The Rutledge Corn Maze has been grown this year to honor the American Cancer Society. Attendees will get the chance to donate an extra dollar with their price of admission.
Each year, Robby Rutledge creates a unique corn maze in Olympia that Southwest Washington residents and visitors look forward to exploring in the fall.
Last week, the official unveiling showed this year’s maze is going to be about more than a good time.
In 2016, Yelm resident and American Cancer Society employee Nichole Woolsey approached Rutledge about creating an American Cancer Society Maze, with the nonprofit’s logo and name stamped into it.
“So we started planning, and it took two years to get the maze finalized and everything up to date, but it’s been a really cool partnership,” Rutledge said.
He said together the farm and ACS are trying to raise awareness about how cancer affects people.
They will also be donating a percentage of maze revenue to ACS’s 5k fundraising walk, Making Strides Against Breast Cancer, said Amanda Hanks, volunteer survivor lead with ACS.
Rutledge said he hopes to raise $25,000 and aims to do this by asking each guest if he or she wishes to donate $1 to Making Strides Against Breast Cancer.
“We are donating about two percent of our net profits and then we are doing a haunting for dollars night,” Rutledge said. “So we’ll donate 50 percent of all the ticket sales, and the American Cancer Society actually will come out and haunt that night.”
Hanks said she is all for fighting breast cancer and is honored to be the one who gets to make the survivors at Making Strides Against Breast Cancer feel celebrated.
“If we don’t have survivors beating cancer, then we don’t really have anything to fight for,” she said.
One such survivor is Corinn Wohl, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in July 2016.
“I had been up-to-date on all of my screenings — it was a lump that I found myself, and knew immediately that it was cancer,” Wohl said. “I was shocked because we had zero breast cancer in the family and I had always thought this was a genetic disease.”
So the doctors ran a litany of tests, including genetic testing.
“I had planned that I would have this nice, easy bout of cancer and get past it, and that would be the end of it,” Wohl said. “Unfortunately, I found out through the genetic testing that although I was the first in my family to have breast cancer, we do have the BRCA gene mutation. A lot of people don’t know what that is, but I always reference Angelina Jolie and her famous story.”
Wohl said that because she was a carrier of the BRCA gene mutation, her sister and her 22 year-old daughter would both need to be tested. They both tested positive for the mutation, too.
Wohl said that they learned a lot about the gene mutation, citing that it gives people an increased risk of breast cancer, ovarian cancer and several other types of cancer.
“So as a parent, my heart sank knowing that I had now passed along this gene to my daughter, and that her risk was significantly elevated.”
In December 2016, Wohl finished her treatment, and in about the same timeframe her daughter came to her with some news.
“She said, ‘Mom, I’m going to have a double mastectomy, because my kids aren’t going to see me go through what you went through,’” Wohl said. “So as a mom it was tough hearing that she was in the position of having a life-changing surgery, or face testing every six months for the rest of her life.”
Wohl’s daughter had a series of surgeries in May of 2017 and is now celebrating good health, after great recovery, Wohl said.
It’s research like that into the BRCA gene mutation, funded in part by Making Strides Against Breast Cancer, that helps people like Wohl’s daughter.
Making Strides Against Breast Cancer will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 20 at Huntamer Park in Lacey.
The Rutledge Corn Maze opens on Sept. 16.
