Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, the lasagna-loving, Monday-hating, orange tabby cat, still recalls the moment when his two-year old pointed to a comic of his, exclaiming “Snoopy!” For sheer iconic recognition, indeed it would be hard to top the beagle, his owner Charlie Brown, and his gang of friends that made up the cast of the Peanuts comic strip, which cultural historian Robert Thompson called “the longest story told by a single artist.” The Peanuts gang graced the covers of magazines, commented passively on the Civil Rights events, and within a decade went from half a dozen newspapers to syndication in hundreds, along the way earning Schulz a Reuben award, the highest honor given by the National Cartoonists Society.

On this day, October 2, in 1950 Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip was first published. In the four-panel strip that would become Schulz’s trademark, Charlie Brown walks by two friends, one of whom says, “Well! Here comes ‘ol Charlie Brown! Good ‘ol Charlie Brown … yes, sir!” And as Charlie Brown passes, “Good ‘ol Charlie Brown … how I hate him!”

Schulz’s talent was not immediately recognizable: he battled long and hard to be noticed, first by St. Paul Pioneer Press, where he introduced Charlie in a single-panel comic strip called “Li’l Folks.” That work got him noticed  by Jim Freeman, a 30 year-old veteran of United Feature Syndicate, who offered Schulz the opportunity to expand his cartoon from one panel to four. Schulz agreed, coming to work for United Features, but had to give up the title of “Li’l Folks,” for “Peanuts”, which Schulz never liked, decrying it as small and insignificant.