Charles M Schulz - the creator of Snoopy

1920s: His kindergarten teacher at Mattocks School in St. Paul told him, “Some day, Charles, you are going to be an artist.”

He attended St. Paul's Richard Gordon Elementary School, where he skipped two half-grades. As a result, he was the youngest in his class when he attended St. Paul Central High years later, which may have been the reason why he was so shy and isolated as a young teenager. After his mother died in February, 1943, he was drafted into the army and sent to Camp Campbell in Kentucky. He was then shipped to Europe two years later to fight in World War II as an infantry squad leader with the U.S. 20th Armored Division. After leaving the United States Army in 1945, he took a job as an art teacher at Art Instruction Inc., from which he had taken correspondence courses before he was drafted.

His drawings were first published by Robert Ripley in his Ripley's Believe It or Not!, then in a Catholic comic book series called Topix. His first regular cartoons, Li'l Folks, were published from 1947 to 1949 by the St. Paul Pioneer Press; it was in this strip that Charlie Brown first appeared, as well as a dog that looked much like Snoopy. In 1948, Schulz also sold a cartoon to the Saturday Evening Post; seventeen single-panel cartoons by Schulz were publised in the Post.