Norma Huss

Last week the lead arti­cle in our local news­pa­per brought tears to my eyes. I’d remem­bered the sto­ry while it was still hap­pen­ing in 1972. An eighth grade boy named Chris Mil­lard had writ­ten a sto­ry called The Four Dia­monds. He was a can­cer patient and the Can­cer Soci­ety was using his sto­ry, with his approval, of course, to raise funds. There were inter­views, sto­ries, and, lat­er that year, the obit­u­ary when he died. He was coura­geous and great­ly missed.

In fol­low­ing years, the sto­ry was told again. But I had­n’t heard too much about it in recent years. Until this year. The woman who had been his teacher real­ized that the cur­rent stu­dents knew noth­ing about his sto­ry. So she and the boy’s father told bits about it for the newspaper.

The teacher had asked her stu­dents to write an auto­bi­og­ra­phy, but Chris told her, since he was so sick, and knew how the dis­ease would end, did­n’t real­ly want to. She sug­gest­ed he write what­ev­er he want­ed to, and he did. His father said he nev­er showed his work in progress, but occa­sion­al­ly said, “I’ve got anoth­er diamond!”

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I’ve nev­er read his sto­ry, The Four Dia­monds. But I do know that it impressed everyone.

I expect I’ll learn how to do this bet­ter, but here is the link to that arti­cle: http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/826208_Elizabethtown-eighth-grader-who-died-of-cancer-wrote-story-in-1972-that-inspired-the-Four-Diamonds-Fund.html