COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Liz Rosenbaum went from history to Her Story.
She was a high school history teacher in Widefield when the budget ax fell. Now she’s making and selling, among other dishes, Rosie the Riveter’s Beef Stew, Sally Ride’s Blastt and Jane Goodall banana pudding.
Undoubtedly you’ve detected a theme here—strong women. Since April, Rosenbaum has been operating a mobile delicatessen, the Her Story Cafe, a luncheon truck that has a regular route (see ) around town. She sells a variety of items, but it all comes under the heading of “herstorical lunches.”
Like many in the down economy, she was laid off.
“I used to teach high school history in District 3,” Rosenbaum said, “and I’d been subbing and reinventing myself.”
Rosenbaum credits You Gotta Love It Market for helping her get started, and she says her family has pitched in a lot. You have to admire her pluck—it always takes guts for anybody to shift gears, exchanging one career for another—and this is a difficult time to start a new business.
Her regular route takes her to corporate campuses where there a lot of workers. On a recent Thursday she was at the Patriot Park Business Center.
Rosenbaum is a couple of notches up the food chain from those mobile vendors one might see at a construction site, selling hot dogs, burritos, soft drinks and chips. She gets various kinds of fresh bread from local bakeries and makes her own sauces and side dishes, including an exquisite German potato salad. There’s not a potato chip in sight.
How brisk the business is depends a bit on the weather, but Rosenbaum said, “I don’t really have a lot of competition.”
She pays a vendor fee to get exclusive rights to selected parking lots. Her truck has appeared at such events as Meadowgrass and the Pro Cycling Challenge. Eventually, Rosenbaum said she would like to have a bricks-and-mortar location, but she wants to keep the cafe on the road for about two years first.
She’s not wistful about her teaching career. The 50 hours she puts in every week are less than she worked as a teacher.
“I’m definitely happy doing this,” she said. “Some of my teacher friends have 35 kids in class. I don’t miss that. With this I’m my own boss.”
Her dream is to be in a historic building where she could showcase notable women in history, especially local women. For now, her mobile kitchen has quotations from famous women scrawled on the walls, Rosenbaum’s own motivational graffiti.
Her favorite: “You can do this and it matters.” —Rosa Parks.
