I was born in White Plains, New York, but I grew up in Omaha, my parents’ hometown. Nebraska is the heart of America’s breadbasket, although none of us were farmers. Rather, my father, who was the son of a US congressman, was busy building a financial investment empire piece by piece while I was busy playing with Tonka trucks and collecting Cub Scout merit badges.
One of the most often repeated “factoids” that intrigue people about my father is that he still lives in the Dundee neighborhood house in Omaha where he and my late mother, Susan, raised my sister, Susie, and my younger brother, Peter, and me. It’s a nice, two-story, five-bedroom brick house in a neighborhood of similar homes. It’s not what most folks would probably consider a billionaire’s house. When I was growing up, there were five of us—my parents and us three kids—which left one extra bedroom. And as I’ve thought about some of the experiences that helped shape what I’m doing today, that extra bedroom played a surprisingly important role.
A lot has been written about my father—some of it even true. My dad is a financial genius but also a no-frills, commonsense kind of guy. It’s his belief that people should make their own way in the world, and my sister, my brother, and I have always known that we were not destined to live a life fueled by unlimited spending allowances and luxury. When asked, he would say he was figuring out how to give us enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing.
I respect that. And I would add that my dad is a lot of fun and has the greatest sense of humor of anyone I know. He does almost nothing that is considered extravagant, so some people say he is cheap. One of his standing jokes is, “I don’t buy cheap suits; they just look cheap on me.”
I had a normal childhood. I was never hungry, and I never lacked any basics as a child or teen. But we never did much of what you might consider fancy. Vacations were often long trips in the family station wagon, where we fought and whined and drove our parents nuts. One memorable adventure was a trip to Massachusetts so that my dad could take a look at the textile company called Berkshire Hathaway, which he was considering as an investment. My vivid memory of the trip was that each of us was allowed to take one toy or book in the car. I chose a big coloring book but discovered at one point that it was fun to hold it out the window and listen to the pages flap. My dad kept saying, “Howie, you’re going to lose it, and I’m not buying you another one.” I did—and he didn’t.
My dad supported my education and my desire to travel. He encouraged all three of us to pursue our interests, and he gave us help and support, but few handouts. We made a deal that I would get no birthday or Christmas gifts for three years, and when I graduated from high school, he would give me $5,000 toward my first car. I earned the other $2,500 myself. When I realized in my twenties that I wanted to farm, he purchased some land near Omaha—and I paid him a competitive rent that he insisted return 5 percent annually on his investment.
For all of my dad’s success as an investor, he didn’t talk about it much at home except in the sense of life lessons that were aligned with his investing philosophy. The idea of investing for the long term was a frequent theme, as was paying attention to basic underlying value, not some quick hit. I think he was always more intrigued with value as opposed to money itself. He’d say, “You know, Howie, it can take thirty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” He did not subject us to nightly investing seminars or lectures about cash flow. In fact, my sister tells the story of how she once filled out a form at Dundee Elementary School when we were kids, and under my father’s occupation, my mom told her to write “securities analyst.” According to Susie, “The other kids saw that and thought it meant he went around inspecting burglar alarms.” Somehow I got the idea that it meant my dad was a security guard, and I think I told Peter, and the two of us thought that was pretty cool—although I’m not sure why we didn’t ask where his gun was, why he didn’t wear a uniform, and how he could protect the security of anything but us, since he spent so much time reading and on the phone.
My mother was a loving, caring person who looked out for us and made sure we stayed on track. In my case, this was sometimes a challenge. I was a high-energy kid with a healthy dose of rebel in me. I once did something obnoxious when I was a teenager, and she sent me to my bedroom and locked the door with a key from the outside. She said she wanted me to think about my behavior for a few hours. I climbed out the window, went to a local hardware store where we had an account, bought a bolt lock on credit, climbed back up into my room, and installed it on the inside of the door, thus preventing her from entering when my sentence was up. I look back and wonder where she found the patience to put up with me.
My mother helped us develop an appreciation for the world beyond our own yard and beyond Omaha as well. And that’s where the extra bedroom comes in. She had a curious spirit and a generous soul, and when I was a young child, she started hosting exchange students studying at what was referred to locally as Omaha University (now the University of Nebraska Omaha campus). Over the years, a half dozen or so exchange students stayed with us for several months at a time. The first I remember was an elegant young African woman named Sarah El Mahdi, who was from Sudan.I It was 1960, and I was only five, so I can’t recall many details. I can picture her in her colorful print scarves and dresses, although my sharpest memory overwhelms any other: while Sarah was there, I was stung by a bee for the first time. I remember being terrified and in pain. She took care of me.
BILLY CLUBS AND LONG LINES
Another exchange student who stayed with us would make a more lasting impact on my life. Vera Vitvarová was from Prague, Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. She stayed with my family during a dramatic and tumultuous period in her country’s history. The brief “Prague Spring” flowering of intellectuals and writers and a more liberal government in Czechoslovakia began in early 1968. There was great optimism that reforms might take hold in this Iron Curtain country, but USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev was having none of that. By August, he had sent hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops to invade and occupy the country, many concentrated in Prague.
Vera joined us shortly before the invasion. Her family wrote letters about the developments, and wire service and television reports described the turmoil in Prague. I recall that the Beatles’ song “Back in the U.S.S.R.” was popular during the time she stayed with us. I liked it, but Vera would become upset and ask me to turn it off whenever it came on the radio.
I turned fourteen in December while Vera lived with us. Susie was a year and a half older, and she was more involved with her own friends and high school life, and Peter was too young to pay much attention to Vera. But when she left in the late spring of 1969, she invited us to visit her family in Prague. I wanted to go.
My mother was against it. I can’t remember exactly how much detail we had seen on television or in the newspapers, but she knew it was a volatile situation. We forget how much time it used to take news to travel and how cursory news from abroad could be. It wasn’t anything like the speed of information we have today. I kept asking and arguing with my mom. I remember one day my dad was sitting in the living room listening to us while reading the newspaper, and he finally put it down and said, “Susan-O [his nickname for my mom], let him go. I think it will be a good experience.”
Off I went by myself to Prague for a month. From almost the moment I arrived, I realized that our family had not understood the magnitude of what was going on there. As we taxied down the runway on arrival, I saw tanks and other military vehicles and army personnel all around the airport. I’ve always been fascinated with big iron anything, and I thought that was cool. But after I got off the plane and walked toward Immigration, there was a big soldier with a gun and a grim look on his face checking passports. For the first time in my life, I felt very alone. “Will they let me in? What if he does not let me through? What if Vera is not there to meet me?” I did not speak Czech; cell phones weren’t around then. My adventure took on a new edge. Vera and her family ap
peared, and I could relax a little, but the mood on the ground among passengers and airport and military personnel was stressed and intense. I would soon learn some of the reasons why.
Vera’s family lived in a fourth-floor flat in a building about a half hour from the Old Town area of Prague. Her father, Milos, had what was then considered a good government job as general manager of an import-export company and made the equivalent of about $120 a month. Her mother, also named Vera, and sister, Helena, lived in the apartment. Her cousin Jarslov lived with them as well. By moving Jarslov to the living room floor, I ended up with my own bed, on a couch in Milos’ den. The family also had a sign of affluence at the time: the only television in the building.
There were so many “foreign” impressions that are vivid in my mind to this day, such as no hot water. We could bathe only once a week, and had to boil water on a stove and pour it into a bathtub. But my most vivid memory was about the food. There wasn’t much of it. I’d had no idea just how difficult life had become in Prague since the Soviet invasion.1 I’m not sure that even Vera had either, since she had spent most of the previous year with us. I went to the grocery store with her several times and can remember standing in line for two or three hours just to get in, and then being able to buy only a small amount of potatoes and bread. We had money, but the shelves were practically bare. I was used to having unlimited amounts of food anytime I wanted it. During my month there, I don’t think we ate more than twice a day, and often just those same starchy, bland items. I remember asking, “Why can’t we get hamburger or some kind of meat?”
“Because the Soviet army eats first,” Vera replied. “They take all the meat and most of the vegetables. We just get what is left.”
Prague had a surreal quality. There were tanks in the street, bullet holes in the walls of buildings, and soldiers everywhere. I once watched as a group of young people in a square protested the occupation of their country. Several black vehicles pulled up, and men got out and attacked the protesters with billy clubs. This was the first time I remember feeling as though I could not believe what I was seeing. I felt that I should do something, but I knew I was helpless. Another day, we got word that a monk had set himself on fire to protest the occupation. I wanted to go see what had happened, but the family’s mood told me not to even ask.
After I’d been there a week or so, I asked Vera, “Why are the soldiers on the street corners Czech soldiers? Why wouldn’t they be Soviet soldiers, since they were the ones who invaded?” She explained that when the streets were crowded, Czech citizens were sneaking up behind the Russian soldiers and knifing them in the back. So the Soviets forced Czech soldiers to man these dangerous posts and then positioned their soldiers in safer locations to watch and to make sure the Czechs did their jobs.
Another surreal moment was watching Vera’s black-and-white television set as American astronauts walked on the moon for the first time on July 20, 1969. The moment that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, I felt a surge of pride. I wanted to cheer. In the United States, we had been hearing about the moon launch for months. Every boy in America dreamed of being an astronaut. But the mood in Vera’s apartment, which was crammed with neighbors, was serious—even a little hostile. I later learned from Vera that the Russian-speaking TV moderator had claimed it was fake: the event was staged somewhere in the desert in the United States.
I was a kid who had barely been out of Omaha, Nebraska, but I started to realize how much I had taken for granted about my stable, peaceful life back home. I was never in personal danger while in Vera’s country, but I was witnessing life in a conflict zone. And I have often looked back with regret at my own behavior at the end of my stay. Vera’s family were generous, dignified people. Her father was particularly proud that his daughter had come to the United States to study, and he was grateful to my family for having taken care of her and making her feel welcome. He announced that he was going to take me and the family out to dinner to say good-bye. I didn’t think much of it, although I could see that Vera was not comfortable with the idea. She tried to discourage him. Milos insisted.
We went to a restaurant that was nearly empty. Vera was uptight. I had been operating at a state of low-level hunger almost the entire trip. (I was far from starving, but I was too young to have much perspective on that.) In my self-absorbed, adolescent mode, I thought, “Great, finally I can have a good meal.”
We sat down and looked at the menu. Vera’s father told me to order anything I wanted, while Vera shot me concerned looks. At this point, I was annoyed at her, and, for want of a better word, I was being a jerk. I saw something on the menu that was translated to me as involving steak or hamburger, and I said that was what I wanted. I really didn’t consider or even understand what it cost. Vera told me, “You don’t want that. That is not what you think it is.” Her father told her to be quiet; he said that I could have whatever I wanted.
The rest of the family ordered modestly from the menu, and when my meal arrived, it turned out to be steak tartare. Yes, raw meat. I took one look and announced, “I’m not eating this.” Of course, I had not intended to order raw meat, and Vera had tried to warn me. She was upset. The others at the table ended up sharing what I had ordered. I’m not sure they liked it much either, but they were not about to let that much protein go to waste.
All of us make mistakes because of youth or ignorance or both. We can’t do much about youth, but we can do something about ignorance. That trip was the first real solo adventure of my life. What I saw and experienced would come back around later and fuel my desire to help people who find themselves, like Vera’s family, on the wrong side of events beyond their control. I remember the fear and unease I experienced watching the secret police beating people with their billy clubs, and the shocking and visceral realization that I was not in Omaha anymore. I was in a realm where you couldn’t count on the law to protect you, where the police could not be trusted and rules were capricious, where there was a fundamental disorder that could endanger you or your loved ones.
In 1968, the Soviet army occupied the streets of most towns in Czechoslovakia. I learned to take covert photos for the first time, and it was the first time I had my film confiscated. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
Years later, in the mid-1990s, I would be arrested and detained briefly in Bosnia for taking photographs. This was toward the end of the bloody, three-year Bosnian conflict, which pitted Croatians against Serbs in former territories of Yugoslavia. I remember feeling helpless in a situation without any obvious rule of law. Police officers with unclear motives and intentions sat in front of me, considering actions that would determine my future, and I had no say in what they would do and no recourse. Eventually I was released. In these and other brief periods of feeling powerless, fear about what comes next has never lasted more than a few days or a few hours for me. But it is daily life for millions of people in the world. And one constant is that where there is poverty and conflict, there is always food insecurity. It’s not only physically uncomfortable but also degrading and dehumanizing.
I first learned these lessons because we had an extra bedroom in our house and a mom who made sure we knew that the world was a much bigger and more complicated place than we might realize. And a dad who sensed that I was ready for an adventure. The memory of that trip where I never got enough to eat, and of that steak tartare dinner and all the complicated emotions at the table—Vera’s father’s pride, my ignorance, Vera’s loyalty and concern for her family—continues to remind me that food is a basic ingredient of our humanity. Hospitality is universal; nourishment, fundamental.
* * *
I. Sudan gained its independence from Egypt only four years before Sarah stayed with us. I have since visited Sudan four times. There has been chronic food insecurity in this conflict-plagued region for decades. I once spent three nights sleeping near Nyala in the Darfur region, and every night I could hear the sound of helicopters that were headed out to attack villages filled with starving people. The
government in Khartoum categorically denied it, but I saw the camouflage-painted Mi-24 attack helicopters myself and even managed to take some low-resolution photographs of them by hiding a disposable camera in a potato chip bag. In the morning, local people could tell you which villages were bombed the night before.
Story 3
From Bulldozing Dirt to Building Soil
The knees of my pants have always given me away. I was that little kid with a truck that you see in every sandbox in every crowded playground: growling engine sounds, rolling the truck up a slope, crashing it down, dumping a load of sand. I’d go into our backyard in Omaha and play with Tonka trucks for hours. It was best after a rain, when there was water and mud, and I’d grind the knees of my jeans into a filthy oblivion. To this day, when I return from a trip to visit agricultural projects around the world, my wife, Devon, laughs at the state of my stained and ripped pant knees. The first thing I always do at any location is kneel down, grab a chunk of soil, and roll it through my hands to check the structure and organic matter, and I pick through the roots of whatever is growing.
I had to learn the difference between dirt and soil, however.
Many people assume that because my family is from Omaha, Nebraska, we are farmers, and my dad just broke the mold by going into finance. Not the case. My great-great-grandfather started a grocery store in Nebraska in 1869, but I never had a conversation about farming with any relative that I can recall until the 1980s, when my dad volunteered to invest in four hundred acres north of Omaha that I rented back from him.
No matter where I am in the world, if I am talking to farmers, I end up on my knees inspecting the soil. Photo: Trevor Neilson
40 Chances Page 3