SERENDIPITY II

Here’s another one of the those happy coincidences. Once again it starts with a book, Schultz and Peanuts by David Michaelis. First serendipity was discovering a biography of Peanuts creator Charles “Sparky” Schultz. Second serendipity was only paying $6.98 for a $34.95 book. Books at a big discount are always much better.

So I am reading through the first chapters about the early life of Schultz. There is some good insight into his personality and experience and recognition of the way his life projected itself into the cartoon strips. Probably the most notable element (other than the name “Charles”) is that Charlie Brown’s father was a barber like Schulz’s father.

About eighty pages in there are photographs.



One small snapshot shows Schultz (left) in the army with two of his buddies, Marvin Tack (center) and Larry Payne (right). That’s funny, I thought to myself. I once knew a Marvin Tack. I squinted at the picture–the faces are about 1/8th inch high in the book–and decide it was possible, barely, that this could be the Marvin Tack I knew. I turned to the index and find the one page in the text that refers to Marvin Tack. It is 1943. Schultz is at Camp Campbell in Kentucky where he knew no one.

Michaelis recounts a story. “One morning at revile, he made a friend: ‘I looked across the barracks, and there was a blond kid, and the kid smiled at me, and we said good morning. His name was Marvin Tack, and he was from a small town in Minnesota, and he was a very strong Lutheran boy–a very decent kid.’ During the ten-minutes in training sessions, Schultz and Tack would sit together and talk about their lives as they imagined them in the future–Schultz in cartooning, Tack in the ministry.” After a while Schultz and would be joined by a third Minnesotan, Larry Payne. Schultz would eventually Schultz would lose track of the two of them but he always believed “the bond formed among the three Minnesotans, rooted in common values and a shared moral code, had helped him get through infantry training” (p. 133).

No question about it. This Marvin Tack, friend of Charles Schultz, was the same Pastor Marvin Tack I knew in the late 60s and most of the 70s. Marvin Tack was pastor of St. Andrews Evangelical Lutheran Church in Chicago from 1967 to 1980. This was where my aunt and uncle and cousins attended. I sometimes attended his church, occasionally sang in the choir, I even preached for him once and performed the first Baptism of my career at his church by is generous consent. Pastor Tack spend most of his years of ministry as a missionary in Japan (1952-1967). You can find his name frequently in the annals of the Lutheran Church in Japan.

I’ve mentioned Pastor Tack before (Grow Up) so I won’t repeat what I said, but he remains a model for me of what a pastor should be like. I’m not one quarter the pastor he was, but our vision of what should be ought to stretch father than our grasp or we would have nothing to reach for.

I never heard Pastor Tack mention Charles Shultz, but that’s the sort of person he was. He would never tried to build himself up by claiming friendship with a famous person. I’m not sure I could have resisted the temptation myself.

I have often used illustrations from Peanuts in my sermons. (And have occasionally been criticized when people smiled or laughed because of the reference to a cartoon.) It always seemed to me that the characters reveal a lot about human nature and sometime touch on religious or philosophical themes. Who can forget poor Linus trying to recite his part in the Christmas Pageant?

It is difficult, however, to judge Schultz’s own religious views. Although his Norwegian mother was vaguely a Lutheran, Schultz seems to have had little or no religious upbringing, although he did have a keen moral sense. After his time in the service, Schultz was baptized in the Church of God where he was very active. There was something in him, however, that did not allow him to share much of his Christian beliefs with his artistic friends. It’s as if he lived in different worlds, although his behavior was consistent in both. He later taught Sunday School in a Methodist Church and studied the Bible, but by the mid-1970s his faith was rather ambiguous. He was probably too much an independent thinker to be bound by dogmatic religion and too private a person to articulate his faith publicly. And yet something of what he believed leaked into his cartoons, enough so that Robert L. Short could use his work to produce The Gospel According to Peanuts.

It’s been an interesting experience discovering something about a person I thought I knew. I hope your pilgrimage has its pleasant surprises as well.

May the Lord bless you on your journey and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne






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