Next time a lecture has you making a paper airplane out of boredom, consider giving it to a little boy to help make his dream come true.
Five-year-old Hunter Winship, from Freedom, N.Y. was diagnosed with Burkitt's lymphoma, a rare form of cancer that spreads quickly and left him with a tumor the size of a cantaloupe. Since his diagnosis on Jan. 12 of this year, Hunter has been spending his days in the Women's and Children's Hospital of Buffalo receiving chemotherapy, and paper airplanes.
A few days after his diagnosis, Hunter's system crashed and he spent a week in the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital. That's when his mother, Cheryl Winship, and his aunt came up with the paper airplane idea: they gave Hunter a goal to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for most paper air planes collected.
"It's a way to get his mind off [being sick]," Winship said.
She sent out six e-mails one night telling people about Hunter's goal. Twenty-four hours later, she had 500 replies in her inbox from people wanting to help. News of the cause popped up in charity forums on the internet, and pretty soon boxes of air planes started coming in from states across the country and all over the world.
"It was outrageous," Winship said. "I've never seen anything like it."
Word of the Guinness record came to the UB campus, and Miranda Robinson, a junior civil engineering major, wanted to join in the paper-folding. She got her fellow students in Theta Tau, the professional engineering fraternity, to make around 150 planes using pages ripped from civil engineering magazines.
"It's always a good feeling to know that you helped out someone, especially someone local," Robinson said.
The family requested that Guinness consider them for the record and are awaiting approval. They should know by mid-March whether or not Hunter, who has now collected over 100,000 planes, will be added to the book.
All that is required of the paper airplane is that it includes the name and location of the person who sent it, leaving room for some creativity.
Winship said that someone in New York City had taken photos of landmarks and folded those up into tiny airplanes. They've gotten giant paper planes made out of beer posters from local bars, and even a box of planes from the Attica Correctional Facility.
"I was a little nervous about those but they were all really nice," Winship said. "It's really neat to see the ones where people take the time to make them."
For a while, Hunter was too sick to get the same enjoyment out of the planes that he normally would. A fan of planes, trains and trucks, Hunter takes after his dad, Shawn Winship, who builds airplane parts at Moog Inc. in East Aurora.
Now Hunter's health is improving, and has an 80 percent chance of surviving the cancer, his mom said.
"He's good enough now that he flies them around the room once and a while," Winship said.
Most of the airplanes are stacked up wall to wall in the Winship's house, where Hunter's 9-year-old sister, Brooke, waits eagerly for new boxes to come in the mail.
Robinson also elicited the help of regional engineering companies to add volume to the fraternity's donation. Employees at McMahon & Mann Consulting in Buffalo fashioned a couple hundred air planes out of scrap paper during their lunch breaks.
"Everyone got really into it," said Todd Swackhamer, a project engineer for the company. "We really enjoyed it."
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
