While looking for background information on how phone numbers seen in movies typically use the 555 exchange I found myself going off on an interesting tangent. According to Cecil Adams, at The Straight Dope, Charles Schulz once slipped a real phone number into one of his strips. This, Adams said, led to over 50 phone calls going to a family’s home phone in Moline, Illinois. I could not find any corroborating evidence for this but in the search I found where Cartoon Research (and other sources) reported how, as a joke, Schulz once included the phone number of Lee Mendelson, his colleague on the Peanuts animated specials, into one of his Sunday strips. This led to over 300 calls made to Mendelson’s phone from people wanting to talk to Charlie Brown. oldtelephonebooks.com pinpoints the date of the strip at some time in 1965. A little bit of research into Sunday Peanuts from 1965 turned up the strip in question. Here is the final frame, which has Charlie Brown standing in a phone booth giving out Lee Mendelson’s phone number. I had no idea this frame would have Charlie Brown standing in a phone booth.
You can see the whole strip over at GoComics.com. Charlie Brown, engaged in a croquet match with other Peanuts characters, had to make this phone call because Lucy had smacked his croquet ball so far away that he could no longer see the field of play. I guess the croquet match took place at his family’s house and Charlie called home to ask one of his parents to keep an eye on whose turn it was.
I searched the Moline Public Library website, the Rock Island County Historical Society‘s newspaper databases, and other resources that turn up nothing to corroborate Cecil Adams’ claim that a family in Moline received several calls, some of them apparently unsavory. I also find no mention of either incident in my copy of David Michaelis’ Shulz And Peanuts, the official biography of Schulz.
but I don’t mean to imply these incidents (the Moline one in particular) never happened. It’s likely that everyone in the United States whose phone number happened to be 343-2794 in 1965 received unwanted phone calls on account of this. The number shown did not include an area code, as would be routine today. In 1965 10-digit dialing was only used for long distance calls. Since the strip was published nationally people all over the country must have seen it and called 343-2794 within their local area code. Some of those calls must have been… memorable.
Payphones make a few other appearances in the Peanuts strips. July 11, 1999, has Charlie Brown calling Snoopy for some emotional support after Peggy Jean passively dumps him. Click on the image to get the whole story at GoComics.com.
The backstory is that nine years earlier, in July and August, 1990, Charlie Brown was attending summer camp when he met Peggy Jean, the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. From camp Charlie Brown made a series of payphone calls to Linus in moods ranging from exuberant to terrified. Charlie would just start talking as soon as someone answered the phone. On a couple of occasions this led to laugh-out-loud moments like this one, also found at GoComics.com:
There are likely other payphone appearances in the Peanuts strips. I just had to laugh when two of my long-time interests in life connected unexpectedly like this. I’ve been a lifelong fan of Peanuts, though I never liked the name of the strip. In deference to the fact that Schulz himself hated the name Peanuts I usually refer to it as Charlie Brown. I started collecting the complete series, published over several years by Fantagraphics. But the space those books occupied became a problem, and I was never crazy about the format of the books themselves. With virtually all of Schulz’s strips online in some form or other it made no sense to keep at the collection, so I donated almost all my copies to a thrift shop.