Rosie Paulik with her father, Buz Ecker. Photo / Family photo via The Washington Post
On a whim, Rosie Paulik posted on TikTok about her father, who had recently got a PhD and was “wondering what to do next”.
“He loves writing letters more than most people love their kids,” she wrote in a caption on her video, explaining that he has written her a letter every day, through “college, camp, adulthood”.
“Would you want a letter from my dad?” Paulik asked. “Or know someone who could use a little kindness from a retired professor with a killer signature and a fountain pen?”
Paulik expected a few people to respond. Instead, hundreds did.
“My dad is so excited,” Paulik said of her father, Buz Ecker, 67.
Ecker - and other dads Paulik has recruited - have since spent hours writing to strangers looking for pick-me-ups - including to many whose fathers have died.
Paulik named the volunteer-run group the Dad Letter Project and started a website after her TikTok went viral in July.
The website says: “Mail That’ll Make You Smile (or Cry, in a Good Way)”.
“It’s very gratifying to be people’s fathers who don’t have one,” Ecker told The Washington Post. “And it’s very gratifying to write a letter to people who have never gotten a letter from a father.”
Amy Woods was scrolling on her phone last month, trying to take her mind off the four-year anniversary of her father’s death, when Paulik’s TikTok appeared.
Woods sent Paulik her address in Chatham, England, and a blurb about her father, though she said she didn’t expect she would get a letter.
A few weeks later, a letter arrived with an airmail tag. Woods cried when she read the letter, written by a stranger about 6400km away in Michigan.
“It really reminded me of how much - oh, I feel like I’m going to cry saying it now - of how much love I have for my dad,” said Woods, 41.
Hundreds of people worldwide have had similar reactions this summer when they received letters from men whom they have never met.
Requests picked up - again - in mid-August after ABC News wrote a story about the project.
Ecker grew up receiving letters himself.
His mother, Peg, wrote to him hundreds of times when he went to camps and when he studied English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, in the late 1970s.
When it was time for Ecker’s three children - John and Annie, in addition to Paulik - to attend camps, Ecker wrote them letters, too.
“HI ROSIE!!!” Ecker wrote in June 2005, when Paulik was in Traverse City, Michigan. “I LOVE YOU AND I ALREADY MISS YOU A TON!”
Any day a letter wasn’t delivered, Paulik figured someone at the camp wasn’t doing their job.
Ecker wrote to Paulik when she was a teenage counsellor at a wilderness camp in International Falls, Minnesota, and when she studied strategic communications at the University of Kentucky in the mid-2010s - even as many people shifted to texting to communicate.
Then Paulik moved back to the Cincinnati area - about a 20-minute drive from Ecker’s house - and he still wrote her daily letters.
Ecker typically wrote about mundane things, like what kind of sandwich he ate for lunch.
Or more exciting events, like when a swarm of hornets attacked him.
Sometimes he took breaks telling narratives to include live dialogue with his wife, Betsy, writing, “Hold on, she’s talking to me.”
Paulik, 30, keeps thousands of her dad’s letters in a red bin in her Anderson Township, Ohio, home.
During the coronavirus pandemic, she and her dad had a viral moment on the internet when Humans of New York told their story.
People who requested letters in recent weeks were dealing with a variety of issues.
They were grieving their loved ones’ deaths, had bad relationships with their dads, had recently become dads and didn’t know what to do, felt lost, were stressed from work or were recovering from a break-up.
Ecker wakes up around 4.30am to write for about four hours each morning.
He tells stories about his parents and his grief when they died. But he also includes light anecdotes, like how Paulik’s cat used to attack his dad’s toes when he was trying to sleep and how his dogs, Pearl and Piper, love to escape and cover themselves in burrs and mud at a nearby river.
He has struggled to respond to some problems. When he wrote to a woman whose child died, he told her about his grandmother, Evelyn, having a stillborn child in 1918.
While some requesters laud Ecker for spearheading the project, the longtime jokester reminds them that he has problems too, like feeling more absent-minded after receiving his leadership and change PhD at the start of this year, getting lost on drives and failing to resist jumping out of the closet to prank his wife.
When people outside the US requested letters, Paulik told her dad she would end the project if it was costing him too much money.
But Ecker was excited to reach people across the globe. He has written about half of the roughly 350 letters the project has mailed. It has more than 1600 requests in the queue.
Ecker doesn’t know how much money he has spent on his project, saying that the costs are less than the “gratification that people receive and that I receive out of writing the letters”.
In early August, after Ecker received his first of a handful of thank-you letters from requesters, Paulik’s mother texted her: “You made your father’s day”.
Paulik, who works in communications, hopes to register the project as a non-profit and recruit more volunteers.
She has found more than a dozen dads to help Ecker, including Darren Timmeney, her friend’s father in Kalamazoo, Michigan, who used to drop encouraging notes into his son’s and daughter’s lunch boxes before school.
After retiring from his banking career in June, Timmeney was seeking a new hobby.
Now, “I wake up in the morning a little bit more motivated,” said Timmeney, 64.
He has motivated others, too. Timmeney wrote the letter to Woods, including the line that made Woods cry at her kitchen table: “As a dad, I am proud of you and think you wondering and thinking about your hippie artist dad is really special.”
Woods said she had a complicated relationship with her father, David, who died in September 2021 after suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The letter was written in a similar laid-back tone he had used.
Woods stored the letter in a box with other mementos that remind her of her family. But how long will it stay there?
“Forever,” she said. “Without a doubt.”
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