What it means to miss New Orleans
Benjamin Jaffe
Preservation Hall, New Orleans
Benjamin Jaffe is one of the lucky ones. His business—landmark music venue Preservation Hall— suffered no physical damage from the double-whammy of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last August. The wrought-iron-gated, 256-year-old building, which sits three blocks from the Mississippi River, was unscathed. He, his wife and two dogs rode out the storm safely in their home, which also remained intact.
Yet the economic and emotional impact of the storms has been dramatic, Jaffe says. Late fall and winter—a big season for conventions in addition to the holidays and the Sugar Bowl—would have been a busy time for the music hall, Jaffe, 34, told Family Business in late November. The telephone interview was abruptly cut off when Jaffe’s phone went dead, as he warned it might. Three months after the storms, electricity and phone service continued to cut in and out.
Jaffe was planning to keep the venerable music hall shut indefinitely. He guesses he had lost 30% of annual revenue by November. Before the storms, Preservation Hall was generating less than $10 million from nightly concerts, a record label launched in 2004 and tours by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, which lost its $500,000, 45-foot tour vehicle in the hurricane.
Jaffe doubts that New Orleans’ other busy tourist season—which traditionally lasts from February through May and includes Mardi Gras, the French Quarter Festival and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, plus assorted conventions—will draw enough visitors to allow him to open his doors.
“Even though we could physically open tomorrow, there are not enough people living in New Orleans to support Preservation Hall,” he said in November.
Jaffe expects it will take up to 18 months for New Orleans to get back to normal. He’s quick to add, “Your idea of normal changes.” The few hotels that reopened in the fall housed construction workers and cleanup crews. “Their tastes in food and entertainment don’t reflect the tastes of people who used to live here,” Jaffe notes. “We’re not the type of business that’s thriving now in New Orleans.”
Jaffe’s venue does not offer or permit food, alcohol or cigarettes. He is determined to keep providing affordable ($8 tickets) and authentic New Orleans-style jazz to families, the mission that inspired his parents, Allan and Sandra, to open Preservation Hall in 1961. Jaffe has run the hall since 1993, six years after his father passed away. His mother, 67, though retired, still serves as a consultant to the company, and his aunt Resa, 63, does administrative tasks.
Many of Jaffe’s five full-time and seven part-time employees have had to move away to find other work or schooling for their children. “We’re not a McDonald’s,” says Jaffe. “We can’t just go out and find employees easily. We’re a culturally based facility. And now the communities that provide the culture that produces music do not exist.”
About 70% of local musicians lost their homes, Jaffe estimates. He has accounted for his employees, as well as his fellow members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. (He plays stand-up bass.) But it took ten days to track down bandleader and trumpet player John Brunious, 65, who spent several nights at the New Orleans Convention Center without food or water after escaping his home, which flooded. Brunious ended up in an Arkansas hospital, dehydrated. In late November he showed up in donated clothes and a borrowed trumpet to perform the jazz standard “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” at a fund-raiser in New York City. But he could not sing; his voice was too raw.
No wonder Jaffe has turned much of his attention to the New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund, which he established to support local musicians who lost their homes, clothes and instruments (www.nomhrf.org). The relief fund is producing a series of fund-raising performances around the country. “It’s our way of making sure to keep the spotlight on New Orleans musicians, one of the ingredients that makes New Orleans home,” Jaffe says.
Premature birth and death
Chad Riemann
Gulf Coast Funeral Homes Inc., Pass Christian, Miss.
One month after the hurricanes, Chad Riemann left Riemann Funeral Homes, which had been in his family for 85 years, and opened Gulf Coast Funeral Homes. “We left everything we had built and started again,” says Riemann, 32.
Four of the six Riemann Funeral Home locations—from Biloxi to Bay St. Louis, Miss.—were destroyed. Two were completely gutted. One was under ten feet of water. The only traces of the fourth destroyed funeral home are brick stairs. But that’s not why the Riemann family left the company. Though they had sold out to a conglomerate in 1990, Riemann had continued to manage the six facilities along with his father, David, 55, and his uncle Mike, 50. They all resigned in late September after an unsuccessful attempt to repurchase the business.
“I would have rather taken the financial burden from this storm if I could have taken back that business,” says Riemann, whose father and uncle have not joined him in the new enterprise.
The family originally thought that joining forces with a larger company would give them access to more resources and provide better benefits for their employees, Riemann explains. “We felt it was in the best interest of our employees and our family at the time,” he says. But “it didn’t turn out to be what we thought it would be,” he says simply. He mentions corporate policies and procedures as a source of disagreement between the family and the conglomerate.
The night before the hurricane hit, Riemann, his pregnant wife, their 16-month-old twins and his father stayed in one of facilities that survived—although that building also suffered some damage to its front door and roof. Several staffers were riding out the storm in the main facility, whose roof was torn off. Thankfully, everyone was OK. But Riemann’s wife went into labor on Monday during the storm—two months early. They followed an ambulance to the hospital and managed to stop her labor, at least for a few days. Three days later she gave birth, 150 miles away in Jackson, where there was a hospital with a generator. She and the newborn, along with the twins, stayed in Jackson with Riemann’s mother for several weeks.
Riemann and his staff—at one time, 15 people including Riemann and his father and uncle—were living at the funeral home, sleeping on air mattresses and bathing with a water hose. About half had no homes to go back to.
Even the half who had not lost their homes found it was easier to stay at work because there were so many hurricane victims to attend to. Before the storms, the six facilities handled an average of 20 deaths per week. Suddenly, the two functioning facilities had to handle 35 to 40 deaths per week (though not all were directly related to the storm). Funeral directors from around the country flew in to help—some staying for a few days, some for two weeks.
They used refrigerated trucks because they couldn’t bury people for a week, until the debris could be removed to gain access to the cemeteries. Riemann was so busy that he couldn’t take time to see his newborn or the rest of his family. “I was there when she was born and stayed for three days,” he says, “but it was a week before I could drive up to Jackson to see them again for a day.” After that, he didn’t see them for three weeks. They were able to return when power was restored to his riverside home, which barely avoided flooding because it sits on stilts.
His new funeral home is in a former wedding chapel that had not been badly hurt by the hurricane. The building had initially been a funeral home. The facility, which had been vacant for several years, needed some renovations and cleaning, and supplies had to be ordered. One week after he closed on the purchase, he opened the doors.
Although he couldn’t put the family name on Gulf Coast Funeral Home, Riemann says he feels as if he’s coming full circle, “just like my great-grandparents, when they started their funeral home in 1920. And that’s OK.”
We’ll be back
Bobby Mahoney
Mary Mahoney’s Old French House Restaurant, Biloxi, Miss.
Even John Grisham, who mentioned Mary Mahoney’s Old French House Restaurant in two novels, probably could not imagine the macabre series of crises the Mahoney family endured during Katrina.
Four days before the storm, Bobby Mahoney’s 81-year-old father passed away; his funeral took place two days before Katrina came raging into town. The flooding caused his body to float out of the mausoleum. “There was so much going on, there was no time to grieve,” recalls Mahoney, 59, general manager of the fine-dining establishment his parents founded in 1964. Along with his sister, uncle, cousins, son and daughters, Mahoney operated a 400-seat restaurant, an Irish pub, a café and a gift shop.
During the storm, Mahoney was standing in front of a window on the second-floor apartment above the family’s pub and café, watching the water rise up to 30 feet. Suddenly a wave crashed in the glass, knocked him 15 feet and planted a 3½-inch-long, one-inch-wide glass shard in his gluteus maximus. He had to lie on the floor for four hours. Even though the hospital was just around the corner, the storm was too fierce for him to venture out.
After Katrina, Mahoney’s brother-in-law was bitten by a copperhead snake when he reached inside his flooded jeep to get a battery for the restaurant’s generator. That landed him in the hospital for seven days.
All 120 employees survived the storm. But one staffer, 65-year-old Lionel Burbridge, had perched on a table with his elderly sister in their flooded home to keep dry. She fell off the table and drowned.
The fine-dining restaurant, in Biloxi’s oldest building (circa 1737), did not sustain much structural damage. Even the 2,000-year-old live oak tree out front survived. But Mahoney says he doesn’t have insurance to cover the $300,000 to $500,000 worth of equipment and sheet rock that were destroyed by water and mud.
He had enough cash to hire 20 people to clean up, do some repairs and paint the restaurant walls. Friends from Pensacola, Fla., dropped off Gatorade, water, Vienna sausages and chicken salad—“basic essentials you need to survive,” Mahoney says.
The restaurant reopened in early November. The first customers included some locals, some out-of-town insurance adjusters and Federal Emergency Management Agency workers.
As of November, Mahoney had no clue when he’d begin cleaning and renovating the café. (“We need to get a little cash flow going first,” he said.) His family lives above it. After the storm, they used only the rooms that face north, because the south-facing rooms had flooded from water crashing in through the windows.
Mahoney does not plan to reopen the pub. He guesses it will take a year until his businesses, which grossed about $6 million a year before Katrina, begin humming as they had before the storm. Nine nearby casinos, which drew many of Mahoney’s customers, were badly destroyed; three were scheduled to open in December.
Despite all the turmoil, Mahoney’s optimism is evident. The words “We’ll be back” were spray-painted on the restaurant’s outside wall after the storm.
The calm after the storm
Greg Ladnier
Sea Pearl Seafood Inc., Bayou La Batre, Ala.
In the movie Forrest Gump, Forrest winds up working on a shrimp trawler in the serene, lush coastal town of Bayou La Batre, on the southwestern tip of Alabama. Since Hurricane Katrina hit, that town of about 2,500 residents has been anything but tranquil. Many homes occupied by large, extended families were destroyed or badly damaged. About 85% of the town’s economy is tied to the seafood industry, which will take years to recover.
Yet Greg Ladnier, 52, the president of Sea Pearl Seafood, seems unruffled. “This is what we pay to live in God’s country,” he says. “If you live on the water you know you’re going to get hurricanes, just like if you live in Los Angeles you’re going to have earthquakes.”
Ladnier runs the 40-year-old business with his wife, Janice, 44, and his sister Suzanne Wilson, 47. His first cousin Brenda Seaman, 50, is the quality-control manager. His brother-in-law Eddie Wilson, 47, and his uncle Leon, 58, are plant managers. The company was founded by Ladnier’s father, Joseph, 74, who retired six years ago.
“People in this town make a living on the water and understand and respect the water. So they’ll move at the last minute to higher ground,” says Ladnier, whose inland home fared fine.
But he reports that his shrimp packaging and processing company lost about $2 million to $3 million in appliances and supplies; the losses were covered by insurance. His main building, immersed in about eight feet of water, was badly damaged. Also lost were two months’ worth of production, which would have generated sales of about 750,000 pounds each month. That cost Ladnier $4 million or so in lost sales.
Even so, his losses could have been far greater had he and some of his 70 employees not moved their equipment inside the weekend before the storm. They brought in pallets and vats, and secured the boats.
There’s an advantage to being a small, locally owned family business, Ladnier says: “We call the shots. One of us will make a decision and do it right then. Large companies have to type a memo and wait for a response back. It’s hard to respond under those circumstances.”
Ladnier says he signed employees up for unemployment insurance right away. He kept a few on the payroll for three weeks, while they attended to personal matters. Within seven weeks, the company was back in business. It was relatively easy to resume operations because Ladnier does not own any trawlers; his company just processes shrimp. Others in the business weren’t so lucky. About ten trawlers sank, and 34 were still beached in Bayou La Batre as of late November.
Few processing facilities were able to get ice and fuel by that date. Bayou La Batre was one of the first ports of call where trawlers from Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina could sell their shrimp. “If we’d been 40 miles closer to the center” of the storm, Ladnier says, “it would have been a different story.”
Flooded in milk
Jeffrey A. Kleinpeter
Kleinpeter Farms Dairy LLC, Baton Rouge, La.
Baton Rouge-based Kleinpeter Farms Dairy was not directly hit by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But the dairy processing business has experienced overwhelming side effects from the storms, according to its president, Jeffrey Kleinpeter.
In anticipation of the storms and possible power disruptions, the dairy got busy producing plastic containers around the clock for four days. Its back-up generator could run refrigerators and packaging equipment, but not the container-making plant. And storm or not, Kleinpeter would need containers; weather doesn’t stop cows from producing milk.
Many people from New Orleans who lost their homes traveled 80 miles north to Baton Rouge, causing its population to double to 800,000. As of November, it had leveled off at 650,000. “Those people don’t have homes to go to,” says Kleinpeter, 46, who put up nine evacuees from New Orleans for three weeks.
The increased local population caused a spurt in demand for processed milk. “We’re the only dairy here with a back-up generator on-site,” Kleinpeter says, “so we were the only one that could package milk.” Kleinpeter Farms has 600 cows and also processes and packages milk from outside suppliers. Kleinpeter says he’s proud that the dairy never missed a delivery to his mostly institutional customers. The electricity cut out for four days, but Kleinpeter Farms was able to package its normal amount of milk (200,000 gallons per week). Additional business from nearby farms totaled 500,000 gallons per week.
Even with the back-up generator, the power outage was a huge disruption. “We had to monitor it 24 hours a day,” Kleinpeter says. Because the generator could handle only 60% of the dairy’s need at a time, the staff had to switch off between refrigerating and packaging the milk.
Kleinpeter, in the midst of managing an increased workload, worried about his 110 employees. Many—including several cousins—live in the north shore area, where the storm cut a path. He and his sister Sue Anne Kleinpeter Cox, 49, the dairy’s secretary, treasurer, office manager and only other voting shareholder, put some employees up at an apartment at the dairy farm for about a week. They called employees’ cell phones and pagers to check up on them. Five lost their homes and had to relocate. To replace them and handle the extra business, Kleinpeter hired seven new people. Instead of the usual packaging schedule of 18 hours a day, four days a week, his plant operated daily around the clock for three weeks.
Before the hurricane, Kleinpeter Farms had a 25% share of the market. Virtually overnight, that figure boomed to 100%; it has since leveled off to about 45%. In 2004, Kleinpeter Farms generated $21 million in revenue. Kleinpeter couldn’t predict how high the 2005 figure would rise. “We better have made extra profit, or there’s no sense doing it,” he says.
Kleinpeter says he doesn’t see an end to the pace. “I don’t think we’ll ever see normal again because New Orleans has been so devastated.”
Jayne A. Pearl, a freelance writer, editor and speaker (www.jaynepearl.com), is the author of Kids and Money: Giving Them the Savvy to Succeed Financially and a workbook based on her seminar, How to Gimme-Proof Your Kids.