Peanuts Begins by Charles Schulz for January 05, 2025

Snoopy likes those dog books.

Soon it will be the Bunny-Wunnie books by Miss Helen Sweetstory

Who the heck is he?

I thought for sure Charlie Brown was going to say Jack London.

ht tps:// www.bookseriesinorder. com /albert-payson-terhune/

At least he’s not asking for Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie!

Had to google him. He wrote books involving dogs, specifically collies! Nice to learn something new!

How about the great story “Wag, the tale of a Dog”!

Was “Cujo” written back then?

I read some of his books 75 years ago, starting with “Lad: A Dog”. It was written in 1919, Wiki tells me.

I read Old Yeller when I was a kid. It’s about a dog, and was written by someone else. Snoopy might like that one, except for the ending.

Nice! Albert Payson Terhune (December 21, 1872 – February 18, 1942) was an American writer, dog breeder, and journalist. He was popular for his novels relating the adventures of his beloved collies and as a breeder of collies at his Sunnybank Kennels, the lines of which still exist in today’s Rough Collies. – Wikipedia

Lad, A Dog.

That shouldn’t be a surprise.

That was a rather arcane reference, albeit relevant.

When I was a kid, I read all the “Lad” books by Terhune. I loved them and begged for a collie, which I never got.

I always preferred Jim Kjelgaard.

I had to Google that one.

Reminds me of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies

CB is going to appreciate that one, when Snoopy discovers “the Six Bunnie Wunnies.”

Albert Payson Terhune (1872-1942) was an American journalist, fiction writer, and dog breeder. His dog breeding, and many of his books, concentrated on Rough Collies.

Terhune wrote a very popular novel, “Lad, A Dog,” based on his own collie Lad, which was followed by more than 30 other dog-focused novels. He also wrote a variety of non-dog-based novels, and countless short stories.

Terhune is fairly obscure now, but I suspect he was famous enough in the 1950s that the original readers of this strip, including young ones, would have gotten the reference.

However—

“Terhune is now often criticized for his starkly racist depictions of the minorities, hill people, and so-called ‘half-breeds’ that peopled parts of northern New Jersey less idealized than Sunnybank.” (Quoted from Wikipedia.) (Sunnybank was the Terhune estate, where he had his dog kennels.)

Doggone it! Every time I want to like someone in the past, I find out he or she was a racist, a misogynist, a violent drunk, or some other kind of reprobate.