Cowabunga!

 

If you live in Santa Rosa, California, you can hardly avoid one of the most famous dogs in the world, a gang of kids and the man who brought them to life - Charles M. Schulz, the creator of the "Peanuts" cartoon.

Schulz was born in November 1922 in Minneapolis and in 1958 he moved with his family to Sonoma County, first to Sebastopol and then to Santa Rosa, where he lived and worked until his death in February 2000. Two years later, in August 2002, the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center was opened in Santa Rosa. I still remember those early days when I also met his second wife, Jean, during one of the very first events. Later, during middle and high school, Kaefer regularly worked there as a volunteer in the education room and as a camp counselor for several years. This museum is part of our family memories.

So when there was a special surfing exhibition in the museum, the Geek and I had to go. It was a very enjoyable way to escape the heat for a few hours.

But why "Cowabunga"? 

The Press Democrat, our local paper, wrote on April 24, 1990:

"The word 'cowabunga", created for a character on the Howdy Dowdy TV show in the mid-1950s, was adopted by the generation of kids who grew up watching the program and as teenagers used it as a term of excitement, especially among surfers. By the late 1980s it was being shouted by popular characters like Bart Simpson, an avid skateboarder, and Michaelangelo of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who uses surfer slang."

And so does Snoopy.

According to the museum, "Charles Schulz was not a surfer but enjoyed living near the Pacific Ocean. He also always had his ears open for funny words and phrases. He never recorded when or where he first encountered surfer slang, but he used it to comedic effect as early as 1965. He may have heard it from his older children and their friends or perhaps in one of the many beach party films that were then popular." 

Even though Schulz, whose nickname "Sparky" is still used in Santa Rosa, did not surf, there is a very endearing photo of him on a skateboard together with his daughter Amy in the driveway of their Sebastopol home. The other photo is of him and two of his five children at the ocean where he frequently went.

To my knowledge, no one else of the Peanuts gang surfed and so Snoopy became the lone surfing beagle. Not many of those are around, I assume.

I liked the way many of the comic strips were displayed in the museum, giving it the beach, sand and ocean atmosphere (I'm not mentioning the sun here, because that shiny ball often hides above the marine layer at our coast).

There were also a few sketches that Sparky did before creating the actual comic of the day. They always landed in the waste basket, but his secretaries would often retrieve and collect them.

There is way more to write about our visit to the Schulz Museum, but I will leave this for a later post. This has already become very long. Since there are so many faces, much beloved around the world, I will join Nicole for this week's Friday Face Off.