World War II Veteran Blown Away After Receiving 55,000 Cards in Mail for 96th Birthday
People need other people. No matter how unsocial an individual might seem, they truly needs others in the end.
Aristotle himself said, “Man is by nature a social animal.” So when individuals get deprived of interactions, they suffer severely for it.
Ninety-six-year-old World War II veteran Duane Sherman knows exactly how that feels. According to The Press-Enterprise, his wife of nearly six decades passed away in 2011.
He got precious little interaction with anyone except his 65-year-old daughter Sue Morse. And the only things that showed up in his mailbox were bills and junk mail.
Though he hadn’t anticipated living nearly a century, Sherman’s long life was tinged with sadness. “All my friends are gone,” he explained to Inside Edition.
So Morse decided to do something nice for her father’s birthday. She reached out of social media, asking friends and strangers to send Sherman birthday cards.
KHOU reported that she expected, oh, about 160 cards to come in. What she got was something far more dramatic.
A little more than two weeks after his Dec. 30 birthday, Sherman had received over 60,000 cards and letters. They hailed from all 50 states, from other veterans and students and even inmates.
They sent more than just cards, too. One person sent an American flag that had flown over Pearl Harbor.
Someone else mailed a scale model of an American battleship. People visited, too.
The commander of the guided missile launcher the U.S.S. Cowpens came in person with multiple officers to meet Sherman. Officers from the U.S. Navy Sonar School in San Diego dropped by and soaked up tales about the veteran’s adventures during World War II.
Members of the Pittsburgh Steelers wrote, as did the secretary of the Navy. All of the attention positively bowled Sherman and Morse over.
Morse expressed to the Orange County Register how she “was amazed, shocked and appreciative. All the good comments people made, it just brightened my day.”
For his part, Sherman said, “It was very gratifying. It was hard to believe.”
The best thing about it? Sherman isn’t anywhere near done with the cards.
He’s only gotten through a few thousand of them. A friend is storing the rest of them, and the Post Office has even more waiting to be picked up.
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