Is this the site of the meetings of their "Doing Things Without Charlie Brown" club? Because that's about the most charitable explanation possible for what these four kids and Snoopy were doing in that pile of leaves before CB jumped in.
There's something of Calvin reacting to his dad in Snoopy's responses to Charlie Brown here. There's a later strip, involving a camera, that's makes this even more noticeable.
In the next-to-last strip, Snoopy's snout is thicker than usual, moving him closer to his modern appearance. But he's still got a long way to go there.