Red-Haired Girl He Loved Lives, Not Only In Comics

MINNEAPOLIS - Dear Charlie Brown, the real little red-haired girl never forgot you.

Her hair now gray, Donna Wold remembers Peanuts' creator Charles Schulz with fondness more than 50 years after she declined his marriage proposal. She went on to become the inspiration for the unrequited love of his cartoon alter ego.

Schulz, born in Minneapolis and raised in St. Paul, borrowed characters' names from old Minnesota friends Charlie Brown, Linus Maurer and Frieda Rich.

The last new daily "Peanuts" strip chronicling their exploits ran in newspapers yesterday, and their final appearance in Sunday newspapers is to be Feb. 13. After nearly 50 years, Schulz, 77, is discontinuing "Peanuts" because of his health.

While Charlie Brown and pals became known worldwide, perhaps Schulz's most touching tribute to the real-life group went unnamed.

When he returned from World War II and became an instructor at an art school in downtown Minneapolis, he quickly fell for a red-haired member of the accounting department.

"When he proposed it was agonizing, because I did love him at the time," said Wold, 70.

"It's terrible to be in love with more than one guy."

She turned Schulz down and instead married Allan Wold, an old friend whom she had known since seventh grade and who had attended her family's church. Wold became a Minneapolis firefighter, and they raised four children.

In some ways, Schulz never got over her.

"I loved that little girl, but her mother convinced her I would never amount to anything," Schulz said in a 1997 interview.

"You never get over your first love. More than having your cartoons rejected or three-putting the 18th green, the whole of you is rejected when a woman says: `You're not worth it.' "

Wold thinks Schulz overestimated her mother's influence, but she has no regrets.

She kept in touch with him over the years and has spoken with Schulz's wife, Jean, since the cartoonist's cancer diagnosis.

Wold has kept clippings over the years of strips that featured the little red-haired girl, including one he signed: "For Donna, with love, Sparky." She also still has sketches Schulz would leave at her desk at the art school where they met.

Her husband had once been skeptical about her connection to the comic strip's red-haired girl.

"I really didn't believe that she was the inspiration for it until he came right out and said that she was and named her by name," he said. "Then it kind of really hit home. He really had felt bad about losing her."

The Wolds will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary next October, the month "Peanuts" would have turned 50.

"I'm just wishing him the best of everything, a happy retirement and some good health so he can beat this whole thing. After all these years, he deserves that much," Wold said. "I guess it was such a good strip because we could all identify, now and then, with Charlie Brown.