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Wow Place #262: Santa Rosa, CA “Snoopytown”
When I moved to Santa Rosa, CA in 2012, I didn’t have a lot of expectations. I knew the town was located in the heart of the Northern, California wine country, so I expected to see some vineyards and wineries, some cows and sheep, perhaps — maybe a few pretty, wind-swept beaches. All of that most certainly exists in Santa Rosa and the surrounding Sonoma County. What I didn’t expect to see was so many “Peanuts”!
No, I’m not talking about the legume.
As it turns out, Santa Rosa is the epicenter for all things Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus and Woodstock. You see, this is where the Peanuts’ creator, Charles Schulz, lived and worked for the final 40 or so years of his life.
Born and bred in St. Paul, Minnesota, Charles “Sparky” Schulz moved to Santa Rosa in 1958 and adopted the town as his own. You can see echoes of his presence pretty much everywhere you look. The airport is named after him. There’s an ice arena with Snoopy’s name on it. There’s a multi-million-dollar Charles Schulz-related museum. Moreover, thanks to an art project initiated in the early 2,000s, you can find over 200, five-foot-tall, fiberglass Peanuts statues distributed all over town—specifically Charlie Brown, Woodstock, Snoopy and Lucy.
It’s safe to say that although Santa Rosa may be in the wine country, it’s really the center of Snoopy country.
Oddly enough, it took me a decade to actually visit the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center. I mean, I knew it was there but for some reason, it always felt like there was something else more important for me to do. It’s not even that I didn’t like Snoopy. In fact, I avidly read the Peanuts comic strips when I was a kid and watched and re-watched the TV-animated specials, with their jazzy musical scores. Nevertheless, the museum eluded me…until a couple of years back. And you know what? It’s a fabulous museum! In the courtyard, there’s a “kite-eating” tree. In the galleries, you can find a re-creation of Schulz’s studio, a timeline of his life, an original nursery wall that the artist painted in his Colorado home, and a 100-seat theater showing animated Peanuts specials and other programs. There are also wall after wall of blow-ups of his comics—if you’re a fan, you could spend hours just reacquainting yourself with the adventures of Charlie Brown trying to connect with the red-headed girl…Lucy playing psychiatrist…Snoopy battling the Red Baron…Linus spouting wisdom while clinging to his precious security blanket…and of course, Charlie’s endless attempts to actually get off a field-goal attempt with Lucy as holder. Great stuff.
And when you’re done, you can hop over to the nearby Snoopy skating rink and grab a hot chocolate at the Warm Puppy Café, where Sparky Schulz used to have his breakfasts. If only they offered a bowl of fresh, shelled peanuts with your cocoa, it would be perfect!
(I’ve noticed we tend to skip over the local sights in our area in favor of overseas travel, with the common refrain, “I have my whole life to see the local stuff.” And that makes sense…traveling abroad takes a good deal of energy whereas visiting your local museum can be done in your “golden years,” when your mobility might be more limited. However, most of us only get to travel abroad once or twice a year, if we’re lucky. What do you do the rest of the time? Perhaps we would be wise to stop putting off for tomorrow what we can do today. What have you been overlooking that’s perhaps right under your nose?)