The home of Charles Schulz, the late American cartoonist famous for creating the comic strip Peanuts, was destroyed in the California wildfires that broke out last weekend, his son, Monte Schulz, confirmed.
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The younger Schulz told the Associated Press that his father’s 78 year-old widow, Jean Schulz, managed to evacuate the split-level home before it became engulfed by flames. “It’s the house he died in. All of their memorabilia and everything is all gone,” the son lamented. “The fire came by at, like, two in the morning. Everything’s gone.”
Monte revealed that they still weren’t certain what was lost in the home that Jean occupied since the late ’70s. “Obviously stuff from my dad and their life together, all gone. I had memories of being in that house. I never lived there but I visited all the time,” he added. “That time of our lives is now completely erased.” Monte’s brother Craig sadly also lost his California home in the wildfires, which have destroyed over 3,500 homes and businesses over the course of the last week.
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Although some of the cartoonist’s artwork, which included popular characters like Charlie Brown and Snoopy, was destroyed in the blaze, most of his original work is still on display at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, which survived the fires. Schulz was the highest-paid and most widely read cartoonist of all time in the ’80s and ’90s. The Peanuts strip was read by 355 million people and made the Guinness World Records after being syndicated to its 2,000th newspaper. Schulz died at his California home in 2000, a day before his final Sunday strip hit the presses, at the age of 78.