US Postal Service to release ‘Peanuts’ stamps for Charles M. Schulz’s 100th birthday

The U.S. Postal Service will release 10 new Forever stamps Sept. 30 featuring “Peanuts” characters to commemorate the centennial of the birth of Charles M. “Sparky” Schulz, the comic strip’s late creator.

The Postal Service also will issue a special pane of 20 of the stamps, priced at $12. The stamps star “Peanuts” characters Charlie Brown, Lucy, Franklin, Sally, Pigpen, Linus, Snoopy and Woodstock, Schroeder, Peppermint Patty and Marcie.

“The pane will have Sparky’s picture in the middle, which is what I think really makes it special,” said Melissa Menta, senior vice president for marketing and communications for Peanuts Worldwide in New York City, which manages the “Peanuts” comic strip, DVDs and television shows.

Schulz was born Nov. 26, 1922, in Minneapolis and would have turned 100 this November.

Menta will attend the official celebration of the stamp release at noon Sept. 30 at the Charles M. Schulz Museum & Research Center in Santa Rosa, along with Schulz’s widow, Jeannie, and the museum’s director, Gina Huntsinger.

Stamps will be available for sale from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Museum admission will be free all day, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Luke Grossmann, U.S. Postal Service finance and strategy senior vice president, will serve as dedicating official.

“We’re pleased that the U.S. Postal Service has designated this national event to occur here at the museum,” said curator Benjamin Clark. “The museum is also opening a new exhibition called ‘The Spark of Schulz: A Centennial Celebration’ Sept. 25.”

The idea of the “Peanuts” stamp release timed with Schulz’s centennial arose during a discussion last year with the board of the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Menta said.

“I said, well, you have to apply and it can take a really long time,” Menta recalled. “The next day or so, someone called me from the USPS and said they really wanted to do a ‘Peanuts’ stamp release, and they said, ‘Did you know Charles Schulz’s centennial is coming up?’”

This will be the third “Peanuts”-related stamp from the U.S. Postal Service, Menta said.

“There was a Snoopy stamp in 2001 after Sparky had passed away and one in 2015 for the 50th anniversary of the ‘Charlie Brown Christmas’ television special,” she said.

“There also have been ‘Peanuts’ stamps released around the world, in Italy and Japan and a lot of different countries,” she added.

Charles Schulz, who moved to Sonoma County in 1958, died of colon cancer Feb. 12, 2000, in Santa Rosa at age 77. By the time of his death, he had written and drawn the “Peanuts” comic strip for nearly 50 years.

The stamp release is only one example of the enduring appeal of the “Peanuts” characters, Menta said. A Snoopy plush doll will be aboard NASA’s Artemis I rocket when it launches Saturday from Kennedy Space Center.

“He’s the zero gravity indicator,” she said.

The “Peanuts” comic strip debuted in 1950 and garnered hundreds of millions of readers worldwide and in the 1960s spawned television specials, books and a Broadway show. At its height, the “Peanuts” strip ran in as many as 2,800 newspapers, and reprints still run in about 2,000 papers, including The Press Democrat.

“When people ask me about the staying power of ‘Peanuts,’ I like to say, all you have to do to like ‘Peanuts’ is be human,” Menta said. “You don’t have to be a superhero fan or anything else. You just have to have human emotions.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On Twitter @danarts.