I was reading up on how legitimate looking phone numbers sometimes turn up in movies when I spotted an interesting-if-true anecdote. According to Cecil Adams, Charles Schulz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip, once included in a Sunday strip a phone number that belonged to a family in Moline, Illinois. I can’t find anything on that but Cartoon Research reported that as a joke Schulz once included the phone number of Lee Mendelson, his colleague on the television specials, into one of his strips. Hundreds of calls reportedly came in to Mendelson’s phone from readers hoping to talk to Snoopy. I’m going to make it a drinking project next time I’m at a bar to look for that number in my complete digitized collection of Peanuts. oldtelephonebooks.com pinpoints the strip as having appeared around 1965. I am inclined to think Cecil Adams’ account is either apocryphal or simply an unintended embellishment of the Lee Mendelson story.
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