📍Snelling and Selby Avenues, St Paul, MN 55104, USA
1922 – 1943“I was born in Minneapolis in November 1922, but I grew up in St Paul, Minnesota. My father, Carl, was the son of German immigrants and had very little schooling, but he earned a barber's licence and ran his own shop, the Family Barbershop, on the corner of Selby and Snelling avenues. My mother, Dena, came from a big Norwegian family. I was an only child, and my uncle nicknamed me Sparky, after a racehorse in the comic strip Barney Google. I spent hours in my father's barbershop, watching him work six days a week and seeing his kindness to his customers. My father and I read the Sunday comics together, and I loved Mickey Mouse, Popeye and Skippy; I always wanted to be a cartoonist. We lived in apartments close to the shop, and I went to Richard Gordon Elementary School, where I skipped two grades, which left me the smallest and youngest in my class. I was shy and felt awkward, especially at Central High School, where my drawings were rejected by the yearbook. Our family dog, Spike, a mischievous black-and-white mutt who ate anything, was my best friend, and a drawing of him I sent to Ripley's Believe It or Not was published when I was fifteen. I took a correspondence course in cartooning, and my mother encouraged me before she died of cancer in 1943, just as I was going off to war. After the war I came home to St Paul and sold cartoons, and in 1950 my strip Peanuts began. Charlie Brown's father was a barber, just like mine, and Snoopy was based on Spike.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today