum is hosting more events running through Nov. 26, Schulz’s birthday.

These events include discussions about the legacy of Schulz with CNN anchor Jake Tapper, a discussion about the release of the Schulz Museum’s Book about him with an appearance by Al Roker, the weather anchor on the Today Show, and a celebration with cake and music on the day of his birthday.