ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, December 16, 1995 TAG: 9512170020
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
After having filled the wishes of more than 33,000 seriously ill young people, Make-A-Wish Foundation of America has a request of its own:
Stop sending those business cards!
Ditto, says the Children's Wish Foundation in Atlanta.
Thousands of pieces of mail flood into these organizations each day in response to a chain letter that has passed through one Blacksburg dentist's office about every six months for several years.
It began in 1989, when Craig Shergold, a British boy who had been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, wanted to get in the Guinness Book of World Records for receiving the most greeting cards.
One somebody wrote another somebody about it and the cycle began.
Two wonderful things happened. Shergold got 16 million cards in one year and made the Guinness Book - and Albemarle County billionaire John Kluge brought him to the University of Virginia for treatment and an eventual cure.
Shergold, now 16, was back at the Charlottesville medical center Dec. 1, where he got a clean bill of health.
Guinness has retired the greeting card record of 33 million that Shergold set in 1992.
But the chain letter continues to flow by fax and mail. It has been altered along the way so that several versions exist and few facts are correct. Some letters misspell Shergold's name as Schergold or Sherfold. Some use the name of the Phoenix foundation and others mention the Atlanta group or the name of a foundation that doesn't exist.
Instead of just requesting greeting cards, the letters ask the recipient to send a business card to Make-A-Wish and then send the letter to 10 other professionals.
The chairman of Make-A-Wish in Phoenix regularly issues a statement that his group has never been involved with the Shergold project.
Blacksburg dentist Joe Paget has done his part to try to break the cycle.
When Paget gets one of the letters, which usually come from another dentist or a doctor, he calls the person to say the request isn't valid.
"I never sent the letter on," Paget said.
But he keeps getting them.
"It has taken on a life of its own," he said.
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