Schulz's Pride

10/29/1998 at 12:00 AM EST

Charles M. Schulz is touched by the public outpouring of emotion over his retirement. The "Peanuts" creator, whose final Sunday strip appears this weekend, was diagnosed with colon cancer in November. He said during a Wednesday KSRO radio interview in Santa Rosa, Calif., where he lives, that he suffered a series of small strokes during emergency abdominal surgery last year. The stroke's aftereffects make it difficult for him to see and to speak, let alone draw. "All of a sudden," said Schulz, 77, "one day, it's taken. It's gone. I can't do it." As for the eulogy-like quality of a lot of the current tributes to him and his gang -- Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and the rest -- he said, "I'm pleased that I was able to live long enough to see it all." Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will miss Lucy the most after Sunday. The reason, she told The Washington Post, is "because she acts the way little girls do, until they are told 'that is not the way little girls are supposed to act.' "