Donna Wold, Who Inspired Charlie Brown’s Little Red-Haired Girl, Has Died

Donna Wold could never have known when she broke up with her boyfriend 65 years ago that her doing so would leave a mark on popular culture that would be remembered long after her passing.

But it was Wold, who passed away on August 9, who accepted a marriage proposal from firefighter Allan Wold, breaking off her two-year relationship with cartoonist Charles Schulz just before Schulz’s masterpiece, the comic strip Peanuts, started syndication.

Even though it was more than a decade later that Schulz introduced the anonymous, red-haired object of Charlie Brown’s affection, Wold would live with the character for more than fifty years — and during half of that, others would know her role, too — before he passing, The Washington Post reports. She acknowledged her role in inspiring the Peanuts character in 1989. Wold met Schulz and became part of American popular culture while working at Art Instruction Schools in Minneapolis.

“Oh, we dated for about two years,” Wold said of “Sparky” Schulz, who also proposed to her, but she chose Allan. “I loved him. I guess I chose Al because I knew all Al’s friends, who became my friends. I didn’t really know Sparky’s friends.”

Some purists bristled at the decision to give the Little Red-Haired Girl, who was voiced by actress Francesca Capaldi, more personality and less sense of mystique in last year’s The Peanuts Movie. Schulz’s widow Jean told the Post that “We can’t [really] know her. … There’s this mystique and this fantasy.”

Donna Mae Johnson Wold died of heart failure and complications from diabetes, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported this weekend. She is survived by her husband, four children (some named after Peanuts characters, so clearly Wold was a good sport), and was a foster mother to at least forty more.

“It was a fun story,” said daughter Sally Wold. “We’re all lucky we got to be part of it.”