Charlie Brown

Charlie Brown is the wishy-washy child hero of the newspaper comic strip Peanuts. Charlie Brown is a lovable loser who dreams of hitting the game-winning home run but usually strikes out. He first appeared in Li'l Folks, a comic feature by Charles Schulz, which debuted in the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1947. In 1950 a new version of Schulz's strip was syndicated as Peanuts. For the next 50 years, Charlie Brown and his nutty beagle Snoopy appeared in newspapers around the world. As the popularity of the strip soared in the 1960s, the Peanuts gang also appeared in books, TV specials, and even an in off-Broadway play titled You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown. A few of Charlie Brown's traits became particularly famous: his phrase of dismay, "Good grief!"; his unrequited love for the unseen little red-haired girl; his philosophical discussions with his blanket-carrying chum, Linus; and his annual (failed) attempts to kick a football held by Linus's sneaky sister Lucy. Schulz drew the strip right up until his death in 2000; since that time it has continued in reruns in hundreds of newspapers.

Extra credit: Charlie Brown's younger sister is named Sally... His father is a barber, as was Schulz's real-life father... Charlie Brown was played by Gary Burghoff in the original 1967 off-Broadway cast of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown... Schulz named Charlie Brown after a friend he met at an art class in Minneapolis... Charlie Brown and Snoopy were the name of the command module and the lunar module on Apollo 10, the final test flight before Apollo 11 put Neil Armstrong on the moon.