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Questioning everything

MRHC stages trivia competition marking 100th anniversary, National Library Week

Above, the Marquette Regional History Center hosted “100 Years, 100 Questions” Wednesday night, attracting nearly 100 people to participate in the trivia night. Nancy Henderson, center, and Linda Dionne, right, ponder a question with their teammates. (Journal photo by Rachel Oakley)

MARQUETTE — It was a night of trivia and treats at the Marquette Regional History Center Wednesday when it hosted “100 Years, 100 Questions.” More than 15 groups of four to six people gathered to participate in the competition.

The event was held in celebration of National Library Week and the MRHC’s 100th birthday.

“We decided to do a trivia night using library resources to come up with questions about Marquette’s history and we thought 100 questions for our 100 years would be fun,” said Beth Gruber, research librarian for MRHC’s J.M. Longyear Research Library.

Ten rounds, each with 10 questions, covered different categories. The last question of each round was “Jeopardy style, where (teams) can bet their points, and win that many points or lose that many points,” Gruber said.

“We are going to be covering all sorts of things — from Native American early settlement all the way up to sports, famous people from Marquette, buildings, roads,” Gruber said. “We’re doing a pretty wide range.”

Local businesses and organizations donated prizes and awards for the event, including Dead River Coffee, Everyday Wines, Zephyr, Getz’s, Marquette Baking Company, Snowbound Books, Superior Outfitters, Queen City Running Company, Spice Merchants, EconoFoods, Big Boy, The Gathered Earth, Boomerang Retro & Relics, Art of Framing and Yoop-Phoria, Gruber said.

“We’ve been working on the questions for about a month and a half, two months,” Gruber said. “Most of the staff were involved with either coming up with questions or proofreading. Some of (the questions) I was told were too hard, so those got taken out. Some of them were turned into multiple choice to make them a little bit easier, but there’s still some hard ones.”

Gruber talked about the process of coming up with questions for the event, saying that she used library resources to find “random little tidbits. Things like dates on when buildings were built or who said what; there are some quotes that are kind of famous in the area … We do a trivia question with our Mining Journal column every week, so that kind of helped.”

Gruber said the last time they had a trivia event like this was more than five years ago.

The history center’s next event is called “Explosion!!” It will be held at 6:30 p.m. May 9 and details the lead-up and aftermath of the explosion of a boxcar loaded with nitroglycerin on a stretch of track west of Negaunee in 1878.

More information can be found at marquette history.org.

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