Here’s a review of this week’s questions:

  1. What was the name of the Cincinnati company that was the first in the US to print greeting cards?
  2. In what year did the Cincinnati Reds become the first major league team to play a night baseball game under lights?
  3. Although she may be mostly associated with “The City” (in this case, New York), this famous actress actually grew up in Cincinnati. What is her name?

And here are the answers:

  1. While the Hallmark company may be synonymous with the idea of “greeting cards,” it was Cincinnati’s Gibson family and their Gibson Greetings that developed the first line of greeting cards in America. As emigres from Scotland, the family engaged its entrepreneurial spirit toward the printing industry, and in the 1870’s, decided to fill a niche once satisfied by importing greeting cards from Germany. Before long, their Christmas, New Years and Valentine’s Day cards were a hit across the country, and the company grew to become the third largest greeting card manufacturer in the US. In 1995, Gibson merged with American Greetings.
  2. It was probably a good omen for night baseball that the home team beat the Philadelphia Phillies on May 24th, 1935. The feat had been accomplished in the minor leagues five years earlier, but the Cincinnati squad was the first team in the majors to start the latest trend. 25,000 fans were on hand at Crosley Field that night as President Franklin Roosevelt threw the switch and started a new phase of baseball history. The Chicago Cubs were the only team that didn’t follow suit, at least until 1988, when they finally installed lights at Wrigley Field.
  3. Actress Sarah Jessica Parker, who already had a successful career prior to “Sex and the City” in 1998, became a show biz superstar when he took on the role of Manhattan sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw in the HBO series. The Nelsonville, Ohio native had, after all, been performing since she was a kid in the 1970’s. She appeared on Broadway in the hit musical, “Annie,” shortly after relocating from Cincinnati to New York City. Her parents, both native New Yorkers, raised Sarah and her seven siblings in Cincinnati, where Sarah gravitated early to ballet and musical theater. Parker had a long relationship with fellow actor Robert Downey, Jr., before marrying current husband Matthew Broderick in 1997.