He asked Texas for 100 birthday cards. Four thousand came.

Weldon Bowen wanted 100 birthday cards, and the number was not even his: the Texas Veterans Land Board runs a scheme for the residents of its veterans homes called 100 for 100, and the poster with his face on it was simply the form filled in. On 20 August the Land Commissioner put out the request with his postal address at the bottom, and the wording was the wording a state agency uses when it is trying to be warm: help me celebrate, I would love to receive 100 birthday cards.

The Henderson News ran it, and so did the Gilmer Mirror and the Kilgore News Herald, and a radio station in Wichita, Kansas read it out between songs one morning, which is about as far as a press release about a man in a care home in east Texas usually travels before it stops. Somewhere between the small papers and the radio it got onto the kind of Facebook pages where people share things about veterans, and after that nobody was counting the readers any more.

By his party on Saturday there were more than 4,000 cards.

Who he is

Weldon Kenneth Bowen was born in Luling, Texas, on 5 September 1926, finished high school, and enlisted in the Marines on 3 August 1945, which was three days before Hiroshima and a month before the war he had signed up for ended without him. He was posted to the Puget Sound shipyard at Bremerton, Washington, where the Pacific fleet came home to be patched up, and he was discharged on 23 August 1946 with a Good Conduct Medal and an Expert Rifleman badge, after which the record goes quiet for about eighty years.

It picks up again at the Watkins-Logan veterans home in Tyler, in a green polo shirt with W. K. Bowen stitched on the pocket, sitting on a porch next to a poster asking strangers for post. That is the whole biography anyone has printed about him, and it turned out to be plenty.

Saturday

KLTV, the Tyler station, counted more than 4,000 cards at the party, from all over the country, and his daughter Gail had a theory about why a request for 100 had come back forty times over: there are a lot of veterans who never got a fair shake, she said, and here was one you could actually do something about for the price of a stamp. Julia Dechiro, whose own father was a veteran, had a stack of cards ready to post and then thought better of the post office altogether. "It was getting close to September 5, and I thought instead of just mailing all this, I want to go there," she said, so she drove to Tyler and handed them to him herself.

The poster asked for a hundred, in large friendly numerals, and four thousand people looked at the number and decided it was wrong.