Sitting in a newsroom reading the comics one day, I couldn't believe it. Charlie Brown had hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to win a game. After, sheeze, 40-some years in the paper, Charlie Brown was finally a hero.

   After a brief discussion over whether news could occur on a funny page, I made my decision. Time to work the phones.

   The guy who never wins, the little man struggling against the inhuman machine of life, he gets his day in the sun. The ultimate underdog finally wins.

   Turns out, I was apparently the first (and probably only) reporter in America who noticed.

   ***

   What should have been a five-minute call turned into a much longer and very pleasant chat. Charles Schultz, displaying genuine warmth and affection, explained to me how it all started with a picture. He had this vision of Charlie Brown being deliriously happy, spinning cartwheels to the front door, and the storyline sprang from there.

   At the time, neither Schultz nor the exec in charge, Sarah Gillespie, who later launched Dilbert, let me in on the catch. A few days later Chuck's run of luck ended; turned out he hit the homer off a girl.

   We talked at length about how Charlie Brown -- he can never be Chuck to anybody but Peppermint Patty -- can never be considered a loser, that he's actually more like just one of us. The deskhounds at UPI wanted me to use the "lovable loser" tag in the story, but I stole a line from my deskmate instead and called him the much more sympathetic "icon of ineptitude." Note the headline above: the lovable loser tag just plain sticks.

   Perhaps the most poignant part of the call was when Schultz told me that when he retires, Peanuts and Snoopy and the entire gang will, too. Best interests after serious consultation with the family, he said.

   Contemplate this notion for a moment. Not the wholly sentimental notion that there's never been a day in my reading life that's not had Peanuts to start it off. Consider the business, the enterprise, the entire marketing juggernaut and commercial revenue -- imagine a family saying that was Dad's work, and it would not be right for us, to carry it on despite what would have to be an intense financial incentive to continue.

   Shortly after his "60 Minutes" appearance, word came out that Schultz has been diagnosed with colon cancer. It was the type of news I'd been dreading since he became my all-time favorite interview in 16 years in the news business. On December first, he came home after two weeks of chemotherapy. His wife described the 77-year-old as tired but fine.

   Good luck and God bless, Mr. Schultz. And thanks for every laugh.

   ***

   G.L. Marshall was reminded via the Internet that the little red-haired girl was not Mrs. Schultz but a crush in the accounting department in one of his early jobs.