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THE AT-HOME wedding reception is going beautifully: the bride is blushing; the groom is handsome; the bride's mother is teary-eyed and her father is wondering how much all of this is going to cost. Everything is perfectly normal until suddenly disaster strikes. With the New Orleans' heat and the way in which New Orleanians drink, the hosts have run out of ice. In the past, such poor planning would have spelled catastrophe, but, in 1987, a morning-suit-clad younger brother is quickly dispatched to the nearest convenience store to pick up a few bags of Crazy Cubes -- saving the day and the champagne.
Those few bags are just part of the 15,000 retail bags of Crazy Cubes ice shipped out daily from Pelican Ice & Cold Storage Inc.'s icehouse on Howard Avenue. The oldest block ice company in New Orleans, Pelican was founded in 1902 by the grandfather of present president and co-owner Daniel Behre.
A third-generation iceman, Behre, 66, used to have his own ice route carrying blocks of ice to homes with iceboxes. Although refrigeration has ended that phase of the business, Pelican still manufactures up to 120 tons of block and 75 tons of package ice a day -- generating a cool $2 million in sales yearly.
"Approximately 60 percent -- 2.5 million bags yearly -- of our annual volume now is packaged ice with 90 percent of that being retail ice which we market under the name Crazy Cubes," Behre explains. The product name was reportedly coined by a truck driver who, upon seeing newly installed equipment spouting irregular pieces of ice 20 feet into the air in all directions, said, "Oh, boy! Those ain't cubes, and the boss is going crazy!"
Crazy Cubes are now uniformly manufactured in Vogt tubes. Pelican sales manager Mary Minor explains today's cubes are "a clean, good-looking product" made with holes in the center and flattened ends. This increased surface area provides maximum cooling of a drink, she says. According to Behre, it's the second-best type of ice around -- better than plate ice but still not as good as his first love, block ice.
Due to its aeration process, Pelican's 300-pound blocks of ice are frozen from the outside in. Any dirt or...