Classified Peanuts

General

If you’ve read a lot of Peanuts reprint books, you’ve probably at some point read the June, 1962 storyline where Linus’s blanket got turned into a kite, which in turn got carried away by the winds. You may even have seen this panel:

That panel showed up the in the newspapers as well, over in the funnies. If you’re old enough, you may have seen it there. But did you bother to look in the classified section, in the lost-and-found section? Let’s take a look at the (Dover, Ohio) Daily Reporter:

Or The (Klamath Falls, Oregon) Herald and News:

Or The (Santa Fe, New Mexico) Santa Fe New Mexican:

Or The Arizona Daily Star:

And you could find similar listings in papers in Battle Creek, Michigan; Terra Haute, Indiana; Sikeston, Missouri; Somerset, Pennsylvania; Des Moines, Iowa; Tacoma, Washington; and many, many more.

But the readers of the Detroit Free Press got something special!

"Found - One Blanket. Pink. Well worn. NOT in the shape of a kite. Not Linus Van Pelt's blue blanket. Call Betsy, TU 2-5037

And the folks in Florida got an article explaining (among other things) that the object that many people were seeing in the sky that day was not a blanket-kite, but merely another weather satellite that had just been launched from Cape Canaveral. In Tucson, a businessman reported finding the blanket, and supplied a photo of it conveniently dangling in front of his business. In Port Heurn, Michigan, they covered a letter that was received in response to the listing. Heck, in Dover, the responses were front page news! And so on and so forth. It was, at the time, a bit of a thing.

General
Peanuts publisher buyout

Sources are reporting that KKR is buying Simon and Schuster, probably currently the biggest publisher of Peanuts thanks to their Little Simon-published storybooks, from the current owner, Paramount. Sometimes, when one company buys another, it makes no real difference, just a slight change in letterhead. However, KKR isn’t a media …

General
Correct the record

While searching for something else, I stumbled across this announcement of the Kaye Ballard Peanuts album in the Chicago Sunday Times Magazine for January 15, 1961. Now, let’s take a zoom in on that drawing… and its caption. Magazine sections are generally created with a long lead time, allowing them to …

General
Spot the Dog

I publish things. I also research things. And really, the two efforts are often one and the same: I research stuff and find that it’s worth publishing; I publish stuff and in the process I’m doing research. That all just happened for me with a syndicated comics panel called “Spot” …