Charlie Brown Stolen - Reward Offered

[matcom]

<snip>

Good Grief!

Someone has absconded with Charlie Brown.

The victim is described as round-headed, seemingly bald, weighing about 300 pounds, and wearing a chef's hat.

He was last seen bolted to a concrete block, posing for pictures with kids outside Michele's Restaurant in Santa Rosa.

Right now, there happen to be 54 other, nearly identical Charlie Browns throughout Santa Rosa, but this statue-napping is particularly mean-spirited - - the sculpture belongs to the extended family of Peanuts creator and civic benefactor Charles Schulz.

"It's just so wrong,'' said Bob Forsyth, who owns both Michele's Restaurant and the 6-foot polyurethane Charlie-Brown-in-a-chef's-hat.

Forsyth's dad's sister is Jeannie Schulz, widow of Charles Schulz, the man whose drew the most popular comic strip in history, and who was known around town as Sparky. He lived and worked in the Santa Rosa area for 42 years.

Schulz died at the age of 77 from complications of cancer on Feb. 12, 2000, the day before his last Peanuts comic strip was published. Newspapers around the country, including The Chronicle, continue to run reprints of his old comic strips under the name Classic Peanuts.

The 55 prefab Charlie Brown look-alikes had been placed around Santa Rosa in the last two weeks, for a public art exhibition to celebrate the 55th anniversary of the Peanuts comic strip.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/06/BAGKUD46RI1.DTL

[Ignoramus]

1. Trees are more beutiful than those monstrosities

It's all well and good to memorialize Charles Shulz, but people should know that there was a big beautiful tree in railroad square in Santa Rosa that they cut down and replaced with one of those charlie brown statues, shortly after Schulz's death. Because of that I can't help but recoil in disgust any time I see one of those things.