Cincinnati does not get enough credit.
People who have never been there think of it as a flyover city, somewhere between Columbus and Louisville, vaguely Midwestern, easy to miss. People who know it know better. Cincinnati is one of those places that has quietly built things the rest of the country depends on, invented things the rest of the country copied, and fed people in ways the rest of the country still cannot quite replicate no matter how hard they try.
Let me show you what I mean.
🍝 The Chili Wars
Cincinnati chili is not what you think chili is. It is a Greek spiced meat sauce served over spaghetti, topped with a mountain of shredded cheddar, and it has been sparking passionate arguments about allegiances since 1922 when the Kiradjieff brothers opened Empress Chili next to a vaudeville theater in downtown Cincinnati and changed the city forever.
What followed was a chili empire. Families in Cincinnati do not just eat chili. They belong to a chili. They are Skyline people or Gold Star people or Camp Washington people, and they will tell you about it with the same conviction other people use to talk about religion or football. That kind of loyalty to something delicious, passed from parent to child across generations, is its own kind of legacy.
🧼 The Brands in Every Home
Procter and Gamble did not just build a company in Cincinnati. They built an institution. The products that come out of that company have been in American bathrooms, kitchens, and laundry rooms for generations. Folgers coffee. Coast Soap. Tide. Crest. The fingerprints of Cincinnati are on the products that start your day.
But here is the part of the Procter story that most people miss. When the founding families wanted to ensure their community and their faith would outlast them, they did not just donate money. They essentially wrote their own life insurance policy by heavily endowing Christ Church Glendale, putting a permanent financial foundation in place so that everything they cared about most would survive long after they were gone. That is not a business strategy. That is love made into a plan. That is legacy work.
⚾ The Birthplace of Professional Baseball
Cincinnati did not just play baseball. It invented the professional game. The Cincinnati Reds are the oldest professional baseball franchise in America, and cheering for them is not just a summer pastime in the Queen City. It is a tradition that parents hand to children like a name or a recipe, generation after generation, Opening Day feeling like a civic holiday every single year.
📡 The Tower That Told the World the Truth
Just north of Cincinnati in West Chester, the federal government built one of the most powerful radio transmission stations ever constructed. The Voice of America Bethany Relay Station broadcast news and information to occupied Europe and beyond during World War II, powered by Cincinnati engineers and Cincinnati ingenuity. Adolf Hitler hated the signal so much he called the broadcasters "those Zinzinnati liars." They were not lying. That was exactly the point.
📺 A Political Story Worth Telling
Long before he became a daytime television icon, Jerry Springer served as the Mayor of Cincinnati in the 1970s. The city has never been short on characters with stories worth telling.
All of it, the chili dynasties, the baseball tradition, the soap empire, the radio towers that carried truth across an ocean, adds up to something bigger than tourism. It adds up to a portrait of what people build when they decide the people who come after them deserve something solid to stand on.
We spend so much of our lives building our careers, our homes, and our families. Statistically, the odds are in our favor. Roughly 85 percent of us will make it to age 65 to see the fruits of that labor.* But what happens to the families of the other 15 percent? A true legacy is not just about what you accumulate. It is about what survives you.
Life insurance is not just a policy. It is the promise that if your adulthood stops too soon, their childhood does not have to. It is the peace of mind that the house stays their home, their education stays funded, and the foundation you worked so hard to build stays rock solid. The founding families of Cincinnati understood that. They did not just build things. They protected them.
*Statistic based on the Social Security Administration Actuarial Period Life Table, which indicates that depending on gender, approximately 80 to 87 percent of Americans survive from early adulthood to age 65.
Ohio does not appear on my birth certificate. It is not in my college transcripts or on any official document that describes where I came from. But Ohio, and Cincinnati and the surrounding region in particular, raised a significant part of who I actually became.
My great grandmother Carrie spent her entire career at Procter and Gamble, the same company I just told you about. My great grandfather Robert lived near the WLW radio tower in Mason, Ohio, the same Crosley Broadcasting operation that the federal government called on to build and operate the Voice of America transmitters. My great grandfather Brownie left the West Virginia coal mines and built a new life for our family in Cincinnati, eventually working at the gigantic Goodwill on Springfield Pike in Woodlawn.
Three great grandparents. Three different corners of the same region. All of them woven into the very institutions and landmarks I just described to you. That is not a coincidence I researched. That is my bloodline.
And then there were the weekends. I went to college at the University of Kentucky, and I spent more weekends than I can count driving north on I-75 to Germantown, Ohio, where cousins and family filled rooms the way that only extended Midwestern families can. Middletown. Germantown. The whole corridor of small cities between Cincinnati and Dayton where people work hard and take care of each other and do not make a lot of noise about it.
Those drives, those kitchens, those people, they did not just shape me informally. They were a key part of who I became. The values I carry into every conversation I have about life insurance, about protecting families, about building something that lasts, those values have Ohio in them.
I was never the hero of any of these stories. Brownie was. Carrie was. Robert was. The families I drove up 75 to spend time with were.
But I can be someone's guide.
And that is exactly what I am here to do.
Building a legacy does not happen by accident. It takes a little planning and the right guide. Whether you are just starting to explore your options or you are ready to put a policy in place today, we are here to help you get it done right.
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If you love Cincinnati history the way I do, there is a Facebook group called Cincinnati Now and Then that is one of the best corners of the internet for anyone who wants to see what the city looked like decades ago and understand how it became what it is today. Old photographs, neighborhood memories, lost landmarks, and the kind of storytelling that only comes from people who actually lived it.
Every now and then you will find me posting there.
