WEST VALLEY CITY — Granger High School students' American kid origami is about to land alongside a Korean War veteran's treasure and recycled elephant poop.
The students have made some 8,000 paper airplanes for a 5-year-old boy fighting cancer in Centerville, N.Y., a tiny town between Buffalo and Rochester.
Come to find out, so have thousands of other people worldwide.
It's part of an effort to not only lift young Hunter Winship's spirits but also to break the Guinness World Record for collecting the largest number of paper airplanes. There currently is no such record-holder.
"My husband (Shawn) said he's sure there's over a million" planes sent from around the world, Hunter's mom, Cheryl Winship, told the Deseret Morning News. "Coming home and seeing all the boxes — to me, it makes me feel good that all these people care."
At the turn of the new year, Hunter was complaining of stomach pain, his mom said. But what doctors had been treating as constipation and pneumonia turned out to be Burkitt's lymphoma, which caused rapidly growing tumors in his abdomen. The boy was admitted to a Buffalo children's hospital with a tumor the size of a tennis ball. Two days later, it was the size of a cantaloupe.
Doctors started aggressive treatment, which resulted in bouts of kidney and respiratory failure, his mom said. The family felt helpless.
So a family member and cancer survivor thought of a way to lift Hunter's spirits. Winship's sister in-law recalled a program in which hospitalized children put their names on lists to receive paper airplanes to cheer them.
Cheryl Winship suggested the family take the idea a step further: Seek a world record for the most paper airplanes collected.
The mother passed her idea via e-mail. Within hours, she says she received hundreds of responses.
The message apparently circulated worldwide. A video of the quest was posted on YouTube; local news media featured Hunter's story; and the NBA's Washington Wizards brought Hunter and his family to a home game, and featured him and another child during a quarter break.
Granger High kids joined the quest through Hunter's dad, in a roundabout way.
Shawn Winship makes airplane parts at Moog Inc. Moog, one of the school's business partners, suggested the students help Hunter's wish come true. And if there are any teenagers who understand a love of airplanes, they are Scott Lewis' students, who have been working well over a year to make their own plane, Excalibur, whose maiden flight is set for May.
Some students spent class time folding up their old assignments into all-American kid origami. Others, like sophomore Andrew Thomson, took the challenge home.
"I've got a lot of paper cuts," but they were worth it, smiled Thomson, who says he folded about 400 planes with whatever paper he could find.
"I thought it would make me feel good," he said. "I'd want it done for me."
Lewis says his students have shipped 5,000 planes to Hunter and were loading up probably 3,000 more Monday, the last day of the airplane drive.
Students at Fillmore School, where Hunter attends kindergarten, folded about 200,000 airplanes, Winship said.
Thousands of other planes have soared from all over the world, including Germany, Finland, Greenland, South America, Philippines, Belgium and Indonesia, Winship said. One from Thailand was made of paper recycled from pachyderm dung. Another was made of a unique thin paper an aging U.S. serviceman brought back from Korea. One family sent several planes folded out of dollar bills. Someone even sent a book on how to make 3-D paper airplanes.
As of Sunday, the family had counted 278,261 planes, according to word Moog forwarded to Granger High. There are still dozens of boxes stacked floor to ceiling in a storage unit.
The global outpouring has lifted the family's spirits — and Hunter's, his mom said.
The boy is doing much better. He came home Friday with his family, which had been staying at the Ronald McDonald House, Winship said. He was doing fine, but with the speed at which this form of cancer comes and goes, Winship said they were keeping their fingers crossed.
Meanwhile, Winship says she received an invitation and tickets to come to the Guinness World Record Museum in Ontario. But between now and any type of meeting with a Guinness representative, there's work to do, she said.
"I have millions of airplanes to count."
E-mail: jtcook@desnews.com