I had a little adventure on Saturday. A relation of mine from Norway, a young man, is spending a year studying at a college in South Dakota. He contacted me a while back, saying a bus tour was being arranged to the Mall of America here in Minneapolis, and would I show him around town if he came? I agreed of course, and so he ditched the tour and I took him around the Cities. He’d asked to see some of the sites related to Norwegians.

The first place I took him, after lunch, was an obscure one. I told him he’d probably wonder why I bothered with it, but it’s one most tour guides don’t know about (I think). I only know it because I read David Michaelis’s book, Schulz and Peanuts.

I took him to the corner of Snelling and Syndicate in St. Paul,and we walked to a cafe next to O’Gara’s Bar. The cafe has large front windows. I explained that this (I was pretty sure) was the place where the father of the creator of the Peanuts comic strip, Charles M. Schulz, had had his barber shop.

“They lived in several places,” I told my cousin, “but the last place they lived as a family was an upstairs apartment just around the corner, where the bar’s parking lot is now. It was there that Schulz’ mother died of cancer, about the same time he was preparing to go off to war.

“Are you familiar with the Norwegian nickname, ‘Snupi?’” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he said. (Snupi is a term of endearment, something a mother might call her child).

“Well, it was right there that Schulz’s mother, who was Norwegian by ancestry, said to him, ‘If we ever have another dog, I think we should name him Snupi.’” It was one of the last things she ever said to him.

Years later, when Schulz was making a deal to syndicate the Peanuts strip, somebody found out that the name he’d chosen for his cartoon dog, “Sniffy,” had already been taken by another cartoonist. So Schulz whited out the name “Sniffy” from all the panels, and inked in “Snoopy,” the name his mother had liked—the spelling altered so Americans could pronounce it.