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101 cards for 101 years and then some

Mission accomplished! Myrna Wetsch received 101 cards to help her celebrate her 101st birthday on Nov. 22 and the birthday greetings kept pouring in.


Mission accomplished!

Myrna Wetsch received 101 cards to help her celebrate her 101st birthday on Nov. 22 and the birthday greetings kept pouring in.

"She received 237 in total," said Lori Veroba, her granddaughter who has taken on the responsibility of recording and preserving the cards and messages which will eventually find their way into a special box of memories.

Wetsch lives independently in a family home. She has some hearing loss, but is otherwise alert and ready to roll, although she claims, she's never rolled very far from home, restricting her outings to within 10 miles of Estevan.

A teacher in the Estevan Roman Catholic Separate School system for many years, Wetsch and her husband John, who passed away several years ago, raised three children, Charlene, Dale and Lawrence.

Lori explained that for her 100th birthday, her grandmother received congratulatory messages from The Queen as well as from the Canadian Parliament and MPs as well as the Saskatchewan Roughriders, who were also celebrating their 100th birthday.

"So the trick was to find something different for her 101st year," Veroba said. "So we put an advertisement in The Mercury and in the Regina Leader Post, asking people if they'd like to send her some birthday wishes. We put the ads in for two weeks each and they starting coming. There were over 50 on the first Friday after the ads appeared," she added.

The cards came from as far away as Halifax on the East Coast and Texas to the south and several locations in British Columbia on the West Coast.

"To think in this day and age you would take time out of your busy schedule to select a card, write a message and send it off is unbelievable," the elder Wetsch said in issuing her thanks to all. "You are a certain kind of person. For the best of a lifetime experience, I thank my ever-loving granddaughter Lori and her daughter Casey who have been baking and decorating my birthday cakes for the last 11 years."

Wetsch went on to note that she was amazed at the number of people who responded and who shared the same birthdate as she does and she enjoyed the joke about the two drops of water that was contained in one card and loves the card sent by the perfect stranger, a young girl, who included her photo.

"Your picture is going on my dresser mirror so I can say good morning every day," she said. "So to relatives, old friends, neighbours, staff groups ... a huge thank you. All this for a farm girl who had never been any further than 10 miles from her home. How times change. Now I give best wishes for your next birthday everyone ... lovingly signed by Myrna."

"I really didn't think it was possible that this would happen, but when that first bundle of cards came in the mail, it changed my mind," said Veroba.

As Wetsch noted, the response put her on Cloud 9.