Welcome to Money Talks, a series in which we interview people about their relationship with money, their relationship with each other, and how those relationships inform one another. Cheryl Roorda is 51 years old; her husband, Zac Smith, is 52, and together they have two grown children. After a decades-long career as independent musicians, Cheryl and Zac opened SQZBX Brewery and Pizza Joint in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
The restaurant has been in business for nearly seven years. The following conversation has been lightly condensed and edited. Zac: We’ve been running SQZBX for about six-and-a-half years, but we’ve been working on it for a lot longer than that.
Cheryl: Since 2007. Zac: That’s when we purchased an extremely broken building on Ouachita Avenue in Hot Springs. It was an old piano shop, and the previous owner was getting out of the business and retiring.
Cheryl: It was full of musical instruments, so we were delighted because we were working musicians at the time. Zac: Cheryl played the accordion, and I played a tuba-like instrument called an E-flat helicon. We had a regular gig at a German restaurant.
The name of our band was The Itinerant Locals, and every summer we’d throw the kids in the car and drive around America playing wherever we could set up gigs. We did specialty tours — we did a tour on Amtrak where we spent 45 days riding the trains around America and playing, we did a tour on a solar-powered boat down the Ouachita River, we joined a circus and .