The Snowball

by Alice Schroeder

  Her husband’s stance as the lone wolf of the party exacerbated Leila’s irritable mood. Still miserable about living in Washington, she tried to create a miniature Omaha and spent her free time with the women of the Nebraska delegation. But that free time was limited, for she no longer had a cleaning lady. She felt put upon. “I gave it all up to marry Howard,”4 she would say, adding this lament to her stories of how she and Howard had sacrificed for their ungrateful children’s welfare. But rather than teaching those children to help around the house, she did everything, because “it was just easier to do it myself.” Feelings of martyrdom made her angry at the kids a lot of the time, especially at Doris, who was having her own issues about fitting in.

  Although strikingly pretty, Doris says she never felt that way, and was insecure about whether she was good enough for the sophisticated Washington crowd of which she longed to be a part. She was invited to the French Embassy for Margaret Truman’s birthday party and was added to The Debutante Register, as she began planning to debut as a Princess of Ak-Sar-Ben*7 with the crowd she would have been graduating with back in Omaha. Warren made fun of her for her pretensions.

  Leila, herself a determined striver who cared deeply about appearances, would pore over every bit of news about the Duchess of Windsor, a penniless commoner who had been rescued by a prince.5 But, unlike the duchess, who spent the rest of her life amassing one of the world’s most impressive collections of jewels, Leila’s ambition and pride wrapped themselves in a self-conscious disdain for ostentation. She pictured the family as a middle-class Midwestern archetype, a Saturday Evening Post magazine cover, and berated Doris for being socially ambitious.

  Still fourteen years old, Warren became a sophomore at Woodrow Wilson High School in February 1945, upon his graduation from Alice Deal.6 He wanted to be both “special” and “normal” at the same time. Much less mature than his classmates, he was being carefully watched by his parents, who were determined to see him straighten out. His paper routes were the source of his autonomy, such autonomy as he now had. And he had been reading—as well as throwing—the papers.

  “I read the comics, the sports section, and looked at the stock pages every morning before I delivered the newspapers. I read the cartoon Li’l Abner every morning. I had to know what Li’l Abner was doing every day. His appeal was that he made you feel so smart. You’d read this thing and think, ‘If I was in that position…this guy is so dumb.’ Because here was Daisy Mae, this incredible woman who was just nuts about him, and was always chasing after him, and he just kept passing her up and not noticing her. Every red-blooded American boy in those days would have been just waiting there for Daisy Mae to catch him.”

  Daisy Mae Scragg, the hillbilly heroine of the Appalachian cartoon hamlet of Dogpatch, was a bodacious blonde whose cleavage burst from an off-the-shoulder polka-dot blouse. The dim-witted strongman Li’l Abner Yokum spent most of his time trying to evade Daisy Mae’s marital designs on him. But the faster he ran away, the more deaf he seemed to her attention and longing, the more he spurned her, the harder Daisy Mae chased him. Even though rich and powerful men wooed her, to Daisy Mae there was but one man on earth, Li’l Abner.7

  Besides elusiveness, Li’l Abner’s only apparent asset was his manly physique. Warren’s poor record with girls so far suggested that if he ever wanted to attract the interest of a girl like Daisy Mae, he had better do something to make himself more attractive. Now he developed a new interest, which conveniently gave him an excuse as well for hiding away down in the basement. The way that Frankie Zick could clean-and-jerk fifty-pound bags of animal feed for hours at a time at South Omaha Feed had impressed him. He got his friend Lou Battistone interested and they embarked on a weight-lifting program. At the time, weight training was not the stuff of serious athletes, but it had many qualities that appealed to Warren: systems, measuring, counting, repetition, and competing with yourself. In search of technique, he had discovered Bob Hoffman and his magazine, Strength and Health.

  Strength and Health was Hoffman’s attempt to overcome the stigma against weight lifting through aggressive promotion. It was edited, published, and apparently written largely by Hoffman himself. Ads for his products appeared on nearly every page. “Uncle” Bob’s technical knowledge, his razzle-dazzle, the man’s unflagging ability to market himself, were striking.

  “He was the coach of most of the Olympic team. He was the head of the York Barbell Company, and he was the author of the Big Arms and the Big Chest books. The basic thing he sold initially was barbell sets. If you went to a sporting-goods store then, everything was York barbells. You could buy all these different kinds of sets.”

  Warren got a set of dumbbells and a barbell with a set of plates in increments of one and a quarter pounds that slipped on and off the bar, which he tightened with a little screwdriver that came with the set. He kept the weights in the basement and was “always down there clanking. My parents got a big kick out of the whole thing.”

  Sometimes he went down to the YMCA to lift weights among other young men. He and Lou took their hobby seriously, making insider jokes about the “heavy and light” lifting system and “upright rowing motions.” They paid close attention to everything Uncle Bob wrote. Hoffman knew how to adapt to the tenor of the times. Everyone knew about the vicious Jap soldier’s ability to withstand pain and suffering, so he wrote that the point of lifting weights was to fight the Japanese. He illustrated this with a photo of a vicious Jap soldier, arched in a backbend from his toes to the crown of his head, lifting a huge set of cement barbells over his chest, training to beat the Allies. Warren was not lifting weights to fight the Japanese, or, for that matter, to fight anybody. Everything that Uncle Bob wrote, however, inspired him in his competition with himself.

  But while Warren was clanking down in the basement, the Republicans were in hell. Franklin Roosevelt had managed to win a fourth term as President, ensuring the Democrats another four years in the White House. At the dinner table, the family listened to much ranting from Howard. Then, on April 12, Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and his Vice President, Harry Truman, succeeded him as President.

  Roosevelt’s death sent most of the country into deep mourning, tinged with fear. Three and a half years into the war, the country had lost the man who made it feel secure, and it had low expectations of Truman. He retained FDR’s cabinet and sounded so humble that some thought he might be overwhelmed by the job. But to the Buffetts, no one could be worse than FDR. The family down the street whose father worked for the Canadian Embassy came to call on their Congressman neighbor upon the President’s death and pay their condolences. But when they arrived, Doris says, “Yo, ho, ho, we were celebrating.”8

  And to Warren, the death of a President meant another way to make money. Newspapers put out special editions, and he hustled himself out to the street corner, hawking papers while everybody mourned.

  One month later, on May 8, 1945, came V-E Day, the formal end of the war in Europe, following Germany’s unconditional surrender. Again there were special editions to sell, and Warren echoed his father’s political convictions as a matter of course. But at the time, he was only passingly interested in these adult concerns, because his real obsession was weight lifting and Bob Hoffman. He spent most of his free time down in the basement. A few weeks later, when school was out, he could wait no longer. He had to meet his idol, Uncle Bob. “He was it. I had to see him in person.”

  With their parents’ amused blessing, Warren and Lou took off for York, Pennsylvania, hitchhhiking part of the way.9

  “He had this barbell factory up there in York where they turned this stuff out. It was really more of a foundry. And he had the whole Olympic team working there. John Grimek was the big bodybuilder. Steve Stanko held the world’s record then for the clean and jerk: three hundred eighty-one pounds. But this is before they had super-heavyweight classifications.”

  In one sense the visit was demoralizing. “The guys did not bulk up the same way
in those days. It blew my mind that here were these guys that were Olympic champions, but a lot of them were small because they were in smaller-weight classes. And if you saw them in a foundry, wearing foundry-type clothes, they just looked like nothing.” But in another sense, the sight of those fairly ordinary-looking men lifted the boys’ aspirations. Maybe success in bodybuilding was within their reach. They saw themselves becoming men, physical specimens who could impress a woman. “Uncle Bob—when he spoke, it was like God was talking to us. And when you looked at yourself in the mirror, you saw deltoids and abs and the latissimus dorsi and everything. You learned every muscle group.”

  But the most impressive celebrity in Strength and Health—apart from Uncle Bob himself—was not John Grimek, the greatest bodybuilder in the world. It was a woman.

  “There were not a lot of women in Strength and Health. Pudgy Stockton’s about the only one that ever made it. I liked Pudgy. She was impressive. We talked about her a lot at school.”

  That was more than a slight understatement. Warren and Lou were obsessed with Abbye “Pudgy” Stockton, a work of art in human flesh—taut thighs rippling as her chiseled arms lofted a huge barbell above her wind-whipped hair, bikini showing off her tiny waist and perky bosom to all the musclemen and gaping onlookers at Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach. Five foot one and 115 pounds, she could lift a grown man in the air over her head and do it without sacrificing any of her femininity. As the world’s “Foremost Female Physical Culturist,” she wrote “Barbelles,” a column in Strength and Health, and conducted a Salon of Figure Development, “specializing in bust development, figure contouring, and reducing” in Los Angeles.10

  “She had the muscle tone of Mitzi Gaynor and the mammary development of Sophia Loren,” says Lou Battistone. “She was phenomenal. And we—I have to admit to you—we lusted for her.”

  Until now, Daisy Mae had been Warren’s fantasy girl. He would always look for the qualities of Daisy Mae in a woman. But Pudgy—Pudgy was real.

  It was not clear, however, exactly what you did if you had a girlfriend like Pudgy.11 The boys puzzled over ads for “Bob Hoffman’s guide to a successful happy marriage,” which featured “Premarital examination. How to examine your wife before marriage to make sure she’s ‘intact,’ as well as courtship, why people marry, and minor forms of lovemaking.” Just what were the minor forms of lovemaking? they wondered. Even the major forms were largely a mystery to them; the ads in the back of Strength and Health were the best the 1940s could do in terms of sex education. Don’t worry, Dad, we’re down in the basement, doing a little studying for our physics exam.

  However, in the end, Warren’s fascination with numbers won out.

  “You know, you kept measuring that biceps to see if it’d gone from thirteen to thirteen and a quarter inches. And you were always worried whether you were loosening up the tape or anything. But I never improved from looking like the Charles Atlas ‘before’ picture. I think my biceps went from thirteen inches to thirteen and a quarter inches after thousands of curls.

  “The Big Arms book didn’t do me much good.”

  12

  Silent Sales

  Washington, D.C. • 1945–1947

  That August, while the Buffetts were back in Omaha, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; on September 2, Japan formally surrendered. The war was over. Americans celebrated in near hysteria. But Warren recalls that he quickly started thinking through the next chess moves after the dropping of the bombs.

  “I didn’t know anything about physics. But I knew you could kill a couple of hundred thousand people if you were the first one to use the bomb in a war. It’s as if I run into some guy in a dark alley, and I’ve got a cannon, but he’s got a gun. If he’s willing to pull the trigger and I have some moral compunction against doing it, he wins. Einstein said right away, ‘This has changed everything in the world except how men think.’ It put a fuse to the end of the world. Now, it may be a long fuse, and there may be ways to interrupt it, but once that metaphorical bomb has a dozen fuses all burning, the problem becomes a different sort of thing than if no fuse is lit. I was only fourteen, but it seemed to me just totally clear what was going to happen, and it has happened to quite a degree.”

  A few weeks later, with the family back in Washington, Warren returned to finish tenth grade at Woodrow Wilson High School, at fifteen still a kid but now also a businessman. He was making so much money throwing papers that he had accumulated more than $2,000. Howard had let his son invest in Builders Supply Co., a hardware store that he and Carl Falk were opening next to the feed store back in Omaha.1 Meanwhile, Warren himself had bought a forty-acre farm for $1,200 about seventy miles away, near Walthill, in Thurston County, Nebraska.2 A tenant farmer worked the farm and they shared the profits—just the kind of arrangement Warren liked, with someone else doing the sweaty, boring work. Warren began introducing himself to people in high school as Warren Buffett from Nebraska, who owned a tenant farm back in the Midwest.3

  He thought like a businessman but did not look like one. He fit uncomfortably into the high school crowd, showing up with the same tattered sneakers and droopy socks peeking out from under baggy trousers day after day, skinny neck and narrow shoulders swallowed inside his shirt. If forced into dress shoes, he wore startling yellow or white socks above the scuffed leather. He seemed to squirm in his seat all the time. Sometimes he looked shy, almost innocent. At others, he wore a sharp, tough expression.

  Doris and Warren ignored each other if their paths crossed in the halls of high school. “Doris, who was very popular, was particularly ashamed of me, because I dressed terribly. Sometimes your sister would help you get socialized but I rejected that, basically. It wasn’t her fault; I was painfully aware of being socially maladjusted. I may just have felt so hopeless.”

  Warren’s stone-faced, smart-aleck act covered up the feelings of inadequacy that had made his life so difficult since leaving Omaha. He desperately wanted to be normal, but still felt very much the outsider.

  He was “hesitant,” said classmate Norma Thurston, his friend Don Danly’s girlfriend, “and he chose his words carefully and never made any commitment, however small, if he thought he might have to take it back.”4

  Many of his classmates plunged enthusiastically into teenage life, joining fraternities and sororities, getting pinned, and going to parties in their families’ basements where they served soda pop, hot dogs, and ice cream and then turned the lights down while everybody necked. Instead of necking, Warren rubber-necked. He had a regular Saturday night reservation with Lou Battistone at Jimmy Lake’s theater, a local burlesque joint, where they had a fantasy flirtation with one of the dancers, Kitty Lyne. Warren would roar with laughter when a comedian took a pratfall or the second banana in the balcony started heckling him.5 He spent twenty-five dollars on a 1920s-style raccoon coat. When he wore it down to Jimmy Lake’s, the bouncer told him, “No clowning around, you guys. Either take that coat off, or you can’t come in.”6 He took it off.

  The side of Warren that had robbed Sears blind was in transition: fading, but not gone. He and Danly still took the occasional five-finger discount at Sears. When his teachers told him they had most of their retirement savings in AT&T stock, he shorted it, then showed them the trade tickets to give them heartburn. “I was a pain in the ass,” he says.7

  His exceptional powers of reasoning and smart-aleck tendencies combined into a talent for taking perverse stands. Somehow, probably because he was the son of a Congressman, he wound up appearing on a radio program on January 3, 1946. CBS “American School of the Air” brought its program to WTOP, the local station owned by the Washington Post. On that Saturday morning, Warren went down to the station, where he and four other kids sat around a microphone and debated as “Congress in Session.”

  The show’s hostess assigned him the job of spicing up the debate. He argued convincingly in favor of absurdities—ideas on the order of eliminating income taxes or annexi
ng Japan. “When they wanted someone to take a crazy position,” he says, “I did it.” But while he relished argument for its own sake, his clever retorts, lightning-fast counterarguments, and general contrariness hindered his quest to be liked by his peers.

  Until now, Warren’s efforts to get along with people had had mixed results. He charmed adults, except for his teachers. He felt ill at ease with his peers, but had always managed to make a few close friends. He desperately wanted people to like him and especially not to attack him personally. He wanted a system. In fact, he already had one, but he wasn’t using the system to its full effect. Now, lacking any other resources, he began to work harder at it.

  Warren had found this system at his grandfather’s house, where he read everything he could get his hands on at a blazing pace, just as he did at home. Browsing the bookshelf in the back bedroom, he had consumed every issue of the Progressive Grocer and every single copy of the Daily Nebraskan that had been edited by his father, and worked his way like a boll weevil through all fifteen years of the Reader’s Digest that Ernest had accumulated. This bookcase also held a series of small biographies, many of them on business leaders. Since a young age Warren had studied the lives of men like Jay Cooke, Daniel Drew, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. Some of these books he read and reread. One of them was special—not a biography but a paperback written by former salesman Dale Carnegie,8 enticingly titled How to Win Friends and Influence People. He had discovered it at age eight or nine.