Woman who inspired the ‘Little Red-Haired Girl’ from ‘Peanuts’ dies
In the comic strip Peanuts, her character never even received a name.
But the “Little Red-Haired Girl” cast as the object of protagonist Charlie Brown’s affections drew fans from across the world for more than forty years, particularly those who empathized with his longing for her from afar.
In real life, the woman who inspired her did have a name: Donna Mae Wold, who passed away Aug. 9 at the age of 87, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported Saturday.
The cause of death was heart failure and complications from diabetes, according to the paper.
Wold, nee Johnson, first met the cartoonist Charles Schulz as a 21-year-old working in accounting at the Art Instruction Schools in Minneapolis, according to a Vanity Fair profile last year. Schulz, who taught at the school, was quickly won over by the Minnesota beauty and regularly doodled cartoons in the calendar on her desk. Schulz proposed to her several times, but she turned him down.
That rejection became the inspiration for Charlie Brown’s own unrequited love in the comics, in which he yearned for the off-strip character throughout its entire run.
Schulz said in an interview published in 1997 that he never depicted the “Little Red-Haired Girl” in his drawings — save for one silhouette — because "I could never draw her to satisfy the readers' impression of what she's probably like.”
Never letting Charlie Brown end up with the “Little Red-Haired Girl” was also a deliberate storytelling device, he said.
To give them a happy ending would mean “your basic premise disappears,” he said at the time. “The foundation collapses.”
Meanwhile, the real-life redhead married Allan Wold in October 1950, a middle school classmate who shared the same scarlet locks but only began to court her after spying her singing in a church choir as adults.
Allan Wold, who had just completed service in the Navy, called hundreds of Johnsons in the telephone book to find her and ask her out on their first date, the Star Tribune reported. She and Wold had seen each other casually for years when he eventually asked her to marry him, weeks after she turned down Schulz for the last time.
They had four children and raised at least 40 more as foster parents — some of whom she named for other “Peanuts” characters like Lucy and piano prodigy Schroeder, according to the Star Tribune.
“It was a fun story,” daughter Sally Wold told the paper. “We’re all lucky we got to be part of it.”
In 1989, Wold became famous when she was named as the “Little Red-Haired Girl” in a biography of Schulz. Readers of the comic wrote letters to her, her husband said, after her identity became public.
“It was a nice interlude,” he told the Star Tribune. “It got her out in the spotlight just a little, not too much. … It was a good thing for her to lift her spirits.”
Schulz passed away in 2000, though the comic’s reruns are still syndicated today. In the decades during which it was published, Wold collected several of the comic strips, which she kept with the desk diary during the time they dated.
The comic strips were “the story of his life and mine,” she told Vanity Fair.
Wold is survived by her husband, three daughters, sister Margaret Olson, seven grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren, according to the Star Tribune.
This story was originally published August 22, 2016 at 8:21 AM with the headline "Woman who inspired the ‘Little Red-Haired Girl’ from ‘Peanuts’ dies."