Writing to strangers who need a father

ON A whim, Rosie Paulik posted on TikTok about her father, who had recently got a PhD and was “wondering what to do next”.

- KYLE MELNICK

“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.

He and other dads who Paulik 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-said. “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 Tik-Tok 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. But a few weeks later, a letter arrived with an airmail tag. Woods cried when she read the letter, written by a stranger more than 6000km away in Michigan.