Chicago Tribune:
At 22, Scott Skelly already has a national reputation in his field – corn.
The recent college graduate has been creating corn mazes since he was an enterprising 9-year-old who persuaded his dad to let him cut a few paths with dead ends in a cornfield on the family’s 200-acre farm. His first maze attracted 500 paying visitors. Subsequent mazes grew more elaborate, and eventually sprouted the Internet business Corn Mazes America while Skelly still was in high school.
Now in his 13th summer of the corn-maze business, Skelly drives around the country in a former ambulance with a bed for sleeping, and a contraption he rigged to cut designs – an old riding lawnmower with a wooden box bolted in front to hold a laptop computer and a GPS system. A satellite receiver attached to the mower pokes above the corn, helping Skelly follow coordinates on his laptop with amazing accuracy.
He can mow any picture imaginable in knee-high corn, from a Wild West scene to a replica of the Mayflower.
“There are three or four other people in the whole country who have the same job as me,” said Skelly, who admits his clients are surprised by his age when they meet him.
Photo by chynna67