From Human Events:
House Conservatives Want End to Birthright Citizenship
by Robert B. Bluey
Posted Dec 8, 2005
House conservatives today announced plans to amend a Republican-sponsored immigration reform bill with language calling for the construction of a 2,000-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border and a provision that would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. whose parents aren’t citizens.
The legislation, sponsored by House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R.-Wis.), is expected to be voted on by the full House as early as next week. Sensenbrenner has worked closely with the White House to craft the bill (H.R. 4437) -- the reason conservatives cited for the exclusion of key enforcement tools.
Rep. Tom Tancredo (R.-Colo.) organized Thursday’s press conference featuring about 20 other conservative Republicans. Each complained about a particular area they want to see addressed (see full list below).
Among those issues likely to be the center of debate next week: the lack of language authorizing a physical structure along the border and the exclusion of a so-called “anchor baby” provision undoing birthright citizenship.
The House conservatives said they would attempt to attach two bills previously introduced to Sensenbrenner’s legislation. House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter (R.-Calif.) is sponsoring the TRUE Enforcement and Border Security Act (H.R. 4313), which authorized the fence construction, and Rep. Nathan Deal (R.-Ga.) introduced the Citizenship Reform Act (H.R. 698), which denies birthright citizenship.
Responding to Sensenbrenner’s bill, Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R.-Ariz.) said, “Both the timing and the thin patchwork context of this proposed House bill reinforced my concern that Washington continues to view illegal immigration as a political problem to be managed, rather than an invasion to be stopped.”
Conservatives flatly rejected any compromise with the Senate that would include a guest-worker or amnesty proposal. During a House Judiciary Committee meeting today, Republicans rejected a Democrat-sponsored amendment that would have attached a guest-worker proposal to Sensenbrenner’s bill.
Tancredo, leader of the 92-member House Immigration Reform Caucus, wouldn’t commit to any specific plan of action regarding amendments. His spokesman said no vote count had been done on any of the potential amendments, adding that the first priority is to simply convince GOP leaders to allow votes on amendments to the bill.
The full list of concerns, released by Tancredo’s office, is printed below.
Fixing our Broken Borders:
* Begin building a border security fence
* Put military on the border
* End ‘catch and release’
* Mandate passport usage for everyone traveling internationally
* Make volunteer border patrol a sanctioned federal activity
* Suspend visa waiver program
Enforcing the Law throughout our Country:
* Require a federal response when local law enforcement asks to have illegal aliens arrested
* Restrict federal money that goes to local governments that have illegal alien sanctuary policies
* Close the loophole which allows religious organizations and their agents to be immune from illegal alien harboring laws
* Make a DUI a deportable offense
* Increase penalties for smuggling of illegal aliens
* Increase penalties for terrorists who are illegal aliens
* Increase penalties for gang members who are illegal aliens
* Draft minimum standards for birth certificates and birth/death registries
* Make unlawful presence in the U.S. a felony
Stopping Businesses from Hiring Illegals:
* Make employment verification mandatory
* Eliminate the business tax write-off for illegal workers
* Increase the penalty for employers who hire illegal aliens
* Make businesses who hire illegal aliens ineligible for future guest workers
Reducing the Incentive to Come Illegally:
* Disallow all federal funding from going to states that offer in-state tuition to illegal aliens
* Disallow the matricula consular card as a legal form of identification
* Reform the use of ITINs
* Eliminate social security totalization for illegal aliens
Disentangling Foreign Policy from Immigration:
* Block any immigration provisions from being inserted into trade bills
* Block visas to countries that refuse to take their nationals back
* Reduce the availability of yearly legal visas per country by the number of illegal aliens from such country
Restoring the Meaning of Citizenship:
* End birthright citizenship for illegal aliens
* Eliminate dual citizenship
* Make English the official language
* Write the oath of citizenship into law
Reforming Legal Immigration:
* Eliminate the visa lottery
* Eliminate chain migration
* Eliminate H-1B visas
* Eliminate unskilled worker green cards
* Create a Department of Immigration or a cabinet-level agency
Friday, December 09, 2005
Thursday, December 08, 2005
From Opinion Journal:
PEGGY NOONAN
The American Way
What does it mean that your first act on entering a country is breaking its laws?
Thursday, December 8, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
As Congress considers the Bush administration's guest-worker plan, as Republicans try to figure out what their immigration philosophy is, and as political observers parse the implications of yesterday's California House race, here are some small and human questions on immigration to the United States.
I recently found out through one of her daughters that my grandmother spent her first night in America on a park bench in downtown Manhattan. She had made her way from Ireland to Ellis Island, and a cousin was to meet the ship. It was about 1920. The cousin didn't show. So Mary Dorian, age roughly 20, all alone, with no connections and no relatives interested enough to remember her arrival in the new world, spent her first night in America alone on a bench, in the dark, in a strange country. Later she found her way to Brooklyn and became a bathroom attendant at the big Abraham & Straus department store on Fulton Street. (It's now a Macy's. I buy Christmas gifts there.)
Two generations after my grandmother arrived, I was in the Oval Office of the American president saying, "I think you oughta." And amazingly enough he was listening.
In two generations. Two.
What a country.
Am I proud of this? Sure. It's the American way to point out that your people went from zero to 60, or will, or can. It's the American way to acknowledge, too, that someone made the car you jumped into. There was an assembly line. My grandparents were ahead of me in that line, and the Founders were ahead of them.
Every time an American brags about where he came from and where he wound up, he's really complimenting the guys on the line.
In my case before there was the car there was a ship. I do not know the name of the ship that took Mary Dorian to America, and yet it gave me my future. I know she wore an inspection card attached to her clothing. I have such a card, encased in plastic, on a table in my home. It is the card worn by Mary Dorian's future husband's sister, who came over at the same time.
It says at the top, "To assist Inspection in New York Harbour." It notes dates, departure points, "Name of Immigrant." On the side there's a row of numbers that mark each day of what appears to have been a 10-day trip. Each day was stamped by the ship's surgeon at daily inspection. You got the stamp if you appeared to be free of disease.
You know how the card looks? Thin. An old piece of paper that looks vulnerable. I guess that's why I encased it in plastic, to keep it safe, because it's precious.
Here is what is true of my immigrants and of the immigrants of America's past:
They fought for citizenship. They earned it. They waited in line. They passed the tests. They had to get permission to come. They got money that was hard-earned and bought a ticket. They had to get through Ellis Island or the port of Boston or Philadelphia, get questioned and eyeballed by a bureaucrat with a badge, and get the nod to take their first step on American soil. Then they had to find the A&S.
They knew citizenship was not something cheaply held but something bestowed by a great nation.
Did the fact that they had to earn it make joining America even more precious?
Yes. Of course.
We all know it is so often so different now. Perhaps a million illegal immigrants come into the United States each year, joining the 10 million or 20 million already here--nobody seems to know the number. Our borders are less borders than lines you cross if you want to. When you watch videotape of some of the illegal border crossings on a show like Lou Dobbs's--who is not a senator or congressman but a media star and probably the premier anti-illegal-immigration voice in the country--what you absorb is a sense of anarchy, an utter collapse of authority.
It's not good. It does not bode well.
The questions I bring to the subject are not about the flow of capital, the imminence of globalism, or the implications of uncontrolled immigration on the size and cost of the welfare state. They just have to do with what it is to be human.
What does it mean that your first act on entering a country--your first act on that soil--is the breaking of that country's laws? What does it suggest to you when that country does nothing about your lawbreaking because it cannot, or chooses not to? What does that tell you? Will that make you a better future citizen, or worse? More respecting of the rule of law in your new home, or less?
If you assume or come to believe that that nation will not enforce its own laws for reasons that are essentially cynical, that have to do with the needs of big business or the needs of politicians, will that assumption or belief make you more or less likely to be moved by that country, proud of that country, eager to ally yourself with it emotionally, psychologically and spiritually?
When you don't earn something or suffer to get it, do you value it less highly? If you value it less highly, will you bother to know it, understand it, study it? Will you bother truly to become part of it? When you are allowed to join a nation for free, as it were, and without the commitment of years of above-board effort, do you experience your joining that country as a blessing or as a successful con? If the latter, what was the first lesson America taught you?
These are questions that I think are behind a lot of the more passionate opposition to illegal immigration.
There are people who want to return to the old ways and rescue some of the old attitudes. There are groups that seek to restore border integrity. But they are denigrated by many, even the president, who has called them vigilantes. The New Yorker this week carries a mildly snotty piece by a writer named Daniel Kurtz-Phelan in which he interviews members of a group of would-be Minutemen who seek to watch the borders with Mexico and Canada. They are "running freelance patrols"; they are xenophobic; they dismiss critics as "communists" and "child molesters."
How nice to be patronized by young men whose place is so secure they have two last names. How nice to be looked down on for caring.
And they do care, that's the thing. And pay a price for caring. They worry in part that what is happening on our borders can damage our country by eroding the sense of won citizenship that leads to the mutual investment and mutual respect--the togetherness, if that isn't too corny--that all nations need to operate in the world, and that our nation will especially need in the coming world.
This is what I fear about our elites in government and media, who will decide our immigration policy. It is that they will ignore the human questions and focus instead, as they have in the past, only on economic questions (we need the workers) and political ones (we need the Latino vote). They think that's the big picture. It's not. What goes on in the human heart is the big picture.
Again: What does it mean when your first act is to break the laws of your new country? What does it mean when you know you are implicitly supported in lawbreaking by that nation's ruling elite? What does it mean when you know your new country doesn't even enforce its own laws? What does it mean when you don't even have to become an American once you join America?
Our elites are lucky people. They were born in a suburb, went to Yale, and run the world from a desk. Which means this great question, immigration, is going to be decided by people who don't know what it is to sleep on a bench. Who don't know what it is to earn your space, your place. Who don't know what it is to grieve the old country and embrace the new country. Who don't know what it is to feel you're a little on the outside and have to earn your way in to the inside. Who think it was without a cost, because it was without cost for them.
The problem with our elites as they make our immigration policy is not that they have compassion and open-mindedness. It is that they are unknowing and empty-headed. They don't know, most of them, what others had to earn, and how much they, and their descendents, prize it and want to protect it.
PEGGY NOONAN
The American Way
What does it mean that your first act on entering a country is breaking its laws?
Thursday, December 8, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
As Congress considers the Bush administration's guest-worker plan, as Republicans try to figure out what their immigration philosophy is, and as political observers parse the implications of yesterday's California House race, here are some small and human questions on immigration to the United States.
I recently found out through one of her daughters that my grandmother spent her first night in America on a park bench in downtown Manhattan. She had made her way from Ireland to Ellis Island, and a cousin was to meet the ship. It was about 1920. The cousin didn't show. So Mary Dorian, age roughly 20, all alone, with no connections and no relatives interested enough to remember her arrival in the new world, spent her first night in America alone on a bench, in the dark, in a strange country. Later she found her way to Brooklyn and became a bathroom attendant at the big Abraham & Straus department store on Fulton Street. (It's now a Macy's. I buy Christmas gifts there.)
Two generations after my grandmother arrived, I was in the Oval Office of the American president saying, "I think you oughta." And amazingly enough he was listening.
In two generations. Two.
What a country.
Am I proud of this? Sure. It's the American way to point out that your people went from zero to 60, or will, or can. It's the American way to acknowledge, too, that someone made the car you jumped into. There was an assembly line. My grandparents were ahead of me in that line, and the Founders were ahead of them.
Every time an American brags about where he came from and where he wound up, he's really complimenting the guys on the line.
In my case before there was the car there was a ship. I do not know the name of the ship that took Mary Dorian to America, and yet it gave me my future. I know she wore an inspection card attached to her clothing. I have such a card, encased in plastic, on a table in my home. It is the card worn by Mary Dorian's future husband's sister, who came over at the same time.
It says at the top, "To assist Inspection in New York Harbour." It notes dates, departure points, "Name of Immigrant." On the side there's a row of numbers that mark each day of what appears to have been a 10-day trip. Each day was stamped by the ship's surgeon at daily inspection. You got the stamp if you appeared to be free of disease.
You know how the card looks? Thin. An old piece of paper that looks vulnerable. I guess that's why I encased it in plastic, to keep it safe, because it's precious.
Here is what is true of my immigrants and of the immigrants of America's past:
They fought for citizenship. They earned it. They waited in line. They passed the tests. They had to get permission to come. They got money that was hard-earned and bought a ticket. They had to get through Ellis Island or the port of Boston or Philadelphia, get questioned and eyeballed by a bureaucrat with a badge, and get the nod to take their first step on American soil. Then they had to find the A&S.
They knew citizenship was not something cheaply held but something bestowed by a great nation.
Did the fact that they had to earn it make joining America even more precious?
Yes. Of course.
We all know it is so often so different now. Perhaps a million illegal immigrants come into the United States each year, joining the 10 million or 20 million already here--nobody seems to know the number. Our borders are less borders than lines you cross if you want to. When you watch videotape of some of the illegal border crossings on a show like Lou Dobbs's--who is not a senator or congressman but a media star and probably the premier anti-illegal-immigration voice in the country--what you absorb is a sense of anarchy, an utter collapse of authority.
It's not good. It does not bode well.
The questions I bring to the subject are not about the flow of capital, the imminence of globalism, or the implications of uncontrolled immigration on the size and cost of the welfare state. They just have to do with what it is to be human.
What does it mean that your first act on entering a country--your first act on that soil--is the breaking of that country's laws? What does it suggest to you when that country does nothing about your lawbreaking because it cannot, or chooses not to? What does that tell you? Will that make you a better future citizen, or worse? More respecting of the rule of law in your new home, or less?
If you assume or come to believe that that nation will not enforce its own laws for reasons that are essentially cynical, that have to do with the needs of big business or the needs of politicians, will that assumption or belief make you more or less likely to be moved by that country, proud of that country, eager to ally yourself with it emotionally, psychologically and spiritually?
When you don't earn something or suffer to get it, do you value it less highly? If you value it less highly, will you bother to know it, understand it, study it? Will you bother truly to become part of it? When you are allowed to join a nation for free, as it were, and without the commitment of years of above-board effort, do you experience your joining that country as a blessing or as a successful con? If the latter, what was the first lesson America taught you?
These are questions that I think are behind a lot of the more passionate opposition to illegal immigration.
There are people who want to return to the old ways and rescue some of the old attitudes. There are groups that seek to restore border integrity. But they are denigrated by many, even the president, who has called them vigilantes. The New Yorker this week carries a mildly snotty piece by a writer named Daniel Kurtz-Phelan in which he interviews members of a group of would-be Minutemen who seek to watch the borders with Mexico and Canada. They are "running freelance patrols"; they are xenophobic; they dismiss critics as "communists" and "child molesters."
How nice to be patronized by young men whose place is so secure they have two last names. How nice to be looked down on for caring.
And they do care, that's the thing. And pay a price for caring. They worry in part that what is happening on our borders can damage our country by eroding the sense of won citizenship that leads to the mutual investment and mutual respect--the togetherness, if that isn't too corny--that all nations need to operate in the world, and that our nation will especially need in the coming world.
This is what I fear about our elites in government and media, who will decide our immigration policy. It is that they will ignore the human questions and focus instead, as they have in the past, only on economic questions (we need the workers) and political ones (we need the Latino vote). They think that's the big picture. It's not. What goes on in the human heart is the big picture.
Again: What does it mean when your first act is to break the laws of your new country? What does it mean when you know you are implicitly supported in lawbreaking by that nation's ruling elite? What does it mean when you know your new country doesn't even enforce its own laws? What does it mean when you don't even have to become an American once you join America?
Our elites are lucky people. They were born in a suburb, went to Yale, and run the world from a desk. Which means this great question, immigration, is going to be decided by people who don't know what it is to sleep on a bench. Who don't know what it is to earn your space, your place. Who don't know what it is to grieve the old country and embrace the new country. Who don't know what it is to feel you're a little on the outside and have to earn your way in to the inside. Who think it was without a cost, because it was without cost for them.
The problem with our elites as they make our immigration policy is not that they have compassion and open-mindedness. It is that they are unknowing and empty-headed. They don't know, most of them, what others had to earn, and how much they, and their descendents, prize it and want to protect it.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
From Slate:
Hollywood's New Axis of Evil
Why do businessmen wear the black hat?
By Edward Jay Epstein
Posted Monday, Dec. 5, 2005
In the new Warner Bros. political thriller, Syriana, the villain is not al-Qaida, an enemy state, the Mafia, or even a psychotic serial killer. Rather, it's the big oil companies, which manipulate terrorism, wars, and social unrest to drive up oil prices (which have risen almost as much as movie ticket prices in the last 10 years). One doesn't need to look far to discover that the root-of-evil corporate villain is hardly atypical of post-Cold War Hollywood.
Consider, for example, Paramount's 2004 remake of the 1962 classic The Manchurian Candidate. In the original, directed by John Frankenheimer, the villain-behind-the-villain is the Soviet Union, whose nefarious agents, with the help of the Chinese Communists, abduct a U.S. soldier in Korea and turn him into a sleeper assassin. In the new version, the military abduction is transposed from Korea in 1950 to Kuwait in 1991, and the defunct Soviet Union is replaced as the resident evil. The new villain is—you guessed it—the Manchurian Global Corporation, an American company loosely modeled on the Halliburton Corporation. As the director, Jonathan Demme, explains in his DVD commentary, he avoided making the Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein (whom the United States was battling in the time frame of the movie) the replacement villain, because he did not want to "negatively stereotype" Muslims. Not only were neither Saddam Hussein nor Iraq mentioned in a film about the Iraq-Kuwait war, but the Manchurian corporation's technicians rewire the brains of the abducted U.S. soldiers with false memories of al-Qaida-type jihadists so that they will lay the blame for their terrorist acts on an innocent Muslim jihadist.
Why don't the movies have plausible, real-world villains anymore? One reason is that a plethora of stereotype-sensitive advocacy groups, representing everyone from hyphenated ethnic minorities and the physically handicapped to Army and CIA veterans, now maintain liaisons in Hollywood to protect their images. The studios themselves often have "outreach programs" in which executives review scripts and characters with representatives from these groups, evaluate their complaints, and attempt to avoid potential brouhahas.
Finding evil villains is not as easy as it was in the days when a director could choose among Nazis, Communists, KGB, and Mafiosi. Still, in a pinch, these old enemies will serve. For example, the 2002 apocalyptic thriller Sum of All Fears, based on the Tom Clancy novel, originally had Muslim extremists exploding a nuclear bomb in Baltimore. Paramount decided, however, to change the villains to Nazis residing in South Africa to avoid offending Arab-American and Islamic groups. Yet, even if aging Nazis lack any credible "outreach program" in Hollywood, they can no longer be credibly fit into many contemporary movies. "The list [of non-offensive villains] narrows quickly once you get past the tired clichés of Nazis," a top talent agency executive pointed out in an e-mail. "You'd be surprised at how short the list is."
For sci-fi and horror movies, there are always invaders from alien universes and zombies from another dimension, but for politico-thrillers, the safest remaining characters are lily-white, impeccably dressed American corporate executives. They are especially useful as evildoers in foreign-based thrillers, since their demonization does not run the risk of gratuitously offending officials in countries either hosting the filming or supplying tax and production subsidies. The "Mission Impossible" franchise replaced the Russian and Chinese heavies that populated the TV series with, in Mission Impossible 2, a WASPish-looking financier who controlled a pharmaceutical company that unleashed a horrific virus on the world in the hopes of cashing in on the antidote. Here, as in other movies in this genre, businessmen's killings are not just figurative. Unlike other stereotype-challenged groups, CEOs and financiers, lacking a connection with the studios' outreach programs, have become an essential part of Hollywood's new version of the axis of evil.
Hollywood's New Axis of Evil
Why do businessmen wear the black hat?
By Edward Jay Epstein
Posted Monday, Dec. 5, 2005
In the new Warner Bros. political thriller, Syriana, the villain is not al-Qaida, an enemy state, the Mafia, or even a psychotic serial killer. Rather, it's the big oil companies, which manipulate terrorism, wars, and social unrest to drive up oil prices (which have risen almost as much as movie ticket prices in the last 10 years). One doesn't need to look far to discover that the root-of-evil corporate villain is hardly atypical of post-Cold War Hollywood.
Consider, for example, Paramount's 2004 remake of the 1962 classic The Manchurian Candidate. In the original, directed by John Frankenheimer, the villain-behind-the-villain is the Soviet Union, whose nefarious agents, with the help of the Chinese Communists, abduct a U.S. soldier in Korea and turn him into a sleeper assassin. In the new version, the military abduction is transposed from Korea in 1950 to Kuwait in 1991, and the defunct Soviet Union is replaced as the resident evil. The new villain is—you guessed it—the Manchurian Global Corporation, an American company loosely modeled on the Halliburton Corporation. As the director, Jonathan Demme, explains in his DVD commentary, he avoided making the Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein (whom the United States was battling in the time frame of the movie) the replacement villain, because he did not want to "negatively stereotype" Muslims. Not only were neither Saddam Hussein nor Iraq mentioned in a film about the Iraq-Kuwait war, but the Manchurian corporation's technicians rewire the brains of the abducted U.S. soldiers with false memories of al-Qaida-type jihadists so that they will lay the blame for their terrorist acts on an innocent Muslim jihadist.
Why don't the movies have plausible, real-world villains anymore? One reason is that a plethora of stereotype-sensitive advocacy groups, representing everyone from hyphenated ethnic minorities and the physically handicapped to Army and CIA veterans, now maintain liaisons in Hollywood to protect their images. The studios themselves often have "outreach programs" in which executives review scripts and characters with representatives from these groups, evaluate their complaints, and attempt to avoid potential brouhahas.
Finding evil villains is not as easy as it was in the days when a director could choose among Nazis, Communists, KGB, and Mafiosi. Still, in a pinch, these old enemies will serve. For example, the 2002 apocalyptic thriller Sum of All Fears, based on the Tom Clancy novel, originally had Muslim extremists exploding a nuclear bomb in Baltimore. Paramount decided, however, to change the villains to Nazis residing in South Africa to avoid offending Arab-American and Islamic groups. Yet, even if aging Nazis lack any credible "outreach program" in Hollywood, they can no longer be credibly fit into many contemporary movies. "The list [of non-offensive villains] narrows quickly once you get past the tired clichés of Nazis," a top talent agency executive pointed out in an e-mail. "You'd be surprised at how short the list is."
For sci-fi and horror movies, there are always invaders from alien universes and zombies from another dimension, but for politico-thrillers, the safest remaining characters are lily-white, impeccably dressed American corporate executives. They are especially useful as evildoers in foreign-based thrillers, since their demonization does not run the risk of gratuitously offending officials in countries either hosting the filming or supplying tax and production subsidies. The "Mission Impossible" franchise replaced the Russian and Chinese heavies that populated the TV series with, in Mission Impossible 2, a WASPish-looking financier who controlled a pharmaceutical company that unleashed a horrific virus on the world in the hopes of cashing in on the antidote. Here, as in other movies in this genre, businessmen's killings are not just figurative. Unlike other stereotype-challenged groups, CEOs and financiers, lacking a connection with the studios' outreach programs, have become an essential part of Hollywood's new version of the axis of evil.
Yank of a singular stripe
By Mike Lupica
It started with Bernie Williams as much as any of them, back in Joe Torre's first October, in 1996. Williams had finished off the Rangers in the first round of the playoffs, hitting home runs from both sides of the plate in the game that put the Yankees into the American League Championship Series. All he did then, against the Orioles, was hit that 11th-inning shot off Randy Myers in Game 1, tie Game 3 with an eighth-inning hit off Mike Mussina, hit a two-run shot in the first inning of Game 4.
In the series that put the Yankees back in the World Series, Bernie Williams hit .474 and was named MVP and was the best of all of them. But then he has been one of them for a long time, as much a Yankee as they have ever had.
When the Yankees last won the World Series, against the Mets in October of 2000, maybe it was fitting that the last out ended up in Williams' glove. Mike Piazza hit it and Bernie tracked it down, way out there in left center at Shea. We didn't know at the time that Williams and the Yankees would go the next five years without winning it all. Nobody would have believed such a thing possible at the time.
Nothing lasts forever. Joe DiMaggio limped away from center field at the Stadium at the age of 36, a year younger than Bernie is right now. Mickey Mantle limped away. If Williams leaves the Yankees today, he will leave in better shape than either one of them, even if he isn't close to what he used to be. It doesn't change that when you talk about all the center fielders in the history of the New York Yankees, there is DiMaggio, there is Mantle, there is Williams. It is not such a terrible way to run third.
He has played 1,945 regular-season games for the Yankees. He has played 115 more in the postseason, during which he came to the plate 443 times and had 22 home runs and 79RBI and hit .280. Once he finally made it to October with the Yankees, in 1995, that unforgettable first-round series against the Mariners, he ended up having the equivalent of a whole season of Octobers. And in those games, he was one of the truly great Yankees, the one who came from some of the worst teams in Yankee history to play center field on Yankee teams that won four World Series in five years and once again made the Yankees the proudest name in sports.
"There is such a thing as Yankee character, and it's real," Reggie Jackson said yesterday. "If you want to trace it all the way back, you'd have to say it starts with Lou Gehrig. Character plus class. Bernie's been that kind of class, and he's been that kind of Yankee.
"There are special Yankees, and special people. Bernie's been both. He would have fit in on any great Yankee team of any era, and he would have delivered the way he always did with the money on the table. And the whole time, he never made it about him. What was good for him was good for the Yankees."
Finally Jackson said, "One of those quiet, special guys. They tell me Bobby Richardson was like that. Catfish Hunter was always like that. Bernie's been like that. It's why in my heart, I hope he's not going anywhere."
Maybe midnight tonight is a deadline for the Yankees and Williams, maybe not. If the Yanks don't offer Williams arbitration, he can't re-sign with them, even if he wants to, until May 1. Sometimes there is a wink and a nod between a team and a player, an arrangement where arbitration is offered and rejected, and the deadline is extended for another month.
Suddenly, after a Yankee career that goes back to 1991, after 2,000 games in the uniform, it has come to that for Bernie Williams.
He will come back in some form of the role Ruben Sierra has filled the last couple of years, a switch-hitter off the bench, a part-time outfielder. Or Williams will leave the Yankees for good, after the kind of good long run only a handful of great Yankees have ever had. Reggie was here for five seasons. A-Rod would have to play here until he is 40 to play as many games for the Yankees as Bernie Williams has. If Williams doesn't put on the uniform again until his first Old Timers' Day, he has played 200 more games as a Yankee than Don Mattingly did.
Williams and Jeter were a center fielder and shortstop teaming up for a decade of big October games the way DiMaggio and Scooter Rizzuto did. The only difference between them is that Jeter never lost here the way Bernie Williams did at the beginning of his career. It is one of the reasons why Yankee fans, and that means ones who didn't decide to start rooting for the Yankees in 1996, have always cheered Bernie the way they have. It was as if they all got up together.
It is why they cheered him at the Stadium the way they did this season, at the last regular-season home game, cheered him because the Yankees still weren't a lock to make the playoffs then, cheered him every chance they got thinking it might be his last game as a Yankee.
He almost left once for the Red Sox. Now he might leave for good. If he does, it means that only Jeter and Mo Rivera and Jorge Posada are left from the glory years. Those years really started in October of 1996, when the Yankees became the Yankees again and the center fielder, the best since Mantle, had 20 hits that month and was the best of all of them.
By Mike Lupica
It started with Bernie Williams as much as any of them, back in Joe Torre's first October, in 1996. Williams had finished off the Rangers in the first round of the playoffs, hitting home runs from both sides of the plate in the game that put the Yankees into the American League Championship Series. All he did then, against the Orioles, was hit that 11th-inning shot off Randy Myers in Game 1, tie Game 3 with an eighth-inning hit off Mike Mussina, hit a two-run shot in the first inning of Game 4.
In the series that put the Yankees back in the World Series, Bernie Williams hit .474 and was named MVP and was the best of all of them. But then he has been one of them for a long time, as much a Yankee as they have ever had.
When the Yankees last won the World Series, against the Mets in October of 2000, maybe it was fitting that the last out ended up in Williams' glove. Mike Piazza hit it and Bernie tracked it down, way out there in left center at Shea. We didn't know at the time that Williams and the Yankees would go the next five years without winning it all. Nobody would have believed such a thing possible at the time.
Nothing lasts forever. Joe DiMaggio limped away from center field at the Stadium at the age of 36, a year younger than Bernie is right now. Mickey Mantle limped away. If Williams leaves the Yankees today, he will leave in better shape than either one of them, even if he isn't close to what he used to be. It doesn't change that when you talk about all the center fielders in the history of the New York Yankees, there is DiMaggio, there is Mantle, there is Williams. It is not such a terrible way to run third.
He has played 1,945 regular-season games for the Yankees. He has played 115 more in the postseason, during which he came to the plate 443 times and had 22 home runs and 79RBI and hit .280. Once he finally made it to October with the Yankees, in 1995, that unforgettable first-round series against the Mariners, he ended up having the equivalent of a whole season of Octobers. And in those games, he was one of the truly great Yankees, the one who came from some of the worst teams in Yankee history to play center field on Yankee teams that won four World Series in five years and once again made the Yankees the proudest name in sports.
"There is such a thing as Yankee character, and it's real," Reggie Jackson said yesterday. "If you want to trace it all the way back, you'd have to say it starts with Lou Gehrig. Character plus class. Bernie's been that kind of class, and he's been that kind of Yankee.
"There are special Yankees, and special people. Bernie's been both. He would have fit in on any great Yankee team of any era, and he would have delivered the way he always did with the money on the table. And the whole time, he never made it about him. What was good for him was good for the Yankees."
Finally Jackson said, "One of those quiet, special guys. They tell me Bobby Richardson was like that. Catfish Hunter was always like that. Bernie's been like that. It's why in my heart, I hope he's not going anywhere."
Maybe midnight tonight is a deadline for the Yankees and Williams, maybe not. If the Yanks don't offer Williams arbitration, he can't re-sign with them, even if he wants to, until May 1. Sometimes there is a wink and a nod between a team and a player, an arrangement where arbitration is offered and rejected, and the deadline is extended for another month.
Suddenly, after a Yankee career that goes back to 1991, after 2,000 games in the uniform, it has come to that for Bernie Williams.
He will come back in some form of the role Ruben Sierra has filled the last couple of years, a switch-hitter off the bench, a part-time outfielder. Or Williams will leave the Yankees for good, after the kind of good long run only a handful of great Yankees have ever had. Reggie was here for five seasons. A-Rod would have to play here until he is 40 to play as many games for the Yankees as Bernie Williams has. If Williams doesn't put on the uniform again until his first Old Timers' Day, he has played 200 more games as a Yankee than Don Mattingly did.
Williams and Jeter were a center fielder and shortstop teaming up for a decade of big October games the way DiMaggio and Scooter Rizzuto did. The only difference between them is that Jeter never lost here the way Bernie Williams did at the beginning of his career. It is one of the reasons why Yankee fans, and that means ones who didn't decide to start rooting for the Yankees in 1996, have always cheered Bernie the way they have. It was as if they all got up together.
It is why they cheered him at the Stadium the way they did this season, at the last regular-season home game, cheered him because the Yankees still weren't a lock to make the playoffs then, cheered him every chance they got thinking it might be his last game as a Yankee.
He almost left once for the Red Sox. Now he might leave for good. If he does, it means that only Jeter and Mo Rivera and Jorge Posada are left from the glory years. Those years really started in October of 1996, when the Yankees became the Yankees again and the center fielder, the best since Mantle, had 20 hits that month and was the best of all of them.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
The Christmas classic that almost wasn't
By Bill Nichols, USA TODAY
When CBS bigwigs saw a rough cut of A Charlie Brown Christmas in November 1965, they hated it.
"They said it was slow," executive producer Lee Mendelson remembers with a laugh. There were concerns that the show was almost defiantly different: There was no laugh track, real children provided the voices, and there was a swinging score by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi.
Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez fretted about the insistence by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz that his first-ever TV spinoff end with a reading of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke by a lisping little boy named Linus.
"We told Schulz, 'Look, you can't read from the Bible on network television,' " Mendelson says. "When we finished the show and watched it, Melendez and I looked at each other and I said, 'We've ruined Charlie Brown.' "
Good grief, were they wrong. The first broadcast was watched by almost 50% of the nation's viewers. "When I started reading the reviews, I was absolutely shocked," says Melendez, 89. "They actually liked it!"
And when the program airs today at 8 p.m. ET on ABC, it will mark its 40th anniversary — a run that has made it a staple of family holiday traditions and an icon of American pop culture. The show won an Emmy and a Peabody award and began a string of more than two dozen Peanuts specials.
Last year, 13.6 million people watched it, making it the 18th-most-popular show on television the week it aired; CSI was first. One advertiser on the show, financial services giant MetLife, has contracted to use Peanuts characters in its advertising since 1985 and will continue through at least 2012.
Schulz, who died in 2000, never doubted the power of his tale of Charlie Brown's quest for the true meaning of Christmas amid the garish trappings of a commercialized holiday. "It comes across in the voice of a child," says Jeannie Schulz, the wife of the cartoonist, whose friends called him Sparky. "Sparky used to say there will always be a market for innocence."
Peter Robbins, now 49, was the voice of Charlie Brown. "This show poses a question that I don't think had been asked before on television: Does anybody know the meaning of Christmas?"
Parents like Molly Kremidas, 39, who grew up adoring A Charlie Brown Christmas, watch it with their kids. "It's the values in the story," says Kremidas, of Winston-Salem, N.C. She'll watch tonight with daughter Sofia, 6. "Would there be any programs for children on today that could get away with talking about the real meaning of Christmas? I don't think so."
Erin Kane, 36, is eager for her 3-year-old son Tommy to watch the program for the first time tonight in their Boston home. "The Christmas season doesn't start," Kane says, "until Charlie Brown is on."
Hip but wholesome
On paper, the show's bare-bones script would seem to offer few clues to its enduring popularity. Mendelson says the show was written in several weeks, after Coca-Cola called him just six months before the program aired to ask if Schulz could come up with a Peanuts Christmas special.
Charlie Brown, depressed as always, can't seem to get into the Christmas spirit. His friend and nemesis Lucy suggests that he direct the gang's Christmas play. But the Peanuts crew is focused on how many presents they're going to get, not on putting on a show.
"Just send money. How about tens and twenties?" says Charlie's sister Sally as she dictates a letter to Santa Claus.
Charlie goes to find a Christmas tree to set the mood. He returns with a scrawny specimen that prompts his cohorts to mock him as a blockhead. In desperation, Charlie asks if anyone can explain to him what Christmas is all about.
"Sure, I can," says his friend Linus, who proceeds to recite the story of the birth of Jesus from the book of Luke in the King James Version of the Bible. "And suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, 'Glory to God in the Highest, and on Earth peace, and goodwill toward men,' " Linus says. "And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."
Scholars of pop culture say that shining through the program's skeletal plot is the quirky and sophisticated genius that fueled the phenomenal popularity of Schulz's work, still carried by 2,400 newspapers worldwide even though it's repeating old comic strips.
The Christmas special epitomizes the nostalgic appeal of holiday television classics for baby boomers raised as that medium gained prominence, says Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University.
Thompson notes that other Christmas specials made during the same era — such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty The Snowman - also air each year to strong ratings.
"This is the only time in the year when TV programs from the LBJ years play on network television and do very, very well," he says. "For millions of baby boomers, these things became as much a holiday tradition as hanging a stocking or putting up a tree."
What makes A Charlie Brown Christmas the "gold standard" in Thompson's view is that it somehow manages to convey an old-fashioned, overtly religious holiday theme that's coupled with Schulz's trademark sardonic, even hip, sense of humor.
While Schulz centers the piece on verses from the Bible, laced throughout are biting references to the modern materialism of the Christmas season. Lucy complains to Charlie that she never gets wants she really wants. "What is it you want?" Charlie asks. "Real estate," she answers.
"A key element in all of Schulz's work is his sense of man's place in the scheme of things in a theological sense as well as a psychological sense," says Thomas Inge, an English and humanities professor at Randolph-Macon College who edited a series of interviews with Schulz released in 2000. "Then there's this slightly cynical attitude that makes everything work."
Parents say the combination of humor and bedrock values is what draws them and their children to the show. "It does provide a balance, but it's a balance that we as a society have forgotten about," says Patrick Lemp, 43, of West Hartford, Conn. He'll watch tonight with son Brendan, 13.
"This is one of the last shows that actually comes out and talks about the meaning of Christmas. As a society, we're taking religion out of a lot of the trappings of the holiday. This one is different."
A cultural footprint
Much about A Charlie Brown Christmas was revolutionary for network TV, even beyond its religious themes.
The voices of children had not been used before in animation, a technique Mendelson, Melendez and Schulz all wanted to try.
"Lee didn't want to use Hollywood kids. He wanted the sound of kids who didn't have training," says Sally Dryer, 48, who did the voice of Violet — the little girl who mocks Charlie Brown for not getting any Christmas cards. In later specials, she was Lucy's voice.
Mendelson sent tape recorders home with all his employees in Burlingame, Calif. Dryer, then 8, was chosen because her sister worked for the Mendelson crew. Robbins and Christopher Shea, the voice of Linus, were the only children with professional acting experience in the cast.
The show was also novel in that it used no laugh track, an omnipresent device in animated and live-action comedies of the era. Schulz strongly believed that his audience could figure out when to laugh.
Perhaps the most enduring aspect of the show has been its score — a piano-driven jazz suite that was absolutely unheard-of for children's programming in 1965.
Guaraldi, the composer and pianist, was best known for a 1962 hit called Cast Your Fate To the Wind. Mendelson liked it so much that he hired Guaraldi to score a documentary about Schulz that never aired. When the Christmas program was sold, parts of that music were incorporated.
The driving tune that the Peanuts children keep dancing to in the special, called Linus and Lucy, has become a pop staple that's been recorded countless time in the intervening decades.
A new version of the soundtrack was released last month for the 40th anniversary. It features Vanessa Williams, Christian McBride, David Benoit and others.
The song that opens the program, Christmas Time is Here, was written only for piano by Guaraldi, but Mendelson decided to add words to appease other network concerns. When he found his songwriter friends in California were all tied up, Mendelson wrote the words himself on the back of an envelope.
"So now it's a standard," says Mendelson, now 72. "Who knew? I tell people that I'm old and I'm lucky."
Jazz pianist George Winston, recorded a 1996 tribute album to Guaraldi, who died in 1976. He says that when he plays Guaraldi tunes at concerts, young children come up later and say, "Hey, that's the Peanuts music!"
Says Winston: "Vince made a stamp on our popular culture that will never go away. For an artist, that's the ultimate tribute."
A sweet memory
The Christmas special has become a key part of the Peanuts marketing empire, which racks up $1.2 billion in annual retail sales, $350 million of which come in the USA. Millions of VCR tapes and DVDs of the program are in circulation worldwide.
The 40th anniversary has spawned a long list of spinoff products, including a "Charlie Brown Christmas Tree" at Urban Outfitters and a paperback version of a book Mendelson wrote, The Making of a Tradition: A Charlie Brown Christmas. And the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Calif., where Schulz lived, plans a special commemoration on Dec. 17 with Mendelson and several cast members. The museum also has an exhibit on the Christmas show that runs through Jan. 9.
"It's a tradition, along with White Christmas, A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life," says Marion Hull, 77, who toured the exhibit on Friday. "It's simple, it tells a simple story, and it's something that both adults and children can get something out of."
For those who worked to make the program — as well as fans who watch it — its material success seems ancillary. The word that keeps coming up is "sweet."
Robbins, who is single, has no children and manages an apartment building in Encino, Calif., loves that kids of friends squeal with delight each Christmas that "Uncle Pete used to be Charlie Brown."
Jeannie Schulz, who was the artist's second wife when they married in 1973, says their five children, 25 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren see the show as a holiday tradition as well.
"The reason it's endured is because of its simplicity and its very basic honesty to real life," she says. "Who would have thought this would last 40 years? How did that happen?"
For many viewers, it is the speech by Linus from Luke near the end that packs the biggest emotional wallop.
Christopher Shea was just 7 when he did the part and credits Melendez's coaching and his mom's doctorate in 17th-century British literature for Linus' lilting eloquence with a Biblical text.
Shea, who now lives in Eureka, Calif., with two daughters, 11 and 16, answers quickly when asked why the special has proved so enduring. "It's the words," he says.
Shea says that for years, in his teens and 20s, he didn't quite understand his soliloquy's impact.
"People kept coming up to me and saying, 'Every time I watch that, I cry,' " he says. "But as I got older, I understood the words more, and I understood the power of what was going on. Now I cry, too."
Contributing: Editor's note: USA TODAY reporter Bill Nichols first watched A Charlie Brown Christmas on Dec. 9, 1965. He was 7. This Thanksgiving, he watched a tape of it with his son, Charlie, 3, for the first time.
By Bill Nichols, USA TODAY
When CBS bigwigs saw a rough cut of A Charlie Brown Christmas in November 1965, they hated it.
"They said it was slow," executive producer Lee Mendelson remembers with a laugh. There were concerns that the show was almost defiantly different: There was no laugh track, real children provided the voices, and there was a swinging score by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi.
Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez fretted about the insistence by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz that his first-ever TV spinoff end with a reading of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke by a lisping little boy named Linus.
"We told Schulz, 'Look, you can't read from the Bible on network television,' " Mendelson says. "When we finished the show and watched it, Melendez and I looked at each other and I said, 'We've ruined Charlie Brown.' "
Good grief, were they wrong. The first broadcast was watched by almost 50% of the nation's viewers. "When I started reading the reviews, I was absolutely shocked," says Melendez, 89. "They actually liked it!"
And when the program airs today at 8 p.m. ET on ABC, it will mark its 40th anniversary — a run that has made it a staple of family holiday traditions and an icon of American pop culture. The show won an Emmy and a Peabody award and began a string of more than two dozen Peanuts specials.
Last year, 13.6 million people watched it, making it the 18th-most-popular show on television the week it aired; CSI was first. One advertiser on the show, financial services giant MetLife, has contracted to use Peanuts characters in its advertising since 1985 and will continue through at least 2012.
Schulz, who died in 2000, never doubted the power of his tale of Charlie Brown's quest for the true meaning of Christmas amid the garish trappings of a commercialized holiday. "It comes across in the voice of a child," says Jeannie Schulz, the wife of the cartoonist, whose friends called him Sparky. "Sparky used to say there will always be a market for innocence."
Peter Robbins, now 49, was the voice of Charlie Brown. "This show poses a question that I don't think had been asked before on television: Does anybody know the meaning of Christmas?"
Parents like Molly Kremidas, 39, who grew up adoring A Charlie Brown Christmas, watch it with their kids. "It's the values in the story," says Kremidas, of Winston-Salem, N.C. She'll watch tonight with daughter Sofia, 6. "Would there be any programs for children on today that could get away with talking about the real meaning of Christmas? I don't think so."
Erin Kane, 36, is eager for her 3-year-old son Tommy to watch the program for the first time tonight in their Boston home. "The Christmas season doesn't start," Kane says, "until Charlie Brown is on."
Hip but wholesome
On paper, the show's bare-bones script would seem to offer few clues to its enduring popularity. Mendelson says the show was written in several weeks, after Coca-Cola called him just six months before the program aired to ask if Schulz could come up with a Peanuts Christmas special.
Charlie Brown, depressed as always, can't seem to get into the Christmas spirit. His friend and nemesis Lucy suggests that he direct the gang's Christmas play. But the Peanuts crew is focused on how many presents they're going to get, not on putting on a show.
"Just send money. How about tens and twenties?" says Charlie's sister Sally as she dictates a letter to Santa Claus.
Charlie goes to find a Christmas tree to set the mood. He returns with a scrawny specimen that prompts his cohorts to mock him as a blockhead. In desperation, Charlie asks if anyone can explain to him what Christmas is all about.
"Sure, I can," says his friend Linus, who proceeds to recite the story of the birth of Jesus from the book of Luke in the King James Version of the Bible. "And suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, 'Glory to God in the Highest, and on Earth peace, and goodwill toward men,' " Linus says. "And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."
Scholars of pop culture say that shining through the program's skeletal plot is the quirky and sophisticated genius that fueled the phenomenal popularity of Schulz's work, still carried by 2,400 newspapers worldwide even though it's repeating old comic strips.
The Christmas special epitomizes the nostalgic appeal of holiday television classics for baby boomers raised as that medium gained prominence, says Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University.
Thompson notes that other Christmas specials made during the same era — such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty The Snowman - also air each year to strong ratings.
"This is the only time in the year when TV programs from the LBJ years play on network television and do very, very well," he says. "For millions of baby boomers, these things became as much a holiday tradition as hanging a stocking or putting up a tree."
What makes A Charlie Brown Christmas the "gold standard" in Thompson's view is that it somehow manages to convey an old-fashioned, overtly religious holiday theme that's coupled with Schulz's trademark sardonic, even hip, sense of humor.
While Schulz centers the piece on verses from the Bible, laced throughout are biting references to the modern materialism of the Christmas season. Lucy complains to Charlie that she never gets wants she really wants. "What is it you want?" Charlie asks. "Real estate," she answers.
"A key element in all of Schulz's work is his sense of man's place in the scheme of things in a theological sense as well as a psychological sense," says Thomas Inge, an English and humanities professor at Randolph-Macon College who edited a series of interviews with Schulz released in 2000. "Then there's this slightly cynical attitude that makes everything work."
Parents say the combination of humor and bedrock values is what draws them and their children to the show. "It does provide a balance, but it's a balance that we as a society have forgotten about," says Patrick Lemp, 43, of West Hartford, Conn. He'll watch tonight with son Brendan, 13.
"This is one of the last shows that actually comes out and talks about the meaning of Christmas. As a society, we're taking religion out of a lot of the trappings of the holiday. This one is different."
A cultural footprint
Much about A Charlie Brown Christmas was revolutionary for network TV, even beyond its religious themes.
The voices of children had not been used before in animation, a technique Mendelson, Melendez and Schulz all wanted to try.
"Lee didn't want to use Hollywood kids. He wanted the sound of kids who didn't have training," says Sally Dryer, 48, who did the voice of Violet — the little girl who mocks Charlie Brown for not getting any Christmas cards. In later specials, she was Lucy's voice.
Mendelson sent tape recorders home with all his employees in Burlingame, Calif. Dryer, then 8, was chosen because her sister worked for the Mendelson crew. Robbins and Christopher Shea, the voice of Linus, were the only children with professional acting experience in the cast.
The show was also novel in that it used no laugh track, an omnipresent device in animated and live-action comedies of the era. Schulz strongly believed that his audience could figure out when to laugh.
Perhaps the most enduring aspect of the show has been its score — a piano-driven jazz suite that was absolutely unheard-of for children's programming in 1965.
Guaraldi, the composer and pianist, was best known for a 1962 hit called Cast Your Fate To the Wind. Mendelson liked it so much that he hired Guaraldi to score a documentary about Schulz that never aired. When the Christmas program was sold, parts of that music were incorporated.
The driving tune that the Peanuts children keep dancing to in the special, called Linus and Lucy, has become a pop staple that's been recorded countless time in the intervening decades.
A new version of the soundtrack was released last month for the 40th anniversary. It features Vanessa Williams, Christian McBride, David Benoit and others.
The song that opens the program, Christmas Time is Here, was written only for piano by Guaraldi, but Mendelson decided to add words to appease other network concerns. When he found his songwriter friends in California were all tied up, Mendelson wrote the words himself on the back of an envelope.
"So now it's a standard," says Mendelson, now 72. "Who knew? I tell people that I'm old and I'm lucky."
Jazz pianist George Winston, recorded a 1996 tribute album to Guaraldi, who died in 1976. He says that when he plays Guaraldi tunes at concerts, young children come up later and say, "Hey, that's the Peanuts music!"
Says Winston: "Vince made a stamp on our popular culture that will never go away. For an artist, that's the ultimate tribute."
A sweet memory
The Christmas special has become a key part of the Peanuts marketing empire, which racks up $1.2 billion in annual retail sales, $350 million of which come in the USA. Millions of VCR tapes and DVDs of the program are in circulation worldwide.
The 40th anniversary has spawned a long list of spinoff products, including a "Charlie Brown Christmas Tree" at Urban Outfitters and a paperback version of a book Mendelson wrote, The Making of a Tradition: A Charlie Brown Christmas. And the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Calif., where Schulz lived, plans a special commemoration on Dec. 17 with Mendelson and several cast members. The museum also has an exhibit on the Christmas show that runs through Jan. 9.
"It's a tradition, along with White Christmas, A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life," says Marion Hull, 77, who toured the exhibit on Friday. "It's simple, it tells a simple story, and it's something that both adults and children can get something out of."
For those who worked to make the program — as well as fans who watch it — its material success seems ancillary. The word that keeps coming up is "sweet."
Robbins, who is single, has no children and manages an apartment building in Encino, Calif., loves that kids of friends squeal with delight each Christmas that "Uncle Pete used to be Charlie Brown."
Jeannie Schulz, who was the artist's second wife when they married in 1973, says their five children, 25 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren see the show as a holiday tradition as well.
"The reason it's endured is because of its simplicity and its very basic honesty to real life," she says. "Who would have thought this would last 40 years? How did that happen?"
For many viewers, it is the speech by Linus from Luke near the end that packs the biggest emotional wallop.
Christopher Shea was just 7 when he did the part and credits Melendez's coaching and his mom's doctorate in 17th-century British literature for Linus' lilting eloquence with a Biblical text.
Shea, who now lives in Eureka, Calif., with two daughters, 11 and 16, answers quickly when asked why the special has proved so enduring. "It's the words," he says.
Shea says that for years, in his teens and 20s, he didn't quite understand his soliloquy's impact.
"People kept coming up to me and saying, 'Every time I watch that, I cry,' " he says. "But as I got older, I understood the words more, and I understood the power of what was going on. Now I cry, too."
Contributing: Editor's note: USA TODAY reporter Bill Nichols first watched A Charlie Brown Christmas on Dec. 9, 1965. He was 7. This Thanksgiving, he watched a tape of it with his son, Charlie, 3, for the first time.
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