September, 2007

How to be a Loser....
By Jim Roos

The following appeared in a recent newsletter from The Community Center, Palos Park, IL. I'm sharing it with the permission of Reverend Frank Sanders and hope you'll experience the same warm feeling from reading it as I did.

"I read a story - a long time ago. I don't even remember the source.
It was about a loser. It's about a little boy that the kids called Sparky after a comic book character of the day. Sparky never did shake that name.

School was all but impossible for Sparky. He failed every subject in the 8th grade. He even flunked physics in high school. He distinguished himself as the worst physics student in the school history. He also flunked Latin, algebra and English. He didn't do any better in sports.

Throughout his youth Sparky was awkward socially, too. He was not actually disliked by the other children. They just didn't care. He was astonished if a classmate even said hello to him outside school hours. You could never tell how he would have done dating. During high school he never once asked a girl out. He was too afraid of being turned down.

Sparky was a loser. He, his classmates, everyone knew it. So he rolled with it. Sparky made up his mind early in life that if things were meant to work out they would. Otherwise he would content himself with what appeared to be his inevitable mediocrity.

There was only one thing that meant anything to Sparky. Drawing. He was proud of his artwork. Of course no one else appreciated it. In his senior year he submitted some cartoons to the editor of his class yearbook. Almost predictably, they were rejected. Despite this rejection Sparky was convinced his drawings were good. He decided to become an artist. Upon graduation from high school he wrote a letter to Walt Disney Studio. He was told to send some samples of his artwork and the subject matter for a carton was suggested. Sparky drew the proposed cartoon. He spent a great deal of time on it.
Finally the reply came. He was rejected once again. Another loss for the loser.

Sparky wrote his own autobiography in cartoons. He described his childhood self. The little boy loser. A chronic underachiever in a cartoon character that was soon to become famous all over the world.
The boy who flunked every subject in eighth grade and whose work was rejected again and again – was sparky, Charles Monroe Schultz. He created the Peanuts comic script, the little cartoon boy whose kite would never fly. . .Charlie Brown."