“There was this driver, Eddie, that I thought was a hundred years old. He was probably about sixty-five, although he had driven a mule truck back when Buffett & Son delivered that way.
“He had the craziest delivery system that involved going first to Benson, then about five miles back to Dundee to drop somebody’s groceries off, then back to Benson. All this during wartime gas rationing. Finally I asked why, and he gave me this disgusted look and said, ‘If it’s early enough, we may catch her when she’s undressed.’” Warren at first had no idea what this cryptic phrase meant. “He took the groceries up to the house personally in the mornings while I carried twenty-four-bottle boxes of empty soda bottles that were being returned to the store. Eddie would be there ogling Mrs. Kaul, the best-looking customer, trying to catch her undressed.” Mrs. Kaul was Clo-Ann Kaul’s mother, and while Warren was hauling empty soda bottles, Clo-Ann was ignoring him. “I may have been the lowest-paid person to ever work in the grocery business. I didn’t learn anything—except that I didn’t like hard work.”
Warren took his battle for autonomy home to Ernest’s Sunday dinner table. He had despised everything green from birth, except money. Now, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and asparagus lined Warren’s plate like foot soldiers in a battle of wills. With his parents, he had generally gotten his way. Ernest, however, brooked no nonsense. While Alice tried coaxing her nephew, his grandfather glared from his seat at one end of the table, waiting, waiting, waiting for Warren to finish his vegetables. “You sat at the table for two hours to finish your asparagus, but he always won in the end.”
In most other ways, however, being at Ernest’s brought Warren a large measure of freedom. In his grandfather’s garage, he had spotted Doris’s blue Schwinn bicycle with her initials on it—a gift from Ernest, left behind when they went to Washington. Warren had never owned a bicycle. “A bicycle was a pretty big present in those days, you know,” he says. He started riding Doris’s. After a while he traded it in, using it as most of the down payment on a boy’s bike.25 Nobody said anything. Warren had that “halo.”
His grandfather doted on him, in his way. At night he and Ernest listened with “reverential attention” to Ernest’s favorite radio host, Fulton Lewis Jr., who expounded constantly on the theme that America should not get involved in foreign wars. Ernest needed no convincing.
After Fulton Lewis Jr. recharged his conservative energies, Ernest would gather his latest thoughts on the best seller he was writing. He had decided to call it How to Run a Grocery Store and a Few Things I Learned about Fishing, feeling these were “the only two subjects about which mankind had any valid concern.26
“I would sit there at night, or late afternoon, early evening, and my grandfather would dictate this to me. I’d write it on the back of old ledger sheets because we never wasted anything at Buffett and Son. He thought that it was the book all America was waiting for. I mean, there wasn’t any sense writing another book. Not Gone with the Wind or anything like that. Why would anybody want to read Gone with the Wind when they could be reading How to Run a Grocery Store and a Few Things I Learned about Fishing?”27
Warren loved it all, or almost all. He was so glad to be back in Omaha and reunited with his aunt, grandfather, and friends that he almost forgot about Washington for a while.
A few months later, the rest of the family made the three-day drive to Nebraska for the summer and moved into a rented house. Their finances were becoming stretched. Heretofore, the stockyards had simply been the home of some of Howard’s constituents. But when their reek drifted through town every time the wind blew from the south, everybody in Omaha knew—that was the smell of money. Howard now bought the South Omaha Feed Company to supplement his Congressional salary. And Warren went to work for his father.
“South Omaha Feed was a huge warehouse that seemed hundreds of feet long and had no air-conditioning. My job was to carry fifty-pound sacks of animal feed from a freight car into the warehouse. You can’t imagine how big a freight car looks when you get inside and it is packed to the top. And a freight car in the summer, that is really something. There was a guy named Frankie Zick who was tossing these things around. He was a weight lifter. I had on a short-sleeved shirt because it was so hot, and struggling to sort of get these feed bags into my arms and drag them. By noon my arms were kind of a bloody mess. That job lasted for about three hours. I just walked over to the streetcar and went home. Manual labor is for the birds.”
Before the summer ended, the family took a short vacation at Lake Okoboji. As they were leaving, Doris discovered that Warren had traded in her bicycle. But through some miscarriage of family justice, again he suffered no consequences. Indeed, when summer ended and his parents forced Warren, sullen and grim-faced, onto a train headed back to Washington, the new bicycle he had bought for himself with his filched funds went along. Doris was furious. But the theft of her bicycle only marked the beginning of her brother’s descent into behavior that would ultimately force his parents to take action.
Back in Washington, the Buffetts moved into the Fitchous’ house, an attractive two-story white colonial with a mimosa tree in the yard in the sophisticated Washington suburb of Spring Valley, right off Massachusetts Avenue. A restricted community*6 built in 1930 for the “socially and officially prominent,” Spring Valley was designed as a little “colony of outstanding personages.”28 The homes ranged from gigantic stone Tudor mansions to white two-story clapboard colonials like the Buffetts’ house. Leila had paid $17,500 for it, including some furniture. Warren got the front bedroom. The families on either side had sons, all older than Warren. Across the street lived the Keavneys, and Warren, now thirteen years old, developed a crush on Mrs. Keavney, the nearest motherly middle-aged woman in sight. “I was nuts about her,” he says.
The neighborhood had an international feel; it teemed with diplomats. The WAVES,29 women members of the wartime Navy, were headquartered at the nearby huge Gothic-style campus of American University. The Buffetts began adjusting to wartime life in Washington, a very different place from Omaha. The country had finally become prosperous, the Depression over, but with wartime rationing on, money mattered less and less. Everyday life was measured in points and coupons: 48 blue points a month for canned goods; 64 red points for perishables; coupons for meat, shoes, butter, sugar, gasoline, and stockings. No amount of money would buy meat without coupons; only chicken went unrationed. With butter rationed and scarce, everyone learned to squeeze yellow food coloring into containers of tasteless white oleomargarine. No one could buy a new car, because the carmakers devoted their plants to defense work. To take an automobile trip, you pooled the family’s gas coupons. Blowing out a tire could mean serious trouble, since automobile tires were among the most strictly rationed commodities.
Every morning, Howard took the streetcar that ran down Wisconsin Avenue to M Street in Georgetown, then turned down Pennsylvania Avenue. He got off near the old Executive Office Building and went to work in a Washington that heaved and roiled. The government and diplomatic community had ballooned, and the streets were packed with people in kilts and turbans and saris, with armies of clerical workers, and with a sea of uniformed military.
From time to time, black women in Sunday dresses and church hats picketed the Capitol to protest lynchings in the South. Air-raid wardens walked the neighborhoods to check that all houses had opaque blackout curtains. Once or twice a month the Buffetts were required to go down to their basement and turn out all the lights for a mandatory blackout drill.
Leila disliked Washington from the day she arrived. She was homesick for Omaha, and lonely too. Immersed in his new job, Howard had become a more distant husband and father. He worked at the office all day, then read the Congressional Record and legislative materials all evening. He spent Saturdays at the office and often returned there on Sunday afternoons after church.
Doris now attended Woodrow Wilson High School, where again she fell in right away with the popular crowd. Bertie, too, made fr
iends easily, finding a compatible group of girls in the neighborhood. Warren’s experience was nothing like his sisters’. He enrolled at Alice Deal Junior High School,30 which sat atop the highest hill in Washington, overlooking Spring Valley, the black school in the hollow behind it, and the rest of the city below.
The students in his class—many of them diplomats’ kids—were a world more polished than Warren and his now-lost friends from Rosehill School. At first, he had difficulty making friends. He went out for basketball and football, but since he wore glasses and was timid in physical contact sports, neither was a success. “I’d been pulled away from my friends and I wasn’t making new friends. I was young for my class. I was not poised at all. I wasn’t a terrible athlete, but I wasn’t a great athlete in the least, so that was not an entry ticket. And Doris and Bertie were knockouts, so they did fine. A good-looking girl does not have trouble, because the world will adjust to her. So they both fit in better than I did, far better, which was a little irritating too.”
His grades started out at Cs and Bs and improved to As, except in English. “Mostly my grades related to how I felt about the teachers. I hated my English teacher, Miss Allwine.31 Music class was also Cs all the way through.” Miss Baum, the music teacher, was the best-looking teacher in the school. Most of the boys had crushes on her, but Warren had real difficulties with Miss Baum, who reported that he needed to improve in cooperation, courtesy, and self-reliance.
“I was the youngest one in the class. I was interested in girls, and I wasn’t avoiding them, but I felt I had less poise. The girls were way ahead of me socially. When I left Omaha, nobody in my class was dancing. When I moved to Washington, everybody had been dancing for a year or two. So I never caught up, in effect.”
The Buffetts’ move when Warren was twelve had deprived him of a crucial experience: Addie Fogg’s dancing class. At the American Legion hall in Omaha on Friday nights, Addie Fogg, a short, stout woman of middle age, lined the boys and girls up by height and paired them off, boys in bow ties and girls in stiff petticoats. They practiced the fox trot and box-step waltz. A boy learned how a “gentleman” behaves in public with a young lady, and struggled through elementary small talk to break a painful silence. He felt the touch of a girl’s hand, learned to hold her by the waist, and sensed her face close to his own. He tasted for the first time the demands and potential pleasures of leading a partner as they moved in unison. With its many small but shared embarrassments and triumphs, this group rite of passage awakened in its graduates a sense of belonging. To miss it could be profoundly isolating. Already insecure, Warren had been left behind, a child among budding young men.
His classmates noticed he was friendly but seemed shy, especially around girls.32 He was a year younger than most of them, born in August and having skipped a half grade at Rosehill. “I was out of whack. I felt very inept with girls at that time, and socially in general. But with older people, I was fine.”
Not long after the family’s arrival in Spring Valley, Howard’s friend Ed S. Miller—one of those older people—called from Omaha. He wanted to talk to Warren.
“‘Warren,’ he said, ‘I’m in a terrible jam. The board of directors told me to get rid of our Washington, D.C., warehouse. This is a real problem for me. We have hundreds of pounds—cases—of stale cornflakes and cases of Barbecubes dog biscuits. I’m in a real pickle. I’m twelve hundred miles away and you’re the only businessman I know in Washington.’
“So he said, ‘I know I can count on you. As a matter of fact, I told our warehouse men to deliver these cornflakes and Barbecubes dog biscuits to your house. Whatever you get for them, send me half; you keep the rest.’
“And all of a sudden, these huge trucks come up and fill our garage, fill our basement, everything! Now my dad couldn’t get the car in or anything.
“And now I’ve got these things.
“Well, I just tried to figure out who it would be useful to, you know. And obviously the dog biscuits would be useful to a kennel. The cornflakes were not fit for human consumption anymore, so I figured they might be good for some animal. I sold the cornflakes to some poultry guy. I made probably a hundred bucks for the merchandise.33 When I sent the fifty percent to Mr. Miller, he wrote back and said, ‘You saved my job.’
“There were some awfully nice people like that back in Omaha. I always liked to hang around with adults when I was a kid. Always. I would walk over to church or something, and then I would just drop in on people.
“My dad’s friends were very nice too. They had this Bible class and various things at the rectory, and they would come over to the house and play bridge afterward. All these guys were very, very nice to me; they all liked me and called me Warreny. I’d learned Ping-Pong from taking out books from the library and practicing at the Y. They knew I enjoyed playing with them down in the basement, and they’d take me on.
“I had all these things I was doing in Omaha. I had a nice niche there.
“When we moved to Washington, the Ping-Pong table disappeared. It was like my cornet. And the Boy Scouts. I was doing all these different things, but they all ended when we moved.
“So I was mad.
“But I didn’t know exactly how to direct that. I just knew I was having a whole lot less fun than I was having before my dad got elected.”
After his father took him to watch a couple of sessions of Congress, Warren decided he wanted to become a congressional page, but Howard was not in a position to pull that off. Instead, Warren got a job caddying at the Chevy Chase Club, but once again discovered that physical labor did not suit him. “My mother sewed towels inside my shirts because I was carrying these heavy bags around. Sometimes the golfers—mainly women golfers—would feel sorry for me and practically carry the things themselves.” He needed a job that better fit his skills and talents.
Almost from birth, like all the Buffetts, Warren had lived and breathed the news. He loved hearing it and now he would enter the business of delivering it and find he loved that too. He got himself hired to throw a paper route, delivering the Washington Post and two different routes for the Times-Herald. The Times-Herald belonged to Cissy Patterson, the autocratic cousin of Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick. It catered to the right wing, which hated FDR and kept the President up nights worrying what it would print the next day. Cissy Patterson feuded with Eugene Meyer, a financier who owned the Washington Post and supported FDR in every line of his paper’s type.
Warren started delivering in Spring Valley, near his home. “The first year, the houses were far apart, which I was not too keen on. You had to deliver it every day, including Christmas Day. On Christmas morning, the family had to wait until I had done my paper route. When I was sick, my mom delivered the papers, but I handled the money. I had these jars in my room with half dollars and quarters.34 Then he added an afternoon route to his workload.
“The Evening Star, which was owned by this blue-blooded Washington family, was the dominant paper in town.”
In the afternoons, he rolled down the streets on his bike, grabbing copies of the Star to throw from the huge basket on the front. Near the end of the route he had to steel himself. “On Sedgwick was this terrible dog.
“I liked to work by myself, where I could spend my time thinking about things I wanted to think about. Washington was upsetting at first, but I was in my own world all the time. I could be sitting in a room thinking, or I could be riding around flinging things and thinking.”
The thoughts he was thinking were angry thoughts. He spent his days acting them out at Alice Deal Junior High. Bertie Backus, Alice Deal’s principal, prided herself on knowing each pupil by name. She soon had special reason to know Warren Buffett’s.
“I was kind of behind when I got there, and then I fell further behind. I was just mad at the world. I did a lot of daydreaming, and I was always charting things—I would bring stock charts to school and just wasn’t paying attention to what was going on in class. Then I got to be friends with
John McRae and Roger Bell. And I became disruptive.”
The pleasing personality of his childhood all but disappeared. In one class, Warren enlisted John McRae to play chess with him while the teacher was talking, just to be obnoxious. In another class, he cut open a golf ball, which squirted some sort of liquid onto the ceiling.
The boys had started to golf. John McRae’s father worked as a greenskeeper at Tregaron, a famous estate close to downtown Washington that belonged to heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and her husband, Joseph E. Davies, who was ambassador to Russia. The family had dozens of servants and was almost never home, so the boys went over and played on the nine-hole golf course. Then Warren convinced Roger and John to run away with him to Hershey, Pennsylvania, where they were going to try to get jobs caddying at a well-known golf course.35 “We hitchhiked. And after we had successfully gone a hundred fifty miles or so, we made it to Hershey and stopped at this hotel and we made the mistake of bragging to the bellboy.
“The next morning, when we came down, there was this huge highway patrolman waiting for us, who took us down to the highway patrol headquarters.
“We just started lying. And we lied and lied and lied about having our parents’ permission. All the while there was this Teletype machine spitting out alerts about this and that. I was sitting there thinking that pretty soon there was going to be an alert from Washington, D.C., and this guy will know we’re lying. All I wanted to do was get out of there.”
Somehow they lied convincingly enough that the patrolman let them go.36 “We started walking toward Gettysburg or someplace. We were having no luck hitchhiking, and then a trucker picked us up and stuffed all three of us into the cab.” They were so scared by then, they only wanted to go home. “The trucker stopped at a diner in Baltimore and divided us up with other truckers. It was getting dark and we felt like we’d never get out of there alive, but they took us back to Washington, separately. Roger Bell’s mother was in the hospital. I mean, she had gone to the hospital over this, which made me feel terrible ’cause I had talked Roger into going. I was on my way to being a four-star delinquent.”
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