Cedar Falls Sailor Taylor Morris Headed for Today Show, Ellen as Story Goes Viral

Taylor Morris, Cedar Falls' own hometown hero, is headed for the Today Show on Monday after his story caught the world's attention and went viral over the last few days.

Morris, 23, an explosive detection and disposal expert with the Navy, lost parts of all four limbs in a May bomb explosion in Afghanistan. He has been recovering at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., .

Family member Renae Hockemeyer and the website TaylorMorris.org, run by Morris' friends and family, both confirmed Morris is scheduled for a Today Show appearance on Monday, Sept. 24.

Morris and Kelly have been the subject of viral Internet attention over the last two weeks.

Morris' friend Ben Hagarty helps manage TaylorMorris.org. He wrote about a conversation between Morris and Today Show host Matt Lauer. Morris, asked how he feels about all the attention, said this:

“Yesterday, there was an email from a little kid named Rowan, who had been recovering from a traumatic brain injury. He saw a picture of me with my prosthetics and an American flag on my back and thought I was Superman. His mom made a journal post about how he loves it when she read’s him the updates, and that’s really the only reason why we want to share it, to help other people.”

The recent attention started with the website Reddit, where a photo of Morris, taken by Cedar Falls photographer Tim Dodd, was posted on Sept. 11. The photo quickly became the most popular post on the site.

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A few days later, on Sept. 15, the website Buzzfeed posted "A Love Story In 22 Pictures," featuring the tale of Morris and Kelly's relationship with a series of photos. That also quickly became the site's most popular story.

From there, things spread like wildfire. As of noon on Sept. 21, the Buzzfeed story had been viewed over 2.8 million times and liked or shared on Facebook over 400,000 times. The story was picked up by websites across the country and abroad, appearing in Iceland, Australia, Spain and the U.K.

In the U.S., it was featured on websites including Yahoo, HLNtv and Glamour. Earlier this week, Morris' story was mentioned on Fox News and CNN. The Ellen Show has also been in touch, and scheduling for an appearance there is in the works, Hockemeyer said.

In the last two weeks, TaylorMorris.org has crashed twice from all the traffic it has been getting - including over a million visitors in one day. The Facebook page Taylor Morris Community Support has jumped to over 16,000 likes.

On Tuesday, when it hit 10,000 likes, the page posted a question, asking followers where they're from. Over 1000 responses came in - from Cedar Falls and the rest of Iowa, of course, but also from pretty much all 50 states and such far flung locales as Brazil and India.

"Out of nowhere our mailboxes started to fill up, we started to receive phone calls from everyone and their mothers, and one website after another seemed to be displaying pictures of Taylor and myself," Kelly wrote on TaylorMorris.org. "It definitely caught us off guard. Although it has been hard we have been trying to find time here and there to soak everything in, enjoy the moment, and take it one step at a time."