Bald is beautiful: insurance leaders are raising money to fight childhood cancer by shaving their heads on behalf of the St. Baldrick's Foundation.

The first question Chuck Chamness' children asked when they learned their brother Joey, then 8, had bone cancer was "will he lose his hair?"

"When you think about it from a kid's perspective--they were all in K to 8--having a kid with no hair is a big deal. It's a symptom of the disease and the treatment," said Chamness, president and chief executive officer of the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies.

Around the time that Joey was diagnosed, Chamness read in an insurance trade publication about the St. Baldrick's Foundation, a nonprofit group founded by three reinsurance executives who came up with the idea of shaving heads to raise money for childhood cancer research.

The idea originated in 1999, when Tim Kenny, president and chief executive officer of QBE the Americas; John Bender, chief underwriting officer for Platinum Underwriters' casualty business; and Enda McDonnell, president and CEO of Access Re, got together.

"We were hanging out in my backyard, and decided that life was pretty good," Kenny said. "We thought we should do something to give something back."

The trio decided they could raise money for childhood cancer, the No. 1 disease killer of children in the United States. They decided to do this by shaving their heads and collecting pledges. By shaving their heads, they would "show solidarity to kids who have cancer and go through chemo," Kenny said. Plus, the friends thought it would be fun to get McDonnell "to shave his big mop of blond hair," Kenny said.

They figured they could recruit 17 colleagues to each raise $1,000 by volunteering to have their heads shaved on March 17th--St. Patrick's Day.

Both Kenny and McDonnell are originally from Ireland, and Bender is an Irish-American. And by combining "Bald" with "Patrick," St. Baldrick was born.

That first year, instead of the $17,000 they had planned to raise, the three founders of St. Baldrick's Foundation garnered $104,000 in March 2000. The tradition of shaving heads to raise money for children's cancer research took off, and now more than 27,000 heads have been shaved in 42 states and 10 countries, raising more than $20 million for the St. Baldrick's Foundation. Many donations and volunteers have come from the ranks of the insurance industry, with teams from companies such as Endurance, PartnerRe, GenRe and Towers Perrin among those who raised the most money in 2006.

The foundation offers grants for children's cancer research and has funded fellowships to encourage new medical professionals to pursue pediatric cancer research as a specialty.

Inspired by this, Chamness decided to have his head shaved, too. He got some friends together and they raised $45,000 in 2005 for St. Baldrick's. Since then, Chamness has shaved his head several times to raise money for the foundation.

"As a parent, your first responsibility is to determine what is best for the child. Then you ask: Is there anything else I can do?" Chamness said. "It really is ingenious that it involves a certain amount of humiliation on the part of the person who is asking for the money. Any good friend will be willing to part with a few dollars to see a friend in complete baldness, especially if they have pretty good hair to start with."

So this year, around St. Patrick's Day, Chamness once again will join thousands of people to shave his head to raise money for the St. Baldrick's Foundation.

His team, called "Joey's Team: Bald is Beautiful," will meet in an Irish pub in indianapolis for the shaving. Joey's still in physical therapy to strengthen the leg that underwent surgery as part of the cancer treatment, but he's a "full functioning fourth grader now," Chamness said. "We're very lucky."

For more information, visit www.stbaldricks.org.