On Friendly Street, 40 years of ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’

In the middle of the night, thieves descended upon the home on Friendly Street. 

It was 1995. Sarah Glover was 17 years old, and her brother Neil was 7. He woke her up past midnight, small pocketknife in hand. 

There was no time to waste: Someone was trying to steal Charlie Brown. 

Sarah, now 47 and a Herbold by marriage, remembers opening the front door to catch the would-be thieves in the act. They dropped Charlie, Snoopy and his friends, jumped in their car and drove off. 

It’s just one time that someone coveted the Glover family cut-out figures of Charlie Brown and his friends, which have stood in the lawn of 2150 Friendly St. between Black Friday and New Year’s Day for the last 40 years. 

What started as a way for a dad to cheer up his 7-year-old daughter adjusting to a new school and house turned into an annual tradition, both for the Glovers and for Eugene. Herbold and her father Marv Glover, now 78, have put the figures on the lawn by Black Friday each year since 1985. 

“We’ve never had to replace them due to theft, although they’ve taken a lot of adventures,” Herbold said.

How 2150 Friendly St. became ‘the Charlie Brown house’

Glover had made custom cut-outs for the holidays before the “Peanuts” crew, inspired by a plywood snowman he saw in Eugene in the mid-1970s while driving along West 11th Street. Pathetic, he thought. He, an architect by trade, could do better.

So he did, first with Santa Claus, then a pair of mitten-wearing carollers that were immediately stolen. After that, he added two toy soldiers. “For protection,” he said.

By the time 1985 rolled around, Herbold was a 7-year-old second-grader in a new neighborhood school and new house, which didn’t yet feel like home. So Glover asked his daughter, a big fan of “Peanuts,” what decorations she might want him to make out of plywood. 

They went to the Eugene Public Library and checked out a book with illustrations of Charlie Brown and his friends at Christmas time. Glover took pictures of the characters and made slides of them. Herbold remembers his tracing set up in a hallway, with a Kodak Carousel projector at one end of the hall and a piece of plywood at the other. They spent the next two weeks in the basement cutting out the figures and mixing the paint colors for precise matches to the “Peanuts” crew’s outfits.

For the first few years, Glover had a vision for the entire tableau to look like a two-dimensional drawing. He and Herbold wrapped pine branches around narrow pieces of wood lath to make the iconic wimpy-looking tree from the “A Charlie Brown Christmas” television special. When Neil Glover was born in 1988 and the Glovers’ hands were full, they switched to a real tree.

Other than that, the display has remained largely the same — with the exception of the year they were joined by another crew. Requested by Neil Glover when he was in middle school, characters from the television show “South Park” joined the carollers, though Glover ultimately decided they didn’t quite fit the yard. They now live in the Glovers’ carport. (However, Neil Glover, now a senior engineering program manager at Apple who works on the iPhone, and his father still watch “South Park” when Glover visits him in California.) 

“South Park” addition or no, the “Peanuts” carollers on Friendly Street have become a staple of holiday displays in Eugene, even as flashier light displays command attention. Pictures are common. 

“We can be sitting here talking, and flashes of light come from the flash cameras,” said Susie Glover, Marv’s wife and Sarah’s mother, while sitting in the living room.

So is fan mail, at times addressed to the “Charlie Brown House.”

Glover, who spends a lot of time tending to his yard, said that every November, people start driving by and asking him: Is it time for Charlie Brown? Eugene expatriates are invested, too. 

“Somebody was out there the other day, and they said, ‘my daughter lives in Australia, but she asked me if the Charlie Browns were up yet,” Glover recalled. “Because she wanted to know if it was Christmas in Eugene.”

Charlie Brown Christmas capers 

The big heist came in 1988. 

Herbold, then 10 years old, walked out of the house one morning to find Linus alone, face-down in the yard. His friends were gone. 

Herbold was heartbroken. (It was also the first holiday season that she had a baby brother, which she said also factored into her declaration at the time that it was “the worst Christmas ever.”)

Glover didn’t call the police, but he did call the Register-Guard to appeal for their return. The front-page story on Dec. 20, 1988, complete with a picture of a pouting Herbold next to Linus and a sign requesting the characters’ return, publicized their plight. 

News of the heist reached Charles M. Schulz, the cartoonist behind the “Peanuts” series. He sent Herbold a copy of his book “Peanuts Jubilee” with a special note on the title page: “For Sarah — Just a little something to help make up for the loss of the Peanuts cutouts from your yard.” 

Someone told Glover that it had been a student at North Eugene High School, so Glover started spreading the word. Soon, after what he thinks was intervention by a North Eugene mom, the cutouts were unceremoniously dumped on the front lawn.

Other thefts and attempts such as the interrupted 1995 kidnapping, followed here and there, but they always returned. Glover has improved security over the years, and the figures are secured with stakes in the ground, repurposed pieces of an electric fence as a backing pole from the stake and up behind the standee, and a cable looped through small metal rings on the back of each cutout. 

But while 2025 marks four decades of Charlie, Snoopy, Woodstock and the gang carolling around the tree, the plywood cutouts on the Glovers’ lawn are not the original set made back in 1985. 

Those are secured to the rafters of the Glovers’ garage, run over and scuffed up after a haphazard return by one thief — not whoever was behind the ‘88 caper — who scattered them from Friendly Street to Jefferson Street.

Maybe the thief had been convinced by the message written on the back of Schroeder’s head: “Made for Sarah, age 7 in 1985. Please take me home! 2150 Friendly, Eugene, OR.”

Forty years, and a new generation, of Charlie Brown

Herbold hasn’t lived in Eugene since she was 22 years and graduated from the University of Oregon. But she’s made a point every year to come back home and help her dad set up the “Peanuts” cutouts, including for years when she lived in Santa Barbara, California. Now that she’s in Portland, the drive is a bit easier.

Her two children, 12-year-old Max and 9-year-old Zuzu (a nickname for Susan), aren’t invested in setting up the display yet. But Herbold has been taking pictures of Max in front of Charlie Brown every year; Zuzu noticed, and started asking for pictures next to Sally to match. 

Herbold said now that she has kids of her own, she has a new appreciation for Glover’s work: on the “Peanuts” figures, on the playhouse he built for her, and on the things he builds with Max now when her family comes back to Eugene. 

“Knowing how busy life is as an adult and how many other priorities you have, it’s unbelievable that my dad made so much time to do just these magical, fun things,” she said. “I feel really lucky to have grown up with a dad that not only likes making things, but likes making things for kids and just for fun.”