Kathy Troccoli
Walt Disney once told Charles Schulz he wasn’t good enough to draw background art.
Form letter. Very polite.
“We only hire the very finest artists.”
Sparky wasn’t one of them.
His yearbook rejected his cartoons.
His school gave him a zero in physics.
He failed every subject in eighth grade.
The other kids called him “Sparky”
— after a horse in a comic strip.
They were calling him an animal.
Paul Harvey said it best:
“Sparky wasn’t actually disliked by the other youngsters.
No one cared enough about him to dislike him.”
So, this invisible boy did something strange.
He didn’t try to prove Disney wrong.
He wrote his autobiography in cartoons instead.
Named the main character after himself.
Charlie Brown.
A kid whose kite never flies.
Whose team never wins.
Whose crush never notices him.
Then Schulz did something the network executives hated.
He put Luke 2 at the center of his
Christmas special
“Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy…”
They told him to cut it.
Too religious.
He refused.
At Christmastime, millions of people will watch that scene.
A loser became the messenger.
Disney said he wasn’t good enough.
God said otherwise.
(Read this today as I was discovering things about one of my favorite cartoonists.
Brought tears to my eyes…)
