Grove City corn maze transformed into marriage proposal for farmer's now-fiancée
Air travelers that fly over Circle S Farms will see "Will you marry me, Caroline?" written out in a cornfield, a message from farmer Timothy Sullivan for Caroline Liggett.
Sullivan and other workers began planting 13 acres of corn using a computerized tractor on June 3. By mid- to late-June, his proposal message was visible from the air.
"I've been super nervous about other planes or helicopters flying over and possibly them seeing it or taking a picture. So, I felt like every time I opened up my Facebook, I cringed a little bit hoping that the image wouldn't be there and somebody hadn't ruined the surprise," he said.
Sullivan convinced Liggett to fly over the cornfield with him, under the ruse that he was interested in learning to fly. When they first passed the field, she didn't see the message. So, Sullivan asked the pilot to circle around one more time, the engagement ring hiding in his pocket.
Then, she saw the message.
"I was just like so amazed that somebody put that much effort in planning into a proposal like that and you know, I expected he would do something quite elaborate and intentional, but nothing to that extreme by any means," Liggett said.
Sullivan and Liggett actually work at competing agricultural companies; he's with Corteva Agriscience and she's with WinField United.
"It was only fitting that our proposal would happen with the cornfield," Liggett said.
She accepted the proposal, and the wedding is planned for early summer 2026.
Breaking and trending news reporter Nathan Hart can be reached at NHart@dispatch.com and at @NathanRHart on X and at nathanhart.dispatch.com on Bluesky.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohio corn maze transformed into surprise marriage proposal
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Yahoo
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The Block judges slam team over 'upmarket nursing home' room
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The Slovenian transplant Louis Adamic, who had emigrated to the United States in 1913 and settled in the port community of San Pedro, scrutinized Southern California with pitiless objectivity in a 1930 essay titled 'Los Angeles! There she blows!' Adamic mentioned the conviction among Angelenos that their city 'will ultimately — perhaps within the next three or four decades — be the biggest city in the world.' And he acknowledged that 'the place has many great advantages, among the foremost, of course, being Climate, and but a single drawback, which, however, is an extremely serious one — that of water shortage.' Nevertheless, noting that the city's population had doubled over the previous 10 years to nearly 2 million, he confidently predicted that it would number 3 million by 1935. It didn't reach that mark until the 1980s, and it's not the first time, nor the last, that a prediction of the city's future overshot the target. His concern about water, of course, was spot-on. Another writer who extrapolated from what he saw of the Los Angeles of his time was Morrow Mayo, whose 1933 book 'Los Angeles' is quoted elsewhere in The Times' Future of L.A. package. Mayo expressed the opinion that even if 'the territory known as the 'City of Los Angeles'' grew from its then-population of 1.2 million to 4 million or more, he doubted that 'it will ever be permanently the great vibrant, vital, nerve-center of the Pacific coast.' The reason, Mayo wrote, was its climate — 'meant for slow-pulsing life; a climate where man, when he gets adjusted to the environment, takes his siesta in the middle of the day. Go-getterism in this climate does violence to every law of nature.' What kept Los Angeles even marginally vibrant was the steady influx of vigorous immigrants from the East and Midwest. 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Such miscalculations point to another pitfall facing those who would dare to predict the future of Los Angeles: Change has come so rapidly that any prediction can be confounded within the lifetime of its author. Thus Carey McWilliams, that indefatigable chronicler of the California pageant, wrote in his book 'Southern California Country: An Island on the Land' that the aircraft industry was 'likely to remain in the region and even to expand production.' McWillliams wrote those words in 1946; by 1980, when he died, the industry had crashed in Southern California, entering a long period of retrenchment that ended with Boeing's closing of the region's last commercial aircraft manufacturing plant in 2005. The Long Beach plant's 300 workers were transferred to Boeing's military aircraft assembly line, but that was shut down in 2015, ending an era, as The Times observed, in which the region was. 'once synonymous with the manufacture of aircraft.' The trajectory of the Los Angeles ecology, and by extension that of Southern California and the entire state of California, was the subject of Reisner's 1986 book, 'Cadillac Desert.' He viewed the water politics of the region, quite properly, through the prism of winner-take-all economics. Water was wasted by farmers and urban residents because it was almost free. That was already beginning to change in his time, he observed, but the process would need years, even decades, to play out — if it ever could. 'The West's real crisis is one of inertia, of will, and of myth,' he wrote in the closing pages of 'Cadillac Desert.' Reisner looked ahead, hopefully, to a West that 'might import a lot more meat and dairy products from states where they are raised on rain, rather than dream of importing those states' rain .... A region where people begin to recognize that water left in rivers can be worth a lot more — in revenues, in jobs — than water taken out of the rivers.' 'At some point, perhaps within my lifetime, the American West will go back to the future than forward to the past.' Regrettably, Reisner, who died in 2000, didn't live to see that happen. Whether his hope will ever be fulfilled remains an open question. Perhaps the most penetrating look at the future of Los Angeles and its state came from Peter Schrag, a former editorial page editor at the Sacramento Bee. In his 1998 book 'Paradise Lost,' Schrag sought not simply to foretell the region's future, but to explicate how its future foretold what was in store for the country as a whole. (Its subtitle was 'California's Experience, America's Future.') When he wrote the book, California was in one of its boom phases. It was again 'the driving engine of national economic growth and likely to remain in that position until well into the next century .... Because of foundations laid forty years go ... it is at the forefront of the world's leading-edge technologies and of its creative energy.' (He was right about that, at least up to this moment.) But Schrag also pointed to the state's 'increasingly dysfunctional governmental and fiscal public institutions, the depleted state of its public infrastructure, services, and amenities, the growing gaps between its affluent and its poorer residents, and its pinched social ethos,' which 'hang like dark clouds in the sunny skies.' California had exported to other states the facile low-tax policies of Howard Jarvis and Ronald Reagan's view of government as 'the problem, not the solution.' In addition, Schrag saw that the emergence of social media 'may insure against the power of Big Brother to dominate communications, but they also amplify the power of shared ignorance .... What used to be limited to gossip over the back fence is now spread in milliseconds.' 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'The United States is testing its future through California,' he said in an essay for the website of the California State Library, which he served as state librarian from 1994 to 2004. Establishing California as a 'bellwether state,' he wrote: 'The American people are asking a series of questions which now become the California challenge .... Can the American people turn to positive effect the cultural diversity of a nation in the process of being transformed? ... Can the American people maintain their standards of living and education?' Starr's answer to the questions he posed was a resounding yes! 'In recent times,' he wrote, the American people have turned to California and asked it to create a technology revolution, and California responded .... The American people have turned to California for new models of lifestyle, new ways of enjoying and celebrating the gift of life, and California responded with an outpouring of architecture, landscaping, entertainment, sport and recreation.' The confidence that Starr projected 20 years ago may have faded, and may fade further in the future in Los Angeles and up and down the state. But one thing that probably will remain true is that the region's path into the future will inspire writers to keep peering into their crystal balls, cloudy as they are.
Fox News
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