Snoopy at Midway Mall – October 20, 1970

My last surviving Peanuts book

Although Charles Schulz passed away twenty years ago, his Peanuts comic strip remains in the public eye, with a big budget computer-animated movie back in 2015 and many new retro-style products that hearken back to the strip’s original explosion in popularity in the 1960s.

My siblings and I remember it well. Since the comic strip was not in the Lorain Journal in the 1960s or 70s, our main exposure to Snoopy and Charlie Brown were the TV specials that ran on CBS. We eagerly awaited each one.

We also had many of the Peanuts books that contained reprints of the strips, unaware that the comics that we were reading were ten or more years old. (That’s one of them at the top of this post.)

Anyway, as the early 1970s unfolded, Peanuts was in its heyday – and that was reflected in these Journal items from October 1970.

The first is this article from the October 18, 1970 Journal about Schulz and his creation. 

Note in the photo that he’s posing in front of a set of the Peanuts Hungerford dolls (I had a Charlie Brown one, which I wrote about here).

Here’s a color version of the photo in the article. Charlie Brown is really beat-up!

A day after the above article ran, this advertisement appeared in the October 19, 1970 Journal promoting the upcoming appearance of Snoopy, as well as his nemesis the Red Baron, at Midway Mall.

Schulz would surely have cringed at the off-model drawing of Snoopy in the ad.

Was the event something unique to Midway Mall, or was it a traveling show? I can’t seem to find anything online to answer that question – no photos, other ads, etc.

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I’ve done several posts about Peanuts, including this one about the “Great Pumpkin” TV special, this one about the Christmas special, and this post about cartoonist Al Capp (of “Lil’ Abner” fame) poking fun at Peanuts.