Q&A on the News

The chain has about 30 stores and 500 employees in Baltimore, where it has had a presence since the mid-1990s, The Washington Post reported.

CVS has “a long history of serving inner city communities and we are 100 percent committed to serving our patients and customers in Baltimore,” president and CEO Larry Merlo said in a statement.

CVS paid its workers at those stores for their scheduled hours during the weeks of the riots.

Q: I recently was in a classroom where the students were using sticky notes for research, marking passages, etc. I thought, “Why didn’t I think of this?” And then thought, “Who came up with this ingenious idea and why?”

—Kathy McDonough, Peachtree Corners

A: Spencer Silver, a chemist with 3M, was searching for what he told CNN.com was "bigger, stronger, tougher adhesives" in 1968.

Instead, he developed an adhesive with a “removability characteristic.”

He could stick it to surfaces, peel it off and then reapply it.

In 1974, colleague Art Fry was looking for a way to keep his bookmarks from falling out of the hymnal he used at church.

Fry took Silver’s adhesive and applied it to pieces of paper, creating the Post-It Note.

After a few years of testing, 3M released Post-It Notes in 1980.

Andy Johnston wrote this column. Do you have a question about the news? We’ll try to get the answer. Call 404-222-2002 or email q&a@ajc.com (include name, phone and city).