Miss Othmar

Miss Othmar is an unseen character (like all adults) in Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts comic strip.

She is Linus van Pelt's schoolteacher. She was first mentioned in 1959, shortly after Linus was shown to be in school. Almost immediately, Linus developed a crush on her, which lasted for many years.

After an extended sequence where Linus repeatedly forgot to bring in egg shells for a class project, the boy noticed Miss Othmar to be very upset, thinking his inability to remember the shells was the source of her woe. Actually, the teacher was having a romance, and eventually quit her job to get married (Linus gave her the egg shells as a wedding present). Now named "Mrs. Hagemeyer", she wrote to Linus telling him that she missed all her students, but misses him most of all. Linus floated on air (literally) upon reading this.

A few years later, Miss Othmar returned to teaching, presumably under her married name, though Linus refused to recognize it: "In real life, she's Miss Othmar!" Ultimately, the references to her marriage were dropped, and Linus' teacher went back to being Miss Othmar again.

During the late 1960s, Miss Othmar joined a picket line when the teachers at Linus' school went on strike. Exhausted from several days' picketing, she fell to her knees, and Linus rushed to her side, picking up her sign. ("That stupid blockhead," Lucy huffed. "He's become involved!") The next day, she was fired, much to Linus' outrage (he attempted to petition the apostle Paul to no avail). Her replacement, Miss Halverson (also cartoonist Schulz's then-wife's maiden name), met with some resistance from Linus, who remained very loyal to Miss Othmar. Miss Othmar eventually returned again. However, in 1964, Linus mentioned that Miss Othmar retired from teaching to raise kids of her own and was hardly mentioned in the strip afterwards.

In the Peanuts television cartoons, Miss Othmar was voiced by a trombone, as were most of the adults. In an episode of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show, her red-sleeved arm can be seen while handing a paper to Sally Brown. Other than that, the closest the audience has ever come to seeing her was a shot of her from behind in the animated version of Snoopy!!! The Musical.

Miss Othmar is often also assumed to be Charlie Brown's teacher. In the mid-1960s, it was revealed that Charlie Brown's teacher's name was "Mrs. Donovan". However, Charlie Brown did show up in Miss Othmar's classroom (usually sitting behind Linus) starting in the late 1960s. In one series of strips, Miss Othmar continually selected Charlie Brown to pound the chalkboard erasers, filling his lungs with so much chalk dust that he exhaled it for days afterward.

bg:Мис Отмар