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My mother also encouraged me in my drawing but, sadly, never lived to see any of my work published. She died a long, lingering death from cancer, when I was twenty, and it was a loss from which I sometimes believe I never recovered. Today it is a source of astonishment to me that I am older than she was when she died, and realizing this saddens me even more. When I was thirteen, we were given a black-and-white dog who turned out to be the forerunner of Snoopy. He was a mixed breed and slightly larger than the beagle Snoopy is supposed to be. He probably had a little pointer in him and some other kind of hound, but he was a wild creature; I don't believe he was ever completely tamed. He had a "vocabulary" of understanding of approximately fifty words, and he loved to ride in the car. He waited all day for my dad to come home from the barbershop, and on Saturday evenings, just before 9:00, he always put his paws on my dad's chair to let him know it was time to get in the car and make the short drive up to the store to buy those newspapers. When I decided to put a dog in Peanuts, I used the general appearance of Spike, with similar markings. I had decided that the dog in the strip was to be named Sniffy, until one day, just before the strip was actually to be published, I was walking past a newsstand and glanced down at the rows of comic magazines. There I saw one about a dog named Sniffy, so I had to go back to my room and think of another name. Fortunately, before I even