Many of them did not speak English at home. The least well off, the blacks and new immigrants, lived crammed into a buffer zone of boardinghouses and shanties next to the yards. Those with greater savvy and more means had worked their way out into the ethnic parishes nearby, living in neat small houses with steeply pitched roofs that rolled up and down South Omaha’s hills: Czechs in Little Bohemia, Serbs and Croats in Goose Hollow, the Poles in G Town (the former Greek Town); the Greeks were long gone, their homes destroyed in a 1909 anti-immigrant riot.
The people whom Howard approached ranged from the top rank of workers, the specialized butchers from the killing gang who worked on the highest floor of the slaughterhouse, to those on the lower floors, in the boneyard, the lard department, and the fertilizing department. A handful of women trimmed pork, twisted wieners, painted and labeled cans, plucked chickens, and sorted eggs. Management especially prized black women, who could be counted on to fill offal room jobs, and for less pay than whites.6 They cleaned the “pluck”—intestines, bladder, hearts, glands, and other organs—their hands immersed in water and waste, sorting, salting, and packing intestines for casings in a hell of heat and ankle-deep bloody water. They panted shallowly with open mouths to keep airborne particles of excrement out of the deeper parts of their lungs.7 Even the newest and lowliest immigrant or black man would not set foot in the offal room. That was strictly black women’s work.
Men and women, black and white, these people were Democrats in every fiber of their being. The rest of Nebraska might be turning against the New Deal, the President’s cure for the Great Depression, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt was still a hero in this part of town. Yet the leaflets that Howard Buffett politely pressed into their callused hands shrieked that FDR was the greatest danger to democracy that America had ever known. If given a moment to speak, he would calmly explain why, as their Congressman, he would always vote to enact laws that the stockyard workers would oppose.
Howard was a zealot, but he was neither stupid nor crazy. Even though he placed his trust in God’s hands, he had a backup plan. Warren had not come for an education, nor to tag-team his father in a fight. His job was to run like hell for the cops if the stockyard workers started beating up his father.
Under the circumstances, a reasonable person might ask what Howard was doing there at all. His efforts might not be repaid by a single vote. But apparently he felt an obligation to appear before every potential voter in his district, however little of him they cared to see.
Warren always managed to return home intact; he never had to run for the cops. That may have been just luck or it may have been Howard’s demeanor, which conveyed his basic decency. Still, the Buffetts had no reason to believe the voters saw that, nor that if they did, it would overcome his underdog status. On election day, November 3, 1942, Doris, convinced that her father had lost, went downtown and bought herself a new pin to wear to school the next day so she would have something to look forward to. “My dad wrote out his concession statement. We all went to bed at eight-thirty or nine o’clock, because we never stayed up late. And he woke up the next morning to find out he’d won.”
Howard’s deep suspicion of foreign adventures was more than a quirk of his own Quaker-like personality. It reflected a reservoir of conservative isolationism, which had once run deep and wide through the Midwest. Although that stream was drying up, Pearl Harbor had revived it for a little while. Despite Roosevelt’s overwhelming popularity, labor’s support for his foreign policies had wavered temporarily in Omaha, just long enough to get Howard elected against an opponent who had been, perhaps, overconfident.
The following January, the Buffetts rented out their house in Dundee and boarded a train to Virginia. Ernest handed them a hamper of beautifully packaged food along with instructions not to stray into any other cars, lest they pick up dread diseases from traveling servicemen.
They arrived at Washington’s Union Station to find a provincial city grown packed and chaotic. Great crowds of people filled the town, most of them working at vast new wartime government agencies. The military had commandeered every building, office, chair, and pencil within reach in the effort to get itself organized in the newly finished Pentagon, the world’s largest office building, which was outgrown by the time it was completed. By now, flimsy temporary office buildings lined every inch of the Mall.8
Hordes of new arrivals had doubled the population. A ragged army of black men and women streamed across the 14th Street Bridge from Virginia, fleeing the tobacco farms, cotton fields, and textile mills of the poverty-stricken South, lured by the prospect of any job at all in the busiest city in the world. Following in the dust of the respectable, impoverished, and naive came pickpockets, prostitutes, grifters, and drifters, turning Washington into the nation’s crime capital.
Rickety nineteenth-century wooden trolleys packed with government workers crept their way along impassable streets. At any of the trolley stops, local residents might be picketing against Capital Transit, which had refused to hire blacks.9 Still, the logjam of segregation was slowly starting to break. At Little Palace cafeteria on the black side of town, Howard University students were staging a series of “lunch counter sit-ins,” challenging the restaurant’s policy of refusing them service by simply occupying all available tables and refusing to leave, effectively shutting the place down.10
The Buffetts had friends, the Reichels11—acquaintances of Howard’s from his stockbroking days—who told them, don’t live in Washington, it’s terrible. They knew of an enormous house in Virginia that someone in the Marines had just vacated. It sat on a hill above the Rappahannock River, next door to Chatham, headquarters of the Union Army in the battle of Fredericksburg. The house had ten fireplaces, formal gardens, cutting gardens, and a greenhouse. Although its grandeur was far above the Buffetts’ style, and it was located almost an hour from the city, they leased it temporarily. Howard rented a tiny apartment in the District of Columbia and commuted on the weekends. His time filled quickly as the Nebraska delegation assigned him to the financial committees, and he started fitting in and learning the rules and procedures and unwritten customs of serving as a Congressman.
Leila soon began riding into Washington to look for a permanent place to live. She had been unusually irritable since their arrival and often spoke longingly of Omaha. The timing of the move had turned out to be inauspicious. Her sister Bernice had just insinuated that she would commit suicide, saying that she would not be responsible for what happened unless the family committed her to the Norfolk State Hospital, where their mother, Stella, was also housed. Edie, now in charge of her sister’s care, consulted with a doctor. They thought that Bernice wanted to live with her mother and was conceivably using melodramatic means to get her way. Nevertheless, they clearly had to take the suicide threat seriously, and the family sent her off to Norfolk.
The details of the Stahl family’s problems were rarely discussed in front of the children. Each adapted to Washington in his or her own way. Beautiful fifteen-year-old Doris felt like Dorothy, who had just left black-and-white Kansas and stepped into the Technicolor land of Oz. Her life was transformed. She became the belle of Fredericksburg and fell in love with the town.12 Leila began to treat her daughter as a social climber who had pretensions above her station, and still launched the occasional tirade against her. But by now, Doris’s spirit resisted her mother’s constraints, and she had begun to fight for her own identity.
Meanwhile, Warren, twelve years old, spent the first six weeks in an eighth-grade class that was “way behind” where he had been academically in Omaha. Naturally, his first instinct was to get a job, working at a bakery where he “did damned near nothing. I wasn’t baking and I wasn’t selling.” At home, furious and miserable at being uprooted, he wanted to be sent back to Omaha and reported a mysterious “allergy” that disturbed his sleep. He claimed that he had to sleep standing up. “I wrote my grandfather these pathetic letters, too, and he sort of said, ‘You’ve got to send t
hat boy back. You know, you’re destroying my grandson.’” Succumbing, the Buffetts put Warren on a train back to Nebraska for a few months’ stay. To his delight, his companion on the train was Nebraska Senator Hugh Butler. He had always gotten along well with older people and chatted easily with Butler, in his precocious manner, all the way back to Omaha, his “allergy” forgotten.
Bertie, nine years old, felt close to her grandfather and thought she had a special bond with him. She was jealous. Trusting in her relationship with Ernest, she wrote him: “Don’t tell my parents, but send for me too.”
“When Bertie wrote the same kind of letters, I said, ‘Don’t pay any attention. She’s a fake.’”13
Ernest wrote back, “A girl should be with her mother.” Bertie sat in Fredericksburg, fuming that her brother always seemed to get his way.14
Warren returned to Rosehill School and reunited with his friends. Every day he showed up around noontime at the house of his father’s former partner, Carl Falk, whose wife, Gladys, served him sandwiches and tomato soup and kindness for lunch. He “worshipped” Mrs. Falk15 as if she were a surrogate mother, just as he had done with his friend Jack Frost’s mother, Hazel, and with his aunts.
Though Warren was comfortable with all these middle-aged women, he was shy, hopelessly shy, and girls his own age terrified him. Even so, he soon developed a crush on Dorothy Hume, one of the girls in his new eighth-grade class. His friend Stu Erickson had a similar crush on Margie Lee Canady, and his other friend Byron Swanson had a crush on Joan Fugate. After weeks of talk, they worked themselves up to ask the girls to go to the movies.16 But when Warren walked over to Dorothy’s house to invite her, he chickened out when her father answered the door. Warren tried to sell him a magazine subscription instead. Finally, however, he managed to ask Dorothy, and she said yes.
On the appointed Saturday, Byron and Warren went together to pick up their dates because they were afraid to show up alone. Thus the afternoon started with a lengthy trudge from house to house to the streetcar stop, walking for blocks in uncomfortable silence. Margie Lee, who lived in the opposite direction, arrived at the stop with Stu and they all boarded the streetcar, where the boys stared red-faced at their shoes throughout the trip downtown as the girls chatted easily with one another. When they reached the theater, Margie Lee, Dorothy, and Joan strolled directly to a row of seats and sat down next to each other. The boys’ plan to cuddle up with the girls during two horror films, The Mummy’s Tomb and Cat People, instantly fell apart. Instead, they sat in their own group and watched the girls’ brunette heads huddled together as they giggled and shrieked through the weekly serials, the cartoons, and both movies. After a painful trip to Walgreen’s for after-movie treats, the boys retraced their trip on the streetcar in a dazed little group and began the long march to the girls’ houses before being dismissed by their dates. They had barely spoken a word the entire afternoon.17 All three were so mortified that it took each of them years thereafter to summon the courage to ask another girl out on a date.18
But while Warren lost heart, he did not lose interest; he next developed a crush on another girl in his class, Clo-Ann Kaul, a striking blonde. Yet she was not interested in him either; he seemed unable to make any headway at all with girls. His way of diverting himself from disappointment was, again, making money.
“My grandfather liked the idea that I was always thinking of ways to make money. I used to go around the neighborhood collecting wastepaper and magazines to sell for scrap. My aunt Alice would take me down to the collection drop-off, where you could get thirty-five cents for a hundred pounds, or something like that.”
At Ernest’s house, Warren read a shelf full of back issues of the Progressive Grocer. Subjects like “how to stock a meat department” fascinated him. On the weekends, Ernest put him to work at Buffett & Son, the empire over which he presided. About the size of a two-story garage, it had a Spanish-style tile roof that stood out in the pleasant upper-middle-class suburb of Dundee. The Buffetts had always sold on “credit and delivery.” Ladies or their cooks would ring up Walnut 0761 on the telephone and read their lists to clerks who took down their orders.19 Clerks rushed around the store, scrambling up and down a rolling wooden ladder that flew back and forth along the shelves, retrieving boxes, bags, and cans, and filling their baskets from the pyramids of vegetables and fruit. To cut a hand of bananas, they took down the wicked sharp knife next to a four-foot bunch of bananas that hung from a hook by the back door. They ran down to the basement to fill orders for sauerkraut and pickles that lay cooling in barrels near crates of eggs and other perishables. All the goods went into baskets, which the clerks on the mezzanine raised on a pulley, priced and packaged, and sent back downstairs. Then the orange Buffett & Son delivery trucks with rolled-up rubber or leather panels on the side drove the packages off to Omaha’s waiting housewives.
Ernest sat at a desk on the mezzanine and glared down at the clerks. Behind his back, the employees called him Old Man Ernie. “He didn’t do a damn thing. He just gave orders,” says Warren. “I mean, he was king. He could see everything. And if a customer walked in who wasn’t waited on like that…” Snap of the fingers and woe to the clerks. He believed in “work, work, plenty of work.” Ernest felt so responsible for making sure that no one in his charge had foolish notions about there being any free lunch in this world that he had once made a lowly stock boy bring two pennies to work to pay his Social Security tax in cash. This handover had been accompanied by a half-hour lecture on the evils of socialism, so that said stock boy would fully understand how that devil Roosevelt and the tweedy, pipe-smoking Ivy League professors he had brought into the government were ruining the country.20
The only time Ernest left the mezzanine was the minute he saw an important woman drive up with her chauffeur. He would tear down the stairs, grab an order slip, and wait on her himself, showing her the new “alligator pears”—avocados—just flown in from Hawaii and handing peppermint sticks to her children.21 In the face of all this attention to rank, when her brother-in-law Fred once stopped waiting on Leila in order to attend to another customer, she stalked out in a huff and never shopped at the store again.22 Howard bought the groceries from then on.
Warren now felt like one of these clerks, hustling around the store under Old Man Ernie’s thumb. Working in his grandfather’s store, he came as close to being a slave as he ever would be in his life.
“He had me do a lot of little lesser jobs. Sometimes I was on the floor. Sometimes he had me counting wartime rationing stamps—sugar stamps, coffee stamps, sitting up on the mezzanine with him. And sometimes I was hiding where he couldn’t see me.
“The worst job was when he hired me and my friend John Pescal to shovel snow. We had this huge snowstorm, a foot of superwet snow. We had to shovel out the whole bank of snow, in front where the customers parked and in the alleyway behind the store, in the loading dock, and by the garage where we had the six trucks.
“We worked at this for about five hours—shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, shoveling. Eventually, we couldn’t even straighten our hands. And then we went to my grandfather. He said, ‘Well, how much should I pay you boys? A dime’s too little and a dollar’s too much!’
“I’ll never forget—John and I looked at each other….”
That worked out to—at most—twenty cents an hour for shoveling snow.
“Oh no! This was the amount we were supposed to split. That was my grandfather….”
Well, a Buffett was a Buffett, but Warren had learned a valuable lesson: Know what the deal is in advance.23
Ernest had two other Buffett traits: an impulsive streak with women and an obsession with perfection. He had entered into two short-lived marriages after Henrietta died, once coming back from a vacation in California newly wed to a woman he had just met. His perfectionism, however, expressed itself at work. Buffett & Son was a direct descendant of the oldest grocery store in Omaha and Ernest’s demanding ways were all in pursuit of an ideal vis
ion of service to his customers. He felt certain the discount national chain stores that were encroaching on the neighborhoods were a fad that would disappear because they could never provide a comparable level of service. Sometime during this period, he wrote confidently to one of his relatives: “The day of the chain store is over.”24
When Buffett & Son ran out of bread, rather than disappoint his customers, Ernest sent Warren trotting down the street to the nearby Hinky Dinky supermarket to buy bread at retail. Warren did not enjoy this errand because he was quickly recognized once inside. “Hellooooooo, Mr. Buffett!” the clerks would call out to him, loud enough for everyone to hear, as he slunk through the store, “trying to look inconspicuous,” weighed down with armfuls of loaves. Ernest resented the Hinky Dinky, which, like Sommers, his other major competitor in Dundee, was run by a Jewish family. It rankled him to pay good money to a competitor, much less somebody Jewish. Like much of America before mid-century, Omaha practiced de facto segregation by both religion and race. Jews and Christians (and even Catholics and Protestants) lived essentially separate lives, with social clubs, civic groups, and many businesses refusing to accept Jews as members or hire them as employees. Ernest and Howard used the code name “Eskimos” to make offensive remarks about Jews when they were out in public. Since anti-Semitism was so much a matter of course in society at the time, Warren never gave their attitudes a thought.
Ernest, in fact, was an authority figure to Warren, and he only escaped that authority when he was at school, and for a few hours every Saturday when his grandfather put him to work on the delivery truck. Unloading groceries from the truck was exhausting work, and Warren started to figure out how much he disliked manual labor.
The Snowball Page 9