Cultural English 450 - Charles Schultz & Peanuts; Wrangell-St. Elias National Park; Q&A

Complete Transcript

You’re listening to ESL Podcast’s English Café number 450.

This is English as a Second Language Podcast’s English Café episode 450. I’m your host, Dr. Jeff McQuillan, coming to you from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.

On this Café, we’re going to talk about a famous American named Charles Schultz and his now world-famous comic strip, Peanuts. We’re also going to talk about the largest national park in North America, the Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve. And, as always, we’ll answer a few of your questions. Let’s get started.

Charles Schultz was born in 1922 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but grew up in St. Paul. Minneapolis and St. Paul are called the “Twin Cities” because they are right next to each other. I grew up, like Schultz, in St. Paul. Minnesota, in case you don’t know, is located in the central-northern part of the U.S., next to Canada.

There was another person I know, who was born one year after Schultz – also in the Twin Cities – in 1923. He grew up in the same neighborhood as Schultz in St. Paul, met Schultz, and even got Schultz’s signature in his yearbook. A yearbook is a book of photos of everyone in your school, that you can buy. There is a custom, or tradition, of students signing each other’s yearbooks. And who was this other man who knew Schultz from those early years? Why, that was Patrick McQuillan, my father. Of course, Schultz wasn’t famous when my father met him in high school.

After graduating from high school, Schultz took classes in “cartooning,” or drawing cartoons. “Cartoons” (cartoons) are simple drawings of a person or situation that are supposed to be funny. He took these classes at an art correspondence school. “Correspondence (correspondence) schools” are schools where all of the classes are taken through the mail – at least in the old days – and never in a classroom. Now you would do them via the Internet.

Schultz joined the Army and fought in World War II from 1943 to 1945. After he left the Army, he taught art classes through the correspondence school. He also began to “freelance” (freelance), or work for himself, and sell his work piece by piece to newspapers or magazines. He sold his work to newspapers such as the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the local newspaper in St. Paul, and to magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post.

In 1947, Schultz created a cartoon strip called Li’l Folks, with “Li’l” meaning little, or small, and “folks” meaning people – it’s an informal term for people. In 1950 he changed the name of the comic strip and called it Peanuts. The cartoon was about a group of three-, four-, and five-year-old children and their relationships with each other and with the world. Many of the experiences that the characters in Peanuts had were similar to experiences that Schultz himself had had during his life.

The main character of the comic strip, Charlie Brown, was named after one of Schultz’s co-workers at the art school, although it is said that a lot of the details of Charlie Brown come from Schultz’s own life. In this way, Peanuts was a sort of memoir. A “memoir” (memoir) is a book that a person writes about some of the most important events in his or her own life.

Charlie Brown, the character in the Peanuts comic strip, represents not only Schultz, but in some ways all of us. He is sensitive, liked by many people, and easily embarrassed. When Peanuts started, he was four years old, but as the years went on, he aged to six and later to eight. The character Charlie Brown often finds himself in situations that he would rather not be in. He is trusting of his friends and always falls for, or gets fooled by, the same joke that his friend Lucy plays on him. (No relationship to our Lucy here at ESL Podcast, of course!)

In one classic or often-played trick, she holds a football and says that she will hold it until Charlie Brown kicks it. So Charlie runs really hard in order to kick the ball, and then at the last second, just as he is trying to kick the ball as hard as he can, Lucy pulls the ball away and Charlie falls down. Charlie Brown always gets up and says, “Good grief!” – which is a common but old-fashioned way of saying “Geez,” or “Oh, no!” – to show his frustration, and he continues on with his day. “Grief” is usually a kind of sadness caused by someone’s death, but “Good grief!” as an expression just means “Oh, no!”

Other characters in the comic strip include Sally, Charlie Brown’s little sister; Lucy, a girl the same age as Charlie Brown, who thinks she knows everything; Linus, Lucy’s younger brother; and Schroeder, another boy Charlie Brown’s age, who loves to play Beethoven pieces on the piano and whom Lucy is in love with. There is also Peppermint Patty, a girl who is a “tomboy” (tomboy), or a girl who dresses like a boy and likes the same kinds of activities that boys typically do. Peppermint Patty is the only character who calls Charlie Brown “Chuck,” a common nickname for Charles.

The other main character in Peanuts is Charlie Brown’s dog, Snoopy. Snoopy is a type of dog called a beagle. He lives in a doghouse, a small little house just for a dog, in Charlie Brown’s backyard, and has a wonderful imagination. He often lies on the top of his doghouse and imagines himself to be a “pilot” (pilot), or a person who flies airplanes. He often imagines himself as a pilot in World War I, who flies battles against his German enemy, the Red Baron.

The children include Snoopy in many of their activities. The readers of the comic strip know what Snoopy is thinking, but the children in the comic strip do not. A little yellow bird named Woodstock is his friend and often goes on adventures with Snoopy. Like Snoopy, Woodstock quickly became a favorite with readers.

Peanuts was a popular comic from the very early days of its publication. It contained simple drawings, but told stories that readers could relate to, or connect with. Schultz refused to let anyone else draw the comics and insisted on drawing each one himself. In all, he drew over 18,000 Peanuts comic strips. In addition to the comic strips, there were also a number of television movies made from the Peanuts comic strips, including Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Halloween special programs still shown on TV today.

While my father had Schultz sign his yearbook, I have another odd, or strange, connection with the real Charlie Brown, the artist for whom Schultz’s character was named. The real Charlie Brown was not very successful as an artist and had lots of personal problems in his life. But in the early 1980s, he wrote his own memoir, his autobiography, but died in 1983 of cancer at the age of 57 before the book was published.

The person who eventually published the book was someone I knew and worked with briefly as a volunteer at this time, a man by the name of Virgil Burns, who was a friend of Brown. Virgil gave me a copy of the book, which I read. Unhappily, I lost the book, but I believe it was called Me and Charlie Brown: A Book of Good Griefs.

Similar to the real Charlie Brown, Schultz died on February 12, 2000, of cancer. His final Peanuts comic strip was published on February 13, 2000, the day after his death. At the time Schultz died, Peanuts was being printed in 2,500 newspapers in 75 different countries.

Let’s turn now to our second topic, the Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve. A national park is a park that is “maintained,” or taken care of, by the national or federal government because it has plants, animals, and land that the country wants to protect and to keep the way it is, without people changing it or doing damage to it. Hunting animals and cutting down trees, for example, are not normally allowed in a national park. A “national preserve” (preserve) is similar to a national park, except that hunting and fishing are allowed.

The Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve is located in southeastern Alaska, near the Canadian border. It is 200 miles (322 kilometers) west of Anchorage, Alaska. The Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve is the largest national park in the United States. The park covers a total of 20,587 square miles, or 53,320 square kilometers. That’s bigger than many countries, including Switzerland, Costa Rica, and Kuwait. A total of 13,005 square miles (that’s 33,683 square kilometers for those of you taking notes) of the land is the national park. The rest of the land is national preserve.

In 1899, gold was discovered in what is now the northern part of the park. Copper – another mineral, that is reddish in color – was also discovered in the middle of the area that is now the park, on the Kennicott Glacier. A “glacier” (glacier) is a very large, slow-moving river of ice, we could call it, that lies between mountains.

In 1911, a railroad was completed that connected the region, or area, to a town on the Alaskan coast called Cordova. Cordova is 116 miles (or 187 kilometers) south of the Kennecott mines. “Mines” (mines) are places where people dig in the earth to get out valuable resources like gold, copper, or coal. These particular mines were located in what is now the Wrangell–St. Elias National Park. The mine was closed in 1938, and the railroad stopped running. However, in the 1970s, “tourists” – that is, people on vacation visiting a place to see the sights – began traveling to the area.

In 1978, the area was “designated” (designated), or officially called, a national monument. A “national monument” (monument) is similar to a national park, except that it is smaller and doesn’t have as many things to see and do. In 1979, the area was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which is a place that the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has decided is important to save because it is important to the history of the people of the world – versus the people of Pluto or Alpha Centauri, I guess.

In 1980, the Wrangell–St. Elias area was designated a national park and preserve by the U.S. government. The national park and preserve cover the area where the Chugach, Wrangell, and St. Elias mountain ranges meet. Never heard of these mountain ranges? Well, neither did I before looking this information up. A mountain “range” (range), I should add, is a group of mountains connected together. The Rocky Mountains are a mountain range.

If you visit this park, you can see the largest number of glaciers in North America. You can also visit Mount Elias, which is 18,008 feet high. Now, in meters that’s 5,489, which doesn’t sound quite as big or impressive as 18,008 feet, but that’s the metric system for you! Mount Elias is the second-highest mountain in the United States. The tallest is Mount McKinley, also in Alaska, which is more than 20,000 feet high, or more than 6,000 meters.

Another mountain to see in the park if you go – when you go – is Mount Wrangell, which is a volcano. A “volcano” (volcano) is a mountain with a hole in the middle where hot liquid called “lava” (lava) and gas from the center of the earth come up to the surface. The last time this volcano was active, or acting like a volcano, was in 1900, so it is safe for visitors – or at least, that’s what they want you to believe. Me, I’m not too sure.

In addition to seeing the mountains, in the Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve you can see reindeer, brown bears, grizzly bears, moose, wolves, swans, and . . . dinosaurs! Yes, dinosaurs! Okay, no, not dinosaurs, but all those other animals you definitely can see in this park. You can go hiking and you can go fishing in certain parts of the preserve, and you can look at the pretty mountains, but who would want to do that when you can see dinosaurs? I mean, seriously.

The Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve is extremely large – too large, I think – and not very busy. Most tourists go to the more popular Denali National Park in Alaska. Perhaps because it is so hard to reach for tourists, those who do manage to travel to the Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve are guaranteed to have a very special experience with nature – if they are not killed by the volcanoes and the dinosaurs, that is.

Now let’s answer a few of your questions.

Our first question comes from Takahide (Takahide) in Japan. The question has to do with three expressions: “to be pleased to,” “to be happy to,” and “it’s a pleasure to.” What are the differences in how we use these three expressions?

Let’s start with “to be happy to.” “To be happy to” means that you are willing to do something – you feel cheerful, almost, to be able to do something. You want to do this thing, and it would give you pleasure to do it. “To be happy to” is a very common expression used in both informal and formal English. “I’m happy to help you.” “I would be happy to go with you to the movie.” “I’m happy to help you with your homework.”

“To be pleased to” means the same as “to be happy to,” but it’s used in somewhat more formal circumstances. If you are making an announcement to your company that everyone is going to get more money next year – everyone is going to get a raise – if you’re the boss, you might stand in front of your employees and say, “I am pleased to tell you” – or “I am pleased to announce” – “that you will all be getting a raise next year.” That’s a more formal event, a more formal situation, and so you would probably hear someone use the expression “to be pleased to” instead of “I’m happy to.” But both would be acceptable. Both would certainly be correct.

Another more formal way of saying “to be happy to” is “it’s my pleasure (pleasure) to” do something. “It’s my pleasure” is often used in a formal event or formal situation where you are introducing someone to an audience, to a group of people. If you go to a formal dinner or a formal meeting, for example, and there is going to be someone giving you a talk, a speech, the person introducing the speaker might say, “It’s my pleasure to introduce to you Dr. Cat Face. Dr. Cat Face?” And then Dr. Cat Face comes up and gives you a talk, I guess.

You could also use, “it’s my pleasure to” in other somewhat formal situations. If you’re at a business meeting, for example, you could say, “It’s my pleasure to help you today in understanding more about our company.” You can also use “it’s my pleasure” as a way of saying, “You’re welcome.” If someone thanks you for doing something, you could say, especially in a formal situation, “It’s my pleasure” instead of saying, “You’re welcome.” Both are acceptable in formal and informal situations. It’s been my pleasure, Takahide, to answer your question. I am happy to help you.

Paolo (Paolo) in Italy wants to know the meaning of two similar verbs: “to sit” (sit) and “to seat” (seat). Let’s start with “to sit.” “To sit” means the same as “to sit down.” It means to put your body on a chair or a couch with your behind – what we would informally call your “butt” (butt) – sitting or resting on the chair or the couch. “To sit” is the verb that describes that action, the action of sitting down.
You can say to someone, “Please sit.” However, if you are going to use it as a command form – if you are going to use it as what we would call an “imperative,” where you’re telling someone what they should do – you probably wouldn’t use “sit.” You can. It’s acceptable in certain situations. However, we associate “sit” as a command more with dogs. You would tell your dog to sit. Dog owners are often telling their dogs, “Sit, sit.” They’re telling their dog basically to sit down, although the dog doesn’t sit down in a chair. Well, I guess the dog could sit down in a chair, but not like a human would sit down in the chair. So, “to sit” is to rest in a chair or on a couch.

“To seat” is to assign a chair to someone so that person can sit down on it – with one exception, which we’ll mention in a moment. “To seat” is when someone else is finding you a place to sit. When you walk into a restaurant, especially a more formal one, there will be someone at the front of the restaurant who will ask how many people are in your party, meaning how many people are in your group, and you might say, “Two.” That person – who we would call either a “host” (host) if it’s a man or a “hostess” (hostess) if it’s a woman – would then take you to your table, the place where you’re going to sit.

We would say that the host or hostess is seating you; they’re finding a place for you to sit. Sometimes, you’ll walk into a restaurant, especially a less formal restaurant, and there will be a sign in the front of the restaurant that says, “Please seat yourself.” What that is saying is that the waiter or host is not going to take you to a specific place to sit, a specific table. You just pick the table you want to sit at, and you go and you seat yourself. You select your own place to sit.

Notice that “seat” is also a noun, in addition to a verb. A “seat” is a place to sit. On an airplane or on a bus or on any kind of public transportation, we would use the word “seat” instead of “chair” for the place where you sit down. On an airplane, everyone is in their “seats.” Those are the physical places where you are sitting. So, “seat” is both a noun and a verb. “Sit” is just a verb.

“I’m just a verb in the world! That’s all I want to be.” You know that song? Oh no, it’s not “verb” – it’s “girl.” “I’m just a girl in the world! That’s all I want to be . . .” something like that. I think the group was from here, from Southern California . . . ah, “No Doubt,” – that’s what it was called, “No Doubt.” That was a song many years ago. Well, not that many years ago.

Our next question comes from George (George) in Brazil. George wants to know the meaning of the expression “willy-nilly.” “Willy (willy) – nilly (nilly)” means without direction or planning – in a very unorganized or disorganized or unplanned way. “You can’t just spend your money willy-nilly.” That means you have to plan how you’re going to spend your money. If someone is spending their money willy-nilly, they’re spending their money on all sorts of things, often stupid things, and they’re not planning how their doing what they’re doing.

The term or expression “willy-nilly” is still used in informal English. It is however, a very old expression. The words “willy-nilly” come from a phrase “Will I, nill (nill) I.” “To will something” is to desire it, to want it. “Nill” means that you are not willing to do something, but it’s a very old word, and we don’t use “nill” (nill) anymore in spoken or written English. There’s another word, “nil” (nil) – one “l” – which means zero, or nothing.

But the old expression was “Will I, nill I,” and it was meant to express the idea that you are going to do something whether you like it or not. The more common use today, however, is to do something without giving it a lot of thought, without planning it in advance.

From Los Angeles, California, I’m Jeff McQuillan. Thank you for listening. Come back and listen to us again right here on the English Café.

Glossary

cartoon – a simple drawing or series of drawings of a person or situation that is intended to make people laugh

* Most newspapers print cartoons in the same section where they print the crossword puzzle.

freelance – working for oneself and selling one’s work piece-by-piece to newspapers, magazines, websites, and other organizations

* The freelance journalist was excited to have his article printed in The New York Times.

folks – an informally word for “people”

* The pilot came on the intercom and said to the passengers, “Okay, folks. We’re starting our final approach to Washington, D.C.”

memoir – a book that a person writes about himself or herself telling about selected events that occurred in his/her own life

* Lucille wrote a memoir about her days as a Broadway dancer.

tomboy – a girl who dresses like a boy and likes the same kinds of activities that boys typically do

* Yuko was a tomboy who hated wearing dresses and loved playing sports in the mud.

national park – a park that is taken care of by the government because it has plants, animals, and land that they want to protect

* Yellowstone National Park is home to many different kinds of animals.

national preserve – a park that is taken care of by the government because it has plants, animals, and land that they want to protect, but hunting and fishing are allowed

* The Mojave National Preserve is located in California in the Mojave, Great Basin, and Sonoran deserts.

glacier – a very large, slow moving river of ice that in located between mountains

* When the ends of glaciers break off, they become icebergs and float out to sea.

mine – an area where people dig in the earth to remove valuable resources like gold, copper, and coal

* The mines in West Virginia are filled with coal that is used to heat people’s homes and to keep factories operating.

to designate – to call or name something officially; to officially give something a special status or name

* Ben was designated a hero by the President because of how he risked his life to save the other soldiers in his group.

volcano – a mountain with a hole in the middle where lava (hot liquid from inside the Earth) and gas come up to the surface

* When the volcano at Pompeii erupted, the ash covered the city and all life ended.

to be pleased to – to be happy or willing to do something; to be given enjoyment, pleasure, or satisfaction to do something

* Melinda would be pleased to show you to your room.

to be happy to – to be willing to; to feel cheerful about doing something

* We would be happy to give Barbara a ride home from school today.

It’s (one’s) pleasure to – being happy and wiling to do something, often for someone else

* It’s my pleasure to welcome you to our restaurant. May I show you to a table by the window?

to sit – to rest by bending one’s legs and placing one’s behind on a chair or a surface

* Please don’t sit on the glass table!

to seat – to find or assign a chair for someone to sit down on; to place in a job or position of authority

* At the dinner, be sure to seat the most important guests away from the door.

willy-nilly – without direction or planning; in an unorganized or unplanned way

* Don’t throw your new clothes in your dresser willy-nilly. Fold them first.

What Insiders Know

Camp Snoopy at Knott’s Berry Farm

“Situated in (located in)” Southern California in a city called Buena Park is a 160-acre “theme park” (outdoor entertainment area with rides and games) called Knott’s Berry Farm. It is located close to the far better known theme park Disneyland. Knot’s Berry Farm is one of the most popular theme parks in the United States.

In 2012, an “estimated” (approximately) 3.5 million people visited the theme park. If you visit, you will find family rides, children rides, water rides and historical rides, among other types of entertainment.

Knott’s Berry Farm was built by Walter Knott and his family on a site (an area of ground where a building is constructed) of a former “berry farm” (large area used for growing food, in this case, small pieces of fruit full of juice). In 1934 before the theme park existed, the Knotts opened a restaurant that “drew in” (attracted) a lot of tourists. The Knotts then built several shops and other buildings to keep visitors entertained. In 1940, Walter Knott began to construct a “ghost town” (a town from history in which people no longer live) on the property, which technically “marked” (indicated) the beginning of the theme park. Over the years, several more attractions were established, including Camp Snoopy in 1983.

Camp Snoopy is a Peanuts “themed” (used as the main subject) attraction and was the first “section” (part) of the theme park “dedicated to” (designed for particular use) children under 12 years old. There are 14 rides in Camp Snoopy that are perfect for younger children, including a boat ride and a small “roller coaster” (a ride in which one sits in a car similar to a train car, while it moves suddenly and sharply at very high speeds).