Donna Johnson Wold’s hair, which was once, in her own words, “violently red,” has long since faded to the white you’d expect of an 86-year-old grandmother.

Having lived her whole life in Minneapolis, Wold now resides in a nursing home, where she has recently been undergoing physical therapy. Every day, her husband, Al, drives five miles to visit her so the two of them can sit in the sunshine together and reminisce.

One of Mrs. Wold’s fondest memories happens to be of a relationship she had with another man more than half a century ago. She still has a few reminders of him and that time: a scrawled-upon 1950 desk diary, a music box, and a large collection of decades’ worth of Peanuts comic strips, cut out from the pages of The Minneapolis Star Tribune, many of which revolve around a pretty redhead.

The strips have a special significance for Mrs. Wold. Around the peak of its popularity, Peanuts was published in 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries in 21 languages with a readership of 355 million. And yet, every now and then, it was a secret romantic correspondence, imbued with a hidden meaning only truly understood by its creator and one other person.

“It was the story of his life and mine,” Mrs. Wold says.

In the Peanuts Sunday strip that ran on November 19, 1961, Charlie Brown sits down to lunch, as usual, accompanied only by his abundant anxieties. He watches longingly as the other children enjoy themselves, laments his aloneness and unpopularity, and despairs over the lunch that he finds packed for him: a peanut-butter sandwich and a banana.

And, for the first time, he glimpses someone new in the schoolyard. “I’d give anything in the world if that little girl with the red hair would come over, and sit with me,” he says, to no one in particular.

For the remainder of the 17,897 Peanuts strips that Charles M. Schulz drew between 1950 and 1999, Charlie Brown pined for the little girl with the red hair. Like the yanked-away football and the kite-eating tree, the unattainable Little Red-Haired Girl, who shows little sign of knowing Charlie Brown exists, became a recurring motif of the character’s misery. The first definitive Schulz biography linked the character to Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved and the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets; Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson pointed to the importance of the “perpetual theme of unrequited love” in the strip (along with its “bleak undercurrent of cruelty, loneliness and failure”). In “Sartre and Peanuts,” one philosophical essayist suggested that Charlie Brown’s predicament was the essence of existentialism: “The very possibility that he could go over and talk to her is far more distressing than its impossibility would be.”

Even more profoundly, the Little Red-Haired Girl is never seen. Like Godot, she is permanently offstage in the absurd drama of Peanuts, forever lingering on the sidelines of Charlie Brown’s long, dark lunchtime of the soul. We don’t lay our eyes on her, even as he can’t take his off her.

There was, sort of, one exception. On May 25, 1998, the Little Red-Haired Girl appears, in silhouette, dancing with a besuited Snoopy, the beagle naturally fantasizing himself into the role of a resplendent Jay Gatsby dancing with his Daisy. Charlie Brown looks on, having missed his chance yet again.

This November, the Little Red-Haired Girl will finally be coaxed out of the shadows. Along with the more instantly familiar faces from Schulz’s strip, she has been brought to C.G.I. life for The Peanuts Movie.

Indeed, she will play a crucial and catalyzing role in the plot. As the new kid in the neighborhood, she becomes the gestalt of all the other children’s hopes and dreams, especially those of Schulz’s immortal, blockheaded hero.

“What is fascinating in the way Schulz uses the Little Red-Haired Girl is that she’s a window into a different kind of emotion with Charlie Brown,” says director Steve Martino. Right up until his inevitable sighing resignation, Martino explains, Charlie Brown experiences the rare flutter of hope. “You can feel his heart race at a little bit of a faster pace, the feeling that, this time, I’m going to do it. Those strips offered a little different flavor.”

Putting the character on-screen in The Peanuts Movie was not a move taken lightly. “Oh my gosh,” says Martino. “We had many, many days of conversation about this. It’s not lost on us that Charles Schulz left her to our imagination.”

The character has, in fact, had on-screen roles in the past, including two of the classic Peanuts television specials concocted by animation director Bill Melendez, It’s Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown (1977) and Happy New Year, Charlie Brown (1986). The design of the character in those specials, however, suggests Melendez’s looser hand rather than that of Schulz, who had little involvement in the specials and didn’t regard them canon.

Instead, with the same painstaking care they lavished on the other aesthetic considerations of the project, the Peanuts Movie animators looked to the Little Red-Haired Girl’s single silhouetted appearance in Schulz’s 1998 strip. They reproduced the profile and proportions precisely, put her in a striking electric-cyan dress, and conjured up what Martino deems a “special” hue of red hair: a supermarket-tomato red that’s distinct from that of the other Peanuts redheads Peppermint Patty and Frieda.

The character is voiced by 11-year-old actress Francesca Capaldi—a redhead herself, though that is purely coincidence, Martino says. “I have to say that my casting approach for the film was purely about the quality of voice,” he says, laughing. “It was just happenstance and quite amazing that it worked out that way.”

Martino says he is “personally thankful” for the existence of that 1998 strip. He’s also curious about Schulz’s creative decision to finally realize her on the page, just the once.

“It would be fascinating to know the internal dialogue that he had,” Martino says. “That was probably a big day for him and an important one in the life of the strip.”

Without a doubt, Schulz’s thoughts while creating that strip would have lingered a while on a real little red-haired girl from his past.

In 1950, Charles Schulz—or “Sparky,” as friends knew him—worked as an instructor at Art Instruction, Inc. in Minneapolis, a school that offered young people classes in cartooning and illustration by correspondence.

It was a happy time for the 27-year-old cartoonist. As well as earning a generous $32 a week reviewing students’ drawings as a full-time instructor, he was close to realizing his long-held dream of having a daily comic strip; he’d already found some success with a weekly one-panel cartoon called Li’l Folks in his hometown paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The cartoon featured the low-key exploits of a few mostly nameless, round-headed children and a dog.

Every day, Schulz passed by the desk of Donna Mae Johnson, a popular 21-year-old in the accounting department. She had bright-red hair. When Donna arrived at work some mornings, she’d find that Sparky had doodled greetings or cartoons on her desk calendar.

Schulz coached the women on the work softball team, the Bureau Cats. By her own admission, Donna had no softball talent, but she joined the team just to see more of him. Sparky drove some of the team home after practice. He always dropped Donna off last.

He asked her out in February. For their first date, he took her to an ice-skating show—the skating rink was a passion his whole life—after which he gifted her a piano-shaped music box that played Émile Waldteufel’s “Les Patineurs” (“The Ice Skaters”). Donna, a fastidious diary keeper, wrote on the page for Thursday, March 2, using his initials:

“CS. Ice Capades. NICE!!”

Unbeknownst to their colleagues at Art Instruction—Charlie Brown, Linus Maurer, and Frieda Rich, to name a few—Sparky and Donna left work together and went on dates every Monday night. One regular dinner destination was the Oak Grille, on the 12th floor of Dayton’s department store—still there, in Macy’s in downtown Minneapolis, apparently looking and feeling as romantic as it did in 1950: dim lighting, dark paneling, large and luxuriant fireplace.

“When it came time for a tip,” Donna said in an interview with the Schulz Museum archivists recently, “he would write on the placemat, ‘Early to bed, early to rise,’ and that was his ‘tip.’”

Schulz had once suffered from crippling shyness around girls. One year, he lost the nerve to distribute Valentine’s Day cards to his classmates, instead bringing them back at the end of the day to present to his mother. According to Donna, though, the two of them talked freely and often, discussing music, art, their ambitions—hers being to work in a flower shop.

On Saturday, June 24, the pair enjoyed an especially memorable date. In an interview many years later, Schulz described it as “just one of those rare days that happens in life now and then.” The pair drove to picturesque Taylors Falls, swam in the clear waters of the St. Croix River, and made pancakes in a skillet over an open fire with batter Donna had secretly brought along in a jar. “I knew that his favorite thing to eat was pancakes at that time,” Donna says. “So my mother mixed up a pancake batter and put [it] in a fruit jar. We made pancakes over a fire. They turned out pretty good considering what we were working with.”

Back in St. Paul that evening, they saw My Foolish Heart at the Highland Theatre. As Donna recalled in the 2007 American Masters episode about Schulz, it was freezing in the theater, so Sparky put his arm around her.

“We sat in the back row and . . . I suppose in those days we called it, ‘necked,’” she said.

By the time Donna returned home that evening, her mother thought that they had eloped. Actually, the notion had crossed Donna’s mind too. “I asked him to elope with me once,” she says. “He said he couldn’t do that to my mother.”

Years later, Schulz said he came to regret that gentlemanliness and that hearing the music from My Foolish Heart—whose title tune contains the lyric, “For this time it isn’t fascination, or a dream that will fade and fall apart”—would break his own.

Donna had another suitor. For a couple of years, she’d been casually seeing Al Wold, who’d attended junior high school with her and had many friends in common. Even their hair color was the same. But the relationship wasn’t serious until Sparky’s intense interest in Donna forced Al to evaluate his own intentions.

For his part, Schulz had expressed his wish to marry Donna as early as their third date. “I wish I had a diamond ring in my pocket to give you now,” Donna remembers him saying. Her response always was, “I really don’t want to get married right now.”

For Donna, the competing amorous attentions of Sparky and Al presented a genuine dilemma. She loved them both. In May, she wrote in her diary: “How will you ever decide?”

In June, Schulz traveled to New York City, with some sample cartoons, for a meeting with the United Feature Syndicate. He wrote to Donna from there: “If the test of absence is the best test, I am more sure than ever. Last night I kept thinking of you all the time.”

Schulz returned to Minneapolis on the 11th in high spirits, having signed a five-year contract for the strip that would become Peanuts. At around half past 10 that evening, he went to Donna’s place to share the news and propose one last time. He didn’t require an answer straight away. Instead, he presented her with another gift—a statue of a curled-up white cat, which he told her to keep in her drawer at work until she had finally made up her mind to marry him, at which point she should place it on his desk when he wasn’t looking.

Al himself popped the question a couple of weeks later. Another couple of weeks after that, Donna told Sparky she had chosen Al.

Over the years, several different explanations have been offered for Donna’s choice. Schulz would insist that Donna’s mother had it in for him, but there had also been a difference in age, in ambition, in religious values.

Today, both Donna and Al conclude that, while Sparky may have been the more romantic option, Al was the natural fit. “It just seemed like we were more compatible,” Donna says.

But Donna has never forgotten the night she broke the news to Sparky, giving her clearest recount of events back in Good Grief, the 1989 Schulz biography: “I was home sewing. As usual, I had the ironing board set up in the kitchen. We sat outside on the back steps for a long time. He drove away. I went inside and cried. He came back about thirty minutes later and said ‘I thought maybe you changed your mind.’ It was close!”

Speaking about that night 65 years later, Donna remembers the heartbreak, and her sympathy for Schulz, all too vividly. “It was terrible. He didn’t take it too well. And I could tell that he was hurt.”

Donna Mae Johnson quit her job at Art Instruction and—19 days after the first Peanuts strip ran in seven daily newspapers, setting Schulz on a new trajectory of his own—married Al Wold at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on October 21, 1950.

“I can think of no more emotionally damaging loss than to be turned down by someone whom you love very much,” Schulz would say, years later. “What a bitter blow that is. It is a blow to everything that you are.”

It’s no stretch of the imagination to suspect a connection between Sparky’s devastation and a series of Peanuts strips in July 1969, when Charlie Brown realizes with horror that the Little Red-Haired Girl is moving away.

“Why is my whole life suddenly passing in front of my eyes?!” he agonizes. “I thought I had plenty of time . . . I thought I could wait until the sixth-grade swim party or the seventh-grade class party . . . Or I thought I could ask her to the senior prom or lots of other things when we got older, but now she’s moving away and it’s too late! It’s too late!”

Schulz was adept at transmuting his own woes, including in matters of the heart, into Peanuts. Towards the end of his first marriage in 1970, he resisted therapy and believed he was doing some of the best cartooning he’d ever done.

“The reason that Schulz’s early sorrows look like ‘sources’ of his later brilliance,” Jonathan Franzen wrote in the introduction to the fourth volume of The Complete Peanuts, “is that he had the talent and resilience to find humor in them.”

It was 11 years after Donna’s rejection that the Little Red-Haired Girl was first mentioned in Peanuts—in that melancholy lunchtime Sunday strip—though the genius of her creation is that she may have been there all along, inches out of sight.

Donna read Peanuts every day—she still does—and guessed that the unnamed redhead was inspired by her “right off the bat.” She also started picking up on what appeared to be meaningful references and tiny in-jokes. Back in 1950, when Sparky used to pick Donna up in his father’s car, she would climb in and lock the driver’s-seat door, playfully shutting Sparky out; in the June 13, 1971, Sunday strip, Charlie Brown describes exactly that scenario as his idea of what love must be.

“It was just like reading an old love letter,” Donna has said. “It was so very nice to be remembered.”

Schulz had doted on other girls too. David Michaelis’s 2007 Schulz biography mentions several girls that the young Schulz, for example, had only been able to admire intensely from afar. Clearly, though, there was nothing else in Schulz’s strip quite like the cherished handling of the Little Red-Haired Girl. Even in his later years, Schulz divulged, he would dream of being back at Art Instruction with Donna.

Schulz finally confessed to Donna outright over the phone: “You know, that’s you, don’t you?” The real-life inspiration of the Little Red-Haired Girl was publicly revealed for the first time in 1989’s Good Grief, where Schulz also explained his intention, at the time, to preserve the preciousness of the character by never depicting her in the strip.

“He said it was so every man could consider the little red-haired girl in their life,” Donna says. “Someone that he knew, and loved, and didn’t have.”

Beyond the gentle significances embedded in Peanuts, Schulz and Donna also stayed in touch in more conventional ways over the years. There would be friendly phone calls, letters, and visits. During their brief reunions, Schulz said, it felt like no time had passed and nothing had changed. “I was happy to see him and he was happy to see me, too,” Donna says.

Donna and Schulz’s continued friendship never interfered with her marriage to Al—which, along with Peanuts, recently saw its 65th anniversary—or either of Schulz’s marriages.

A tremor crept into Schulz’s famously elegant pen line during the strip’s final years, but he only retired Peanuts in late 1999 after being diagnosed with cancer. He died in his sleep on February 12, 2000, a few days after his last phone conversation with Donna; the last original Peanuts strip ran the following day.

Over the years, Mrs. Wold has turned down many offers from Peanuts collectors, preferring to hold on to her many personal mementos of Sparky, which are displayed on the walls or else stored in a large hope chest in the Wolds’ two-bedroom apartment. The cartoon about Donna’s long-ago car-locking shenanigans is one of a number of strips still on prominent display.

She kept the cat statue too.

There’s no question that Donna and Al have enjoyed a happy life together. Of course, Donna admits, she has occasionally thought about what could have been if Sparky had agreed to run away with her that time she asked. “Of course I’ve imagined what would have happened,” she says. “We would have been happy.”

Tipped off about the prominent role of the Little Red-Haired Girl, Donna is very much looking forward to seeing The Peanuts Movie. She thinks there’s a real possibility that, this time, Charlie Brown will muster the courage to get off his bench and speak to her at last.

“I sure hope so,” she says. “It’s been a long time to carry the torch. I always hoped that he would ask her, and she would tell him that she loved him.”