By age 3, she was reading. By 7, she began to play her mother's harp. At 9, she had already performed in front of hundreds.
"Oh, that was our mistake; we put her crib next to the piano," Cameron Huster Beck's mother Penny said.
Such a joke was typical among the Husters, who, despite a deep appreciation for music, didn't have any other children who took to it with Cameron's intensity.
Beck sought to ignite her spark for music in others through her orchestral performances and through teaching students anywhere from 7 to 70.
When Cameron Huster Beck died at 28 on Feb. 2 of leukemia, she had accumulated seven harps. They ranged in size from 22 to 48 strings, the kind that sit in a player's lap all the way to her concert grand harp.
"It's seen a lot of miles," Huster said of her concert grand harp. "It's gone to a lot of places."
In pursuit of performance or lesson opportunities, Beck traveled to Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland, London.
When she was younger and the family went on vacations that didn't necessitate a large harp in tow, Beck — donning her classic "I'm going to do this no matter what" outlook — did the next best thing.
She played air harp. She studied sheet music, took to airport pianos, attended orchestras with her parents.
In her childhood home, Beck started her day at 5 a.m. so that she could fit in practice on the piano and harp in addition to her studies.
"I never had to say, 'Oh, you need to go practice,'" Huster said. "From when she was little, she could organize her time so she could do school and music."
Academically, she was a gifted student, evidenced as early as kindergarten, when she read "Little Women" and skipped to first grade halfway through the school year.
In similar fashion, she transferred during her junior year of high school to Florida State University. She worked in the Barnes & Noble music department while she earned her master's of harp performance from Mannes College The New School for Music, in New York.
Though she had been accepted into two other schools, Beck decided to attend the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins so that she could be treated for leukemia while attaining her doctorate.
Beck completed her course load and sent the cancer into remission, then returned to her hometown. There, she married music teacher Benjamin Beck, whom she met through a mutual friend while visiting from school.
He remembers thinking that she was a nerd just like him. He invited her out for coffee the next day. Their conversation — about music, composers, theatre, academia — lasted hours.
She offered private harp lessons and taught as an adjunct professor at Stetson while she wrote her thesis in DeLand. As announced on its website, Cameron Huster Beck's Graduate Performance Diploma in Harp will be honored this May during Stetson's spring commencement.
In addition to her mother, Penny, and her husband, Benjamin, Cameron Huster Beck is survived by her father, Dr. Richard Huster of DeLand; sisters Katherine Terrell of Cary, N.C., Sandra Stanton of Mount Juliet, Tenn., and Tasha Johnson of Nashville, Tenn.; and brothers Ken Huster of Harrisburg, N.C., and Jim Huster of Jacksonville.
Lankford Funeral Home & Crematory, DeLand, handled arrangements.