Twin Cities artist repairing Peanuts' Lucy statue for South St. Paul library

SOUTH ST. PAUL, Minn. — A beloved member of the South St. Paul community is down but not out.

Jaclee Slaba, a local artist, has been hard at work repairing a statue of Lucy, the iconic character from the Peanuts comic strip.

Peanuts was created by St. Paul native, Charles Schulz.

The Lucy statue stood in front of the now-closed South St. Paul Library for almost a decade, and the years took their toll.

"There were cracks all in her face," Slaba said. "Somebody described it as an Alice Cooper crack through her eye down her face. There was a big hole on the side of her face and into her hair. Her fingers were gone. There was a crack on top of her head."

Slaba has spent a month repairing Lucy in what she calls her backyard "trauma center."

"I said, 'Anything can be saved if you want to do it badly enough,'" Slaba said.

She's in the repainting stage now, but it took a special epoxy sculpting mold to repair the fiberglass statue.

Slaba says the statue is one of 100 Lucys created in the early 2000s.

It was called "Lucy in Love" and had a picture of Lucy's brother, Linus. Slaba says she's replacing Linus with a bull, the mascot of South St. Paul High School.

Slaba says she'll be finished by the end of the month.

Lucy will then be moved to its new home out front of South St. Paul's new Kaposia Library.

"I want to make people happy," Slaba said. "I want to see little kids standing in front of Lucy getting their picture taken again. If that happens, everybody's happy, I've done my job correctly."

Slaba is working on Lucy for no charge. Community members helped raise the money for the costs of the repair.