Rosenbush Café

Edwin Rosenbush’s Café was comprised of an ordinary menu but often with extraordinary additions and Canned Rattlesnake tops my personal list among the more peculiar varieties of food available.

Naturally, there were plenty of farm fresh eggs, home grown vegetables and meat from local cattlemen but Edwin would stock single items he felt may one day attract customers. There were the truck drivers in the 1930s and 1940s that Edwin let park nearby after they gassed up their rigs at his single pump of Ethel and he was well known for secreting bottles of white lightning for special customers. After all, truck drivers delivered his stock and he knew how to keep them happy and coming back to the Café.

My father, Bernard, worked for Uncle Edwin during summers in the 1920s, while attending high school and into the 1930s while attending The University of Alabama, and returned to helped out after serving in the Army during WW II.

Dad was always quick with entertaining anecdotes oft told the tale Canned Rattlesnake.

As the yarn was always spun, Edwin only had one can and it appeared on the lunch and dinner menus for years. Dad would frequently see the item still on the menu and would question the logic:

“You may never sell it,” he would say to which Edwin always replied that “Someday someone is going to come here and want it and we’ll will have it!”

No story like this would be complete unless someone finally did come in and want it: sure enough one day a traveling salesman, who had never eaten at Rosenbush Café, came in and immediately commented how much he loved the canned serpent. Edwin was naturally enthused as the salesman remarked how he couldn’t find it anywhere in all of his travels across the southeast.

The man left satiated and satisfied.

Edwin promptly took the lunch and dinner menus, and with his fountain pen, he marked it off never to offer it again. Although dad was not at the restaurant that day Edwin made certain he knew calling on the telephone to say, “Bernard, we finally sold the Canned Rattlesnake.”

Dad replied, “That’s nice.”