Peanuts Memories

Today's "Peanuts" strip, copyright 1976, brings up a couple of nice memories. Peppermint Patty muses about a shopping center with a bookstore and ice cream shop next door to each other. I remember that shopping center, bookstore, and ice cream shop, which were in Santa Rosa, Calif., the city Mr. Schulz and I both called home.

Schulz's studio is about half a mile from a mall called Coddingtown. In 1976, it had a Books Inc. shop next door to a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop, and the signs Peppermint Patty mentions were actually posted in their windows. Both shops are long gone, but in the '70s I spent a lot of time in both. In particular, Books Inc. was a terrific independent chain that's still around--just not in Coddingtown. Remember when malls used to have bookstores?

That reminisce brought up another memory in the same mall. Later, maybe in the late '80s, I was in a Hallmark store standing in line behind Mr. Schulz, who looked to be buying a few small gifts. He handed his credit card to the cashier, who looked at the name on the card, looked up at him, looked down at the card, looked up at him, and then pulled her eyeballs back into their sockets to ring him up. Neither of them said anything but, as I remember it, he just quietly sighed.

I haven't thought of any of those things in years. It was nice to have the Sunday paper bring them back to mind. And I can't explain the potato chip deal.