He had made another friend by then, Lou Battistone; but, as in Omaha, he had kept his friendship with Lou separate from his relationship with Roger and John. Meanwhile, Warren was doing worse than ever at school. His grades dropped to Cs and Ds and even D minuses: in English, in history, in freehand drawing, in music, even Cs in mathematics.37 “Some of these grades were from the classes where I was supposedly good.” Warren’s teachers found him stubborn, rude, and lazy.38 Some of the teachers gave him double black Xs, for extra bad. His behavior was shocking for the times. In the 1940s, children did what they were told and obeyed their teachers. “I was going downhill fast. My parents were dying, they were dying.”
He excelled in only one class, and that was typing. Washington was fighting the war on paper, and typing was considered a critical skill.
At Alice Deal, typing was taught by placing black covers over the keys so that the students were forced to type by touch.39 It helped to be able to memorize, and it paid to have good hand-eye coordination. Warren was gifted at both. “I made As every semester in typing. We all had these manual typewriters and, of course, you’d slam the carriage back to hear this ‘ding!’
“I was—by far—the best in the class at typing out of twenty people in the room. When they’d have a speed test, I would just race through the first line so I could SLAM the carriage back. Everybody else would stop at that point, because they were still on the first word when they would hear my ‘ding!’ Then they’d panic, and they’d try to go faster, and they’d screw up. So I had a lot of fun in typing class.”
Warren put this same ferocious energy into his three paper routes. He took to the paper-throwing as if he had been born with inky fingers. Next, says Lou Battistone, “he conned the route manager, with that personality of his, into giving him The Westchester” in historic Tenleytown. In this, Warren had pulled off a coup. The Westchester was the kind of route an adult news carrier would ordinarily manage.
“It was a great opportunity. The Westchester was classy. The Westchester was just the crème de la crème. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands owned it.40 There were six U.S. Senators on that route, and colonels, and Supreme Court justices, all these biggies. There was Oveta Culp Hobby, and Leon Henderson, the head of the Office of Price Administration.” Mrs. Hobby came from a famous Texas publishing family, and had moved to Washington to serve as director of the WACs, the Women’s Army Corps.
“So all of a sudden, I had this huge operation. I might have been thirteen or fourteen years old. I first got The Westchester just for the Post. I had to give up my other morning routes when I got The Westchester, and I felt badly.” Warren had grown close to his Times-Herald manager. “And when I told him that I had the chance to get the Post at The Westchester and that meant I had to give up his route in Spring Valley…he was terrific with me, but that was really kind of a sad moment.”
By then Warren considered himself an experienced paper-route operator, but he was tackling a complex logistical challenge. The Westchester consisted of five buildings that sprawled over 27½ acres, four of them connected and one separate. The route included two more apartment buildings across Cathedral Avenue, the Marlin and the Warwick. He would also be covering a small route of single-family homes up to Wisconsin Avenue.
“I started on a Sunday, and they handed me a book telling me the people and their apartment numbers. There was no training session and I didn’t have the book in advance.” He put on his tennis shoes and pulled out his bus pass, which cost three cents each way, and climbed sleepily aboard the Capital Transit bus. He did not stop for breakfast.
“I got up there around four-thirty a.m. There were these bundles and bundles of papers. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I didn’t know how the numbering system worked or anything. I sat there for hours and hours sorting and bundling the papers. I was short papers in the end, because people just took them from the bundles as they left for church.
“The whole thing was a disaster. I thought, what the hell have I gotten into? It took until ten or eleven in the morning to finish up.
“But I stumbled my way through. And it got better and I got good very fast. It was easy.”
Warren raced out of his house to catch the first N2 bus over to The Westchester at 3900 Cathedral Avenue every morning. Often he had bus-pass number 001, the first person buying a bus pass each week.41 The driver got used to looking out for him if he was running a little late. He would jump off the bus and run the couple of blocks over to The Westchester.
He had figured out the most efficient route and turned what could have been a boring and repetitive job delivering hundreds of newspapers each day into a competition with himself. “See, the papers were a little thinner in those days, because of newsprint rationing. A thirty-six-page paper was a pretty good-size paper. I’d stand at one end of the hallway with a bundle and pull off a paper, fold it over flat, and tuck it to make a pancake, or roll it into a biscuit. Then I smacked it against my thigh. And I’d twist it against my wrist to put some spin on it and slide it down the hall. I could slide that thing fifty, even a hundred feet. It was kind of a test of skill, because the apartment doors were at different lengths down the hallway. I’d do the longest ones first. But the trick was to be able to do it in such a way that they’d all come to rest a few inches from the door. And sometimes people would have milk bottles, which made it more interesting.”
He also sold calendars to his newspaper customers, and he developed another sideline too. He asked all his customers for their old magazines as scrap paper for the war effort.42 Then he would check the labels on the magazines to figure out when the subscriptions were expiring, using a code book he had gotten from Moore-Cottrell, the publishing powerhouse that had hired him as an agent to sell magazines. He made a card file of subscribers, and before their subscriptions expired, Warren would be knocking at their door, selling them a new magazine.43
Because The Westchester had so much turnover in wartime, Warren’s biggest dread was customers who skipped out and didn’t pay, leaving him stuck with the cost of their papers. After a few people skipped out on him, he started tipping the elevator girls to let him know when people were about to move. Then the imperious Oveta Culp Hobby got behind. He thought that she should have a little more empathy for her paperboy, since she owned her own newspaper, the Houston Post. But he began to worry that she would skip out on him.
“I paid my own bills monthly, always on time, and I always showed up to deliver the papers. I was a responsible kid. I got presented with a war bond for perfect service. With the customers, I didn’t want to let the receivables build up. I tried all kinds of things with Oveta Culp Hobby—leaving notes—and finally ended up knocking on her door at six in the morning to catch her before she could escape.” Shy in other ways, Warren was never timid when it came to money. When Mrs. Hobby answered the door, “I handed her an envelope, and she had to pay me.”
After school, Warren rode the bus back to Spring Valley and jumped on his bike to deliver the Star. On rainy winter afternoons, he would sometimes come off his paper route and appear on the doorstep of his friends’ homes. He always wore battered canvas sneakers, so full of holes that his feet were swimming to the ankles; his skin would be pimply with cold inside a soaking-wet oversize plaid shirt. For some reason he never seemed to wear a coat. Motherly Mrs. Whoever would smile and shake her head at the pitiful sight, bundle him up, and towel him off while he basked in her warmth.44
At the end of 1944, Warren filed his first income tax return. He paid only seven dollars in taxes; to get it down to that, he deducted his wristwatch and bicycle as business expenses. He knew that was questionable. But at the time, he was not above cutting a few corners to get where he wanted to go.
At age fourteen, he had now fulfilled the promise laid out in his favorite book, One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000. His savings now totaled around a thousand dollars. He took great pride in that accomplishment. So far, he was ahead of the game, way ahead of the game, and
getting ahead of the game, he knew, was the way to his goal.
10
True Crime Stories
Washington, D.C. • 1943–1945
Bad grades, tax evasion, and running away were the least of Warren’s troubles in junior high. His parents didn’t know it, but their son had turned to a life of crime.
“Well, I was antisocial, in eighth and ninth grade, after I moved there. I fell in with bad people and did things I shouldn’t have. I was just rebelling. I was unhappy.”
He started with minor schoolboy pranks.
“I loved print shop. I used to make calculations in print-shop class of the frequency of letters and numbers. That was something I could do by myself. I could set type, you know, and that sort of thing. I enjoyed printing up all kinds of things.
“I made up a letterhead from the American Temperance Union, Reverend A. W. Paul, President. I’d write letters to people on that letterhead saying that for years I’d lectured around the country on the evils of drink, and in these travels my appearances were always accompanied by my young apprentice, Harold. Harold was an example of what drink could do to men. He’d stand there on the stage with a pint, drooling, unable to comprehend what was going on around him, pathetic. Then I said that, unfortunately, young Harold died last week, and a mutual friend had suggested that you might be a replacement for him.”1
The people with whom Warren felt most comfortable encouraged his antisocial impulses. He and a couple of new friends, Don Danly and Charlie Tron, took to hanging out at the new Sears store. Near Tenley Circle where Nebraska and Wisconsin Avenues intersected, the store was an eye-opening swoop of modern design dropped into the middle of Tenleytown, the second oldest neighborhood in Washington. Letters the height of a man spelled out SEARS on a curved metal deck several stories above sidewalk level.2 On the roof behind the Sears sign was hidden a great novelty, an open-air parking garage, which quickly became popular with high school kids as a place to park and neck. The store had become the hangout for all the junior high kids too. Warren and his friends rode the H2 bus there at lunchtime or on Saturdays.
Most of the kids liked the dark little lunch counter Sears had installed in the basement, with its mesmerizing conveyer belt that spit out doughnuts all day long. But Warren, Don, and Charlie preferred Woolworth’s across the street, even though the police station was on the opposite corner. Woolworth’s sat kitty-corner from Sears. They could eat lunch and case the joint through the windows.
After their hamburgers, the boys would stroll down the stairs into Sears’s lower level, bypassing the lunch counter and going straight to the sporting-goods section.
“We’d just steal the place blind. We’d steal stuff for which we had no use. We’d steal golf bags and golf clubs. I walked out of the lower level where the sporting goods were, up the stairway to the street, carrying a golf bag and golf clubs, and the clubs were stolen, and so was the bag. I stole hundreds of golf balls.” They referred to their theft as “hooking.”
“I don’t know how we didn’t get caught. We couldn’t have looked innocent. A teenager who’s doing something wrong does not look innocent.3
“I took the golf balls and filled up these orange sacks in my closet. As fast as Sears put them out, I was hooking them. I had no use for them, really. I wasn’t selling them then. It’s hard to think of a reason why you had this multiplying group of golf balls in the closet, this orange sack that’s just getting bigger all the time. I should have diversified my theft. Instead, I made up this crazy story for my parents—and I know they didn’t believe me, but—I told them I had this friend, and his father had died. He kept finding more of these golf balls that his father had bought. Who knows what my parents talked about at night.”4
The Buffetts were aghast. Warren was their gifted child, but by the end of 1944, he had become the school delinquent. “My grades were a quantification of my unhappiness. Math—Cs. English—C, D, D. Everything Xs for self-reliance, industry, courtesy. The less I interacted with teachers, the better it was. They actually put me in a room by myself there for a while where they would kind of shove my lessons under the door like Hannibal Lecter.”5
When graduation day came and the students were told to show up in a suit and tie, Warren refused. With that his principal, Bertie Backus, had had enough.
“They wouldn’t let me graduate with the class at Alice Deal, because I was so disruptive and I wouldn’t wear clothes that were appropriate. It was major. It was unpleasant. I was really rebelling. Some of the teachers predicted that I was going to be a disastrous failure. I set the record for checks on deficiencies in deportment and all that.
“But my dad never gave up on me. And my mother didn’t either, actually. Neither one. It’s great to have parents that believe in you.”
Yet by the spring of 1945, as Warren was starting high school, the Buffetts had had enough too. By now, it was no great mystery how to motivate Warren. Howard threatened to take away the source of his money.
“My dad, who was always supportive of me, said, ‘I know what you’re capable of. And I’m not asking you to perform one hundred percent, but you can either keep behaving this way or you can do something in relation to your potential. But if you don’t do it, you have to give up the paper routes.’ And that hit me. My dad was low-key, just sort of letting me know he was disappointed with me. And that killed me probably a lot more than his telling me I couldn’t do this or that, you know.”
11
Pudgy She Was Not
Washington, D.C. • 1944–1945
The disruption Warren had created in his family’s life undoubtedly made his father’s already challenging career as a new Congressman no easier. Members of the 78th Congress fraternized under a sort of jolly monarchy ruled by House Speaker Sam Rayburn, a Texas Democrat who kept five portraits of Robert E. Lee in his office, all facing south. The House that Rayburn oversaw was a comfortable home for the typical backbencher, an elbow-grabber who lived for county fairs and the chance to kiss somebody’s grandma, a beauty queen, or any secretary he could catch. Famed for his artful behind-the-scenes vote-wrangling and powerful oratory, Rayburn operated a sort of private saloon in the afternoons where he served “bourbon and branch” water to his favorites.
Naturally, Howard was not among them. Besides the fact that he was a Republican, his idea of a good time was reading the Congressional Record every night. He never went near a saloon. And yet, in many other ways, he did fit the profile of the typical Congressman of the era—hailing from a small city, graduate of a state university, middling student, background in community politics, Rotarian from the middle of the middle class, not part of the country-club set, and a foe of Communism.
But instead of joining the rest of his peers in what amounted to a club and beginning the climb up the ladder of power, Howard Buffett quickly gained a reputation as perhaps the least-backslapping Congressman ever to represent his state. He stayed miles away from the “rubber chicken circuit” of campaign money and vote-getting events that occupied so many Congressmen, and made it known his vote was not for sale or barter. He turned down a raise because the people who elected him had voted him in at a lower salary. He went around with eyebrows lofted at the perks that came with being a Congressman. The subsidized restaurants, the payrolls padded with friends, relatives, and mistresses, the greenhouse that supplied free plants, the “stationery store” that sold, at wholesale prices, everything from tires to jewelry—Howard was shocked by all of it and let that be known.
His long-standing isolationism was shared by a friend, Republican leader Robert Taft.1 But isolationists were no longer entering Congress; they were leaving or retiring. Moreover, with the country at war and the government running at a deficit, Howard was obsessed with the quixotic goal of trying to return the country to the “gold standard.” The United States had dropped the gold standard in 1933. Ever since, the Treasury had been printing money freely to finance first the New Deal and now the war. Howard feared that someday t
he United States might wind up like Germany in the 1930s, when people had to cart wheelbarrows of money down the street to buy a head of cabbage—the direct result of Germany being forced to deplete its gold stock to pay reparations after World War I.2 The economic chaos that resulted was one of the major factors that had led to Hitler.
Certain that the government was going to spend the country into ruination, Howard bought a farm back in Nebraska to serve as a refuge for the family when everybody else starved. A distrust of government bonds was so well-entrenched in the Buffett household that when the family held a powwow about giving a savings bond to somebody for a birthday present, young Bertie, nine years old, thought her parents were trying to put one over on the guy. “But won’t he know they’re worthless?”3 she asked.
Howard’s rigidity impeded him from doing his job, which was to legislate.
“He would lose these votes in the House, maybe 412 to 3. My dad would be among the three. And it just didn’t get to him. He was very much at peace. It would have gotten to me—I get mad when I lose. I can’t ever recall seeing him depressed or despondent. He just figured he was doing the best he could. He went his own way, and he knew why he was there—for us kids. He had a very pessimistic appraisal of where the country was going, but he was not a pessimist.”
The way Howard invariably held aloft his principles—instead of working toward Republican Party goals by joining coalitions—strained relationships with his colleagues and took a toll on the family. Leila cared about fitting in; other people’s opinions mattered to her. She was also competitive. “Why can’t you be a little more flexible,” she said, “like Ken Wherry?”—the junior Nebraska senator who was moving quickly up the ranks. Howard was having none of it. “We believed in him,” says Doris, “but it was hard to see him lose all the time.” That was an understatement. All the Buffetts admired Howard’s fortitude and credit their father for teaching them integrity. But each of the children absorbed in their own way a desire to belong that somehow muted or balanced the family streak of independence.
The Snowball Page 11