Charles Schulz, the 77-year-old creator of the PEANUTS comic strip, has
secured final go-ahead to build a museum as a permanent home for Charlie
Brown, Lucy, Linus and the rest of the gang. Plans for the
17,000-square-foot Peanuts museum in Santa Rosa, California, a town 50
miles north of San Francisco, where Schulz continues to work in a studio he
built twenty-five years ago, were unanimously approved at a city council
meeting October 26, 1999. Schulz and his wife first suggested the idea of a
museum several years ago as a means of preserving both the comic strip and
items from the mountains of memorabilia PEANUTS has generated since
debuting in US newspapers in 1950. The vote gave re-zoning approval for the
1.6 acre site, with construction expected to begin in early 2000. The
two-story museum will feature an array of galleries filled with Schulz'
work, as well as a 99-seat theater, an educational and research center, and
offices. PEANUTS currently appears in 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries, and
has been the subject of plays, books, recordings and television movies.
Charles Schulz, who has always worked on PEANUTS alone, without any
assistants, has said that the comic strip will end when he is no longer
able to continue it.