Sad Papaw

Confirmed 149,238

About

Sad Papaw, also known as Hamburger Papaw, is the nickname given to the grandfather of Oklahoma resident Kelsey Harmon, who announced on Twitter that she was the sole family member to attend his birthday in mid March 2016. The tweet was widely circulated online, causing an outpouring of sympathy for Harmon's grandfather.

Origin

On March 16th, 2016, Twitter user Kelsey Harmon tweeted a photograph of her grandfather eating a hamburger, along with a caption referring to him as "papaw" and expressing sadness that she was the only one of six grandchildren that showed up for his birthday dinner (shown below). In the first 48 hours, the tweet gained over 225,000 likes and 137,000 retweets.

Spread

Over the next 24 hours, the tweet was widely circulated on Twitter, with many expressing sympathy for the grandfather.

On March 17th, Harmon posted a tweet announcing that her grandfather is "OK" and asked readers to stop sending "death threats" to her cousins (shown below).^[3]

Meanwhile, the grandson Brock Harmon tweeted a photograph of himself eating a burger with Papaw (shown below).^[4]

Also on March 17th, BuzzFeed^[2] published an article about the Internet's reaction to the tweet, which included a statement from Harmon about what happened on her grandfather's birthday:

"So I sit down and get a plate, but he waits because he wanted to make sure everyone else got plenty. Well about 30 minutes pass and he decides he’ll eat just one. An hour goes by and nobody shows. I could tell he was disappointed, but I made sure to stick around and hang out with him. We had a really great time."

In the coming days, several other news sites published articles about the viral tweet, including The Daily Dot,^[5] NY Daily News^[6] and NY Mag.^[7]