Written by: Jennifer Kathleen Gibbons

Donna Wold wasn’t famous like Fitzgerald’s Zelda or Andrew Wyeth’s Christina.

Yet, she did inspire one of the most famous artists of all time.

Back when she was young, Donna Johnson’s hair was “violently red.” Until the end of her life, she lived in Minneapolis. In the late forties, she met this guy named Charles Schultz, but everyone called him Sparky. He was teaching cartoon/illustration by correspondence at Art Instruction, Inc., and was riding high. Not only did he have a good job, he was hard at work on the comic “Li’l Folks” a single panel strip telling stories of children who said cute things. Johnson worked in the accounting department and she liked Sparky; when she found out he was coaching the girls softball team, she volunteered to play.

Even though she wasn’t good at softball, all that mattered was Sparky was coaching!

Soon the two met for dinner dates and soon after that they engaged in a Minnesota pastime: ice skating. One time while watching a movie they–in Johnson’s words, “necked.”

Sparky was heads over heels in love. He wanted to marry her yesterday. But she had a secret and that secret was that there was another man who also wanted Johnson’s heart, and his name was Alan Wold.

Both men were smart, kind, charming, and handsome, and that only complicated matters: Johnson couldn’t decide which one would get her hand.

Sparky had just signed a contract to syndicate his strip, but they wanted to rename it “Peanuts.” He wasn’t crazy about the name, but it would do.

Meanwhile, Johnson kept going back and forth.

When Sparky came to visit after signing his contract, she told him her decision: She had chosen Alan. There were many practical reasons for this: she knew Alan’s friends and got along with them. They were, in her words, compatible. Also Sparky was a different religion than she. Sparky took it hard and she felt terrible. She felt worse when Sparky came back half an hour after she rejected him with the wistful, “I was hoping you changed your mind.”

But she hadn’t.

The same month “Peanuts” made its debut, Donna Johnson became Mrs. Alan Wold.

Six months later, Sparky married Joyce Halverson (Schultz biographer David Michaelis wrote she’s the one who inspired Lucy Van Pelt) and they moved to Colorado, then California. He adopted her daughter Meredith, then they had four children of their own. But he always remembered his Red Haired Girl. In a 1961 strip, Charlie Brown spotted a little red haired girl and thought if she just sat with him at lunch he would be so happy.

The reader never saw the red haired girl. She was like the cat Snoopy fought with, or Miss Othmar.

We had to make up what she looked like in our heads.

In the 1967 Peanuts special You’re in Love, Charlie Brown, for a good twenty minutes Charlie Brown obsessed about the little red haired girl. At the end, she wrote him a simple note: I like you, Charlie Brown. Signed the Little Red Haired Girl. Swoon! One problem: She was going to camp. We never saw her once. That changed with another special in 1977 called It’s Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown. We found out her first name was Heather.

And later we found out she had a last name: Wold.

The Red Haired Girl didn’t speak in the special. Of course she had long red flipped hair and bright pink cheeks. She won homecoming queen. At a dance, Charlie Brown gathered up his courage and kissed her on the cheek.

We then saw him fly in a tangerine-colored sky.

In the strip, only one time was she seen: at a dance, Charlie Brown was busy doing the hokey pokey with Peppermint Patty and Marcie. When they were done, Charlie Brown thought he had his chance with her. Linus told him he had to wait. The last panel is Snoopy dancing with her in the dark, with Snoopy thinking “Daisy and Gatsby danced. .. I remembered his graceful, conservative foxtrot.”

The Little Red Haired Girl was in silhouette, with no trace of color, no trace of red.

When The Peanuts Movie came out in November, it was notable because the Red Haired Girl was going to be in it, plus she was going to speak! Of course, journalists wanted to speak to Donna Johnson Wold, the real life muse. By then she was eighty-six, a great grandmother. Still married to Alan Wold; they just celebrated their 65th anniversary. She also fostered children in her later years. The violently red hair was now a snowy white and she never forgot Sparky–how could she? The children she fostered, her obituary said, were often named for Peanuts characters.

When Donna Wold died of August 9th, she was remembered for her foster work and playing card games with her children.

But many remembered her as the Little Red Haired Girl–the one who broke Sparky’s heart, the one who skated with him on cold nights, the one he would never stop chasing throughout his art.