If This is a Lecture, How Long Will it Be?: Browse The Strips

Thursday August 9, 2018

Lynn's Comments: This was the reaction we had when my first husband and I bought our first house. It was 1971 and that night when we went to bed, we kept saying over and over to ourselves, "What have we done?!"

Saturday August 11, 2018

Lynn's Comments: When I was a child, I looked at many things as if they were animate objects. Drawer pulls, for example looked like smiles. A bathtub faucet and handles could look like a face with a long curved nose. A radio dial looked like a smile with many teeth. Houses, to me, had personalities, and some, like this one, even had a "face."

Tuesday August 14, 2018

Lynn's Comments: In panel 3, if you check out the way Elly’s hair bunches up at the back of her neck it looks like an ampersand. It interferes with the word "an" —as if it was the word "and." When I saw this strip in the paper, I realized I'd forgotten to white out the error and redraw her hair!

Friday August 17, 2018

Lynn's Comments: When I read this stuff, I can hear myself lecturing my kids. I can also hear my folks lecturing me. My grandkids aren't old enough for this kind of lecture, but it will come. Oh yes, it will come. We parents all sound exactly the same!

Monday August 27, 2018

Lynn's Comments: I got into some trouble with this idea. Too many kids decided to make superteddys. I liked the storyline, but the readers did not! Super Teddy had a very short-lived run (or flight!)

Wednesday August 29, 2018

Lynn's Comments: Whenever I added a new character to the strip, it added to the complexity of the story. Mrs. Grunion promised to be a lot of fun to work with, but she would have cut into the other characters’ roles. Since I only had one statement a day in which to tell a story, I had to gloss over some potentially great characters. After I retired and we were doing an assessment, my archivist, Stephanie, told me that during my career in syndication, I had created over 90 characters! Wow. This was something I never knew.

Monday September 3, 2018

Lynn's Comments: I once had to write a letter of apology to a girl whose finger I broke. We'd had a bad fight. She pulled a chunk of hair out of my head and I twisted her finger. It was a difficult few words to write. About 6 months ago, she and I met at the funeral of a mutual friend. It had been over 65 years since the incident…but it was the first thing we both had to talk about! Isn't it amazing how situations like this carve themselves into our memories. The apology, though hard to make, allowed us to maintain a friendship. We are both now in our 70s.

Tuesday September 4, 2018

Lynn's Comments: I was one to take a dare! I was dared to tell a classmate that she needed to wash more often. I wrote a note and stuck it on her locker. It said, "Veronica, you smell bad". She was devastated. The kids who dared me took her side and I was sent to the principal’s office. It was a mean thing to do, but I wasn't thinking about her, I was thinking about me. Here’s another lesson that has stayed with me since elementary school! The best lessons are often learned the hard way.

Thursday September 6, 2018

Lynn's Comments: This was another story that ignited some controversy. These kids should never have been left to fend for themselves. I was writing about my own childhood. When I was old enough to babysit and put on the dinner, I was responsible for the house and my brother after school. Times have changed!

Saturday September 8, 2018

Lynn's Comments: A fun story: One year, my husband and I flew out to Santa Rosa, California to visit Charles and Jeannie Schulz. "Sparky" was proud of his home and he asked us to come and walk about his property with him. I just had flats to wear, so he said I could borrow a pair of his sneakers. To make them fit, he stuffed the toes with Kleenex and off we went. There was a thick wooded area, a pond and a scenic ridge to walk along and we were gone for over an hour. When we got back to the house, I said to my hero, the creator of Peanuts, “Guess what, Sparky. I've walked a mile in your shoes!”