The Snowball

by Alice Schroeder

  Host:

  Let’s take the girls’ angle: Is he a cute boy?

  Doris (diplomatically): I think he has a rugged sort of look.13

  Despite the drumming and the “Mammy” singing, Chuck came to be fond of Warren, viewing him as a sort of goofy kid brother, although he still could not believe his roommate continued to wear beat-up Keds throughout the winter, and even when dressed up, was likely to wear one black shoe and one brown shoe without noticing.

  Like many people who met Warren, Chuck began to feel the urge to take care of him. They had lunch together at the Student Union a couple of times a week. Warren always ordered the same thing: a minute steak, hash browns, and a Pepsi. Then he discovered chocolate sundaes topped with malted-milk powder and had those every day too. One day after lunch Chuck took Warren over to the new Ping-Pong table that had just been installed in the Student Union. After four years in Washington, Warren was so rusty that Chuck got the impression he had never played Ping-Pong. In the first couple of games Warren could just about return Chuck’s serve. Chuck won easily.

  Within a day or two, however, Warren played like a demon. The first thing every morning, he got up, went straight over to the Student Union, found a hapless victim, and slaughtered him at the Ping-Pong table. Before long, he was playing Ping-Pong three or four hours at a stretch every afternoon. Chuck could no longer hold his own. “I was his first victim at Penn,” he recalls. But Ping-Pong kept Warren out of the suite and away from the record player while Chuck was studying.14

  Ping-Pong, however, did not fulfill Penn’s physical-education requirement. Rowing and sculling on the Schuylkill River were two of Penn’s most popular sports. Gaily painted boathouses belonging to the school’s many rowing clubs lined the riverbanks. Warren went out for the 150-pound freshman crew with the Vesper Boat Club. He rowed on a team of eight oarsmen guided by a coxswain. Rowing was repetitious and rhythmic, like weight lifting, basketball, golf, Ping-Pong, and his game of bolo, all activities that Warren enjoyed—but it was a team sport. Warren liked to shoot a basketball in his driveway because you could practice alone. He had never succeeded at team sports or learned to dance with a partner. He had been the leader of every stunt or business venture in which he had ever been involved. He couldn’t play the part of the echo.

  “It was miserable. The thing about crew is, you can’t coast or fake it. You have to put your oar in the water at exactly the same time as everybody else. You can be unbelievably tired but you have to match the pace, and it must be done in unison. It’s an incredibly grueling sport.” He came back to the dorm every afternoon sweating, head bowed, hands bloodied and blistered, and dropped crew as soon as he could.

  Warren was looking for a different kind of team. He wanted Chuck to sell used golf balls with him, but Chuck was too busy trying to study and maintain his social life. Warren also suggested that Chuck join him in a pinball business. He didn’t need Chuck’s money or labor, and it wasn’t even clear what Chuck’s role would be. But Warren, a one-man bandwagon, wanted someone to whom he could talk about his businesses, always and endlessly. If Chuck became a partner, it would make him part of Warren’s world.

  He had always been good at this Tom Sawyering, but for once, he failed with Chuck. Still, he wanted Chuck as a friend as well as a business partner. He invited Chuck to visit him in Washington. Leila was astonished when Chuck ate everything she offered him, even oatmeal. “Warren won’t eat anything,” she said. “He won’t eat this, he won’t eat that. He always makes me fix something special for him.” Chuck was amused to find that Warren had his mother so well trained.

  To Chuck, Warren seemed an odd mix of immature kid and brilliant prodigy. In many of his classes, he simply memorized what the professor said, not needing to look at a textbook.15 He flaunted obnoxious feats of memory by quoting page numbers and passages back in class and correcting his teachers on their text citations.16 “You forgot the comma,” he said to one.17

  In an accounting course, the proctors had not even finished passing out the exam papers to the two-hundred-odd students when Warren, showing off, stood up and turned in his paper. He was done. Chuck, sitting on the other side of the room, was frustrated. Wharton was no picnic; a quarter of the class would flunk out. But Warren cruised through with no apparent effort, leaving him as much time as he wanted to drum his hands and sing Mammy, my little Mammy, all night long.

  Chuck liked Warren well enough, but it all finally got to him.

  “He moved out on me. One morning I woke up and Chuck was gone.”18

  At term’s end that summer, Warren—who would never have thought he’d actually be glad to return to Washington—went home. Leila was in Omaha helping Howard campaign for reelection. So the Buffett kids, who had rarely gotten any relief from their parents’ austere regimen, experienced a glorious summer of freedom. Bertie was a camp counselor. Doris had a job at Garfinkel’s, where she was shocked that the store asked your religion on the job application and blacks could shop only on the first floor, where no clothing was sold.19

  Washington was then the most segregated city in the United States. Blacks could not work as streetcar conductors or motormen or at anything other than the most menial jobs. They could not enter the YMCA, eat in most restaurants, rent hotel rooms, or buy theater tickets. Dark-skinned diplomats had to be chaperoned, embarrassed and scandalized by a provincialism like no place else in the world. “I would rather be an Untouchable in the Hindu caste system than a Negro in Washington,” one foreign visitor said.20 The Washington Post, referred to by some right-wingers as “The Uptown Communist Sheet,” had been on a crusade about racism for some time,21 and President Truman had desegregated the military and was pushing for civil-rights reforms. But change was slow.

  Warren, who did not read the liberal Post, paid little attention to Washington’s racism. He was both unaware and immature, too absorbed in his own insecurity, his stunts, and his businesses. He returned that summer to his duties as relief circulation manager for the conservative Times-Herald. He still had the borrowed Ford and once again used it to deliver papers if he had to fill in for one of his paperboys, using the running board technique he had perfected earlier. He also reunited with his pal Don Danly. They thought about buying a fire engine together as their latest stunt, but instead found a 1928 Springfield Rolls-Royce Phantom I Brewster coupe for $350 in a junkyard in Baltimore. It was gray, weighed more than a Lincoln Continental, and was adorned with little bud vases. The car had two sets of instruments, so the lady in back—the employer—could see how fast the chauffeur was driving. The starter was broken, so Don and Warren took turns cranking it until it finally started up, then they drove it the fifty miles or so back to Washington. It belched smoke, leaked oil, and lacked taillights and license plates, but when they were stopped by a cop, Warren kept “talking and talking and talking” until he wiggled their way out of a ticket.22

  They put the Rolls in the garage underneath the Buffett house and started the motor up. The house immediately filled with acrid smoke, so they pulled it back out and up the steep driveway onto the street. They worked on it Saturday after Saturday. “Danly did all the work,” according to Doris, tinkering with the pipes and doing the welding, “and Warren watched admiringly and encouraged it along.”

  When they decided to paint the car, Don and his girlfriend, Norma Thurston, bought something called a Pad-o-Paint, which smeared on the color with a sponge. They painted the car dark blue; it looked really good to them. 23 Naturally, word had gotten around, so they rented it out, thirty-five bucks a pop.

  Then Warren had an idea for a stunt. He wanted to be seen in the car. Danly dressed up like a chauffeur, Warren put on the raccoon coat, and the two cranked and cranked to start the car, then drove downtown with platinum-blond Norma. As Danly lunged about under the hood, pretending to fix the motor, Warren directed him with a cane and Norma draped herself over the hood like a movie star. “It was Warren’s idea,” says Norma. “He was the more theatrical one.
We were going to see how many people would look at us.”

  Norma knew that Warren had never really dated in high school and needed help with girls, so she set him up with her cousin, Bobbie Worley. They dated chastely that summer, going to movies and playing bridge, Warren barraging her with an endless series of brainteasers and riddles.24

  When fall came, he left Bobbie behind and returned to Penn as an eighteen-year-old sophomore. He now had two roommates, his fraternity brother Clyde Reighard and a freshman who was assigned to them, George Oesmann. The year before, he had Tom Sawyered Clyde into acting as the front man for a business venture that went nowhere, but during their short-lived partnership, the two had become friends.

  Warren had not changed much since his freshman year, but he had much more in common with Clyde than he had with Chuck Peterson. Clyde was amused by Warren’s tennis shoes and T-shirts and dirty khaki pants, and he took it in stride when Warren needled and taunted him about his grades. While “he didn’t make me any smarter,” says Reighard, “he did make me use what I had more efficiently.” Indeed, Warren was a master at using what he had efficiently, his own time especially. He rose early in the morning, ate chicken salad at the dorm for breakfast, then headed off to classes.25 After sleepwalking through his freshman year, he had finally found one class he liked: Professor Hockenberry’s Industry 101, which discussed different industries and the nuts and bolts of running a business. “It was textiles, it was steel, it was petroleum. I can still remember that book. I got a lot of stuff from it. I can remember talking about the laws of capture in petroleum, and the Bessemer processes in steel. I devoured that book. That was really interesting to me.” But his suitemate Harry Beja, a grind who sweated through Hockenberry’s class alongside Warren, resented the way he tobogganed ahead effortlessly.26

  It was the same in business law, taught by Professor Cataldo, who “had very close to a photographic mind. He would quote cases at length. I can still remember Hadley versus Baxendale and Kemble versus Farren. So I would do the same thing back to him on the exams, which entertained him to no end. I would quote from his stuff in answering questions, whether applicable or not. And he just ate it up.”

  Helped by his prodigious memory, Warren was free to do as he pleased for much of the day. At lunchtime, he dropped by the Alpha Sig house, an old three-story mansion with a spiral staircase, where Kelsen, the black houseman, cooked, cleaned, and, in his white jacket, gave the place a degree of dignity. A bridge game went on twenty-four hours a day in a corner alcove, and Warren would sit down and play a few hands.27 His taste for practical jokes continued unabated. He occasionally enlisted one of his fraternity brothers, Lenny Farina, to pose for attention-getting photographs out on the street while he pretended to pick Lenny’s pocket or shine his shoes.28

  Meanwhile, in a scam reminiscent of sending poor old Kerlin into a water trap naked wearing a gas mask, he and Clyde had told their third roommate, George, that he looked “run-down and puny and would never attract girls unless he developed muscles.” They finally maneuvered George into buying himself some barbells. “And then we used to bang these barbells up and down while Harry Beja was studying down below. We had great fun taunting him by banging these barbells on the floor.”29

  By college, however, the evidence had become convincing. Warren had begun to give up on the idea of becoming a strongman. “After a while, I decided my bones were wrong. My clavicles were not long enough. It’s your clavicles that determine how broad-shouldered you’ll be, and you can’t do much about your clavicles. That’s why I got disgusted and eventually quit. I decided that if I was going to have girl-like muscles anyway, then to hell with it.”

  Girl-like muscles did not attract girls, and Warren had still not gone out on any dates since he arrived at Penn. Saturdays were big fraternity party days, with prefootball luncheons and postgame cocktail parties, dinners, and evening dances. Warren wrote a letter to Bobbie Worley, asking her to come up for a weekend and saying, in effect, that he had fallen in love. Bobbie liked him and was touched by his letter, but did not return his feelings. She would have enjoyed the weekend but said no because she felt it was wrong to lead him on.30

  Warren had one date, with Ann Beck, a Bryn Mawr girl. He had worked at her father’s bakery shortly after moving to Washington, when he was in eighth grade and she was “just a little girl with long blond hair.” Ann had been voted the most bashful girl at her high school, and the day she and Warren spent together was like a shyness contest: They walked around Philadelphia in awkward silence.31 “We were probably the two shyest people in the whole United States.” Warren had no idea how to make small talk; when stressed, he emitted small grunts instead.32

  Sometimes Warren and Clyde took the borrowed Ford coupe and drove off to the suburbs in search of movies about mummies, Frankenstein, vampires, or anything macabre.33 Since hardly anybody had a car at that time, his fraternity brothers were impressed.34 That was the irony: Warren was the only one with a car to make out in, but nobody to make out with. He passed on the Ivy Ball and the Inter-Fraternity Ball. He always skipped the Alpha Sig Sunday tea dances and never had a date at the fraternity house.35 His face would flush and he would stare at his shoes if anyone talked about sex.36 He was out of his element at such a hard-partying school, where the college fight song was “Drink a Highball.”

  “I tried drinking because I was in a fraternity where about half my dues were going to buy alcohol for these parties. I felt I was getting screwed. But I just didn’t like the taste. I don’t like beer. And I can behave silly enough without it. I mean, I was right there with the rest—the drinkers didn’t have anything on me when it came to being silly.”

  But even without a date on his arm or a glass in his hand, Warren sometimes showed up at his fraternity’s Saturday night parties. He was able to draw a little crowd by sitting in a corner and lecturing on the stock market. He had a wit and an arresting way of talking. His Alpha Sig brothers deferred to his opinion when it came to money and business; they respected his deep, if one-sided, knowledge of politics. They decided he had some “politician in him” and gave him a paddle with his nickname: the Senator.37

  Warren had joined the Young Republicans as a freshman because he was attracted to a girl who was a member. But instead of becoming her boyfriend, he became the group’s president when he was a sophomore. Warren took over at an exciting time—the fall of a presidential election year. In 1948, the Republicans were supporting Thomas F. Dewey against the weak incumbent Harry Truman, who had become President on FDR’s death.

  The Buffetts had grown to hate Truman. Though he had created what was known as the “Truman Doctrine” of containment, which was meant to prevent the spread of Communism, Howard, like many conservatives, felt that Truman and General George C. Marshall, his Secretary of State, were playing palsy-walsy with Soviet premier Stalin.38 Moreover, Truman had implemented the Marshall Plan, which sent eighteen million tons of food to Europe after World War II, and Howard was one of seventy-four Congressmen who had voted against it. Convinced that the Marshall Plan was another version of Operation Rat Hole and that the Democrats were wrecking the economy, Howard started buying gold chain bracelets for his daughters so they could feed themselves when the day came that the dollar was worthless.

  Howard was running for reelection to his fourth term that year. Even though Warren had been present when Howard was hissed and booed after he’d voted for passage of the Taft-Hartley “slave labor” bill, he, like the rest of the family, considered Howard’s Congressional seat relatively safe. Nonetheless, Howard had placed his reelection in the hands of a campaign manager for the first time—family friend Dr. William Thompson. Well-known and admired in Omaha, Thompson knew the pulse of the town and was a psychologist to boot. Day after day as the campaign progressed, people in Omaha would come up and say, “Congratulations, Howard, you’re in again, and I worked for you,” as if the election were over.

  Dewey, too, appeared to be a shoo-in. The polls show
ed that Truman was trailing him badly—in fact, so badly that the Roper organization, a polling research firm, simply stopped taking polls. Truman ignored this, and for months had been traveling around the country speaking from the back of his train on a “whistle-stop” tour, advocating what he called his “Fair Deal” policy: universal health insurance, broad-based civil-rights legislation, and the repeal of Taft-Hartley. He had whistle-stopped in Omaha, marched in a parade, and dedicated a park, looking as cheerful as if he hadn’t read the newspapers predicting his defeat.39

  As Election Day approached, in happy anticipation of his father’s reelection and of Dewey’s victory, Warren made arrangements with the Philadelphia Zoo to ride an elephant down Woodland Avenue on November 3. He envisioned it as a sort of triumphal march, like Hannibal entering Sardinia.

  But on the morning after Election Day, Warren had to cancel his stunt. Not only had Truman won the 1948 election, but his father had lost. The voters had thrown Howard Buffett out of Congress. “I’d never ridden an elephant before. When Truman beat Dewey, the elephant went down the tube. And my dad lost an election for the first time in four campaigns. That was a really lousy day.”

  Two months later, just a few days before the Buffetts left Washington at the end of Howard’s term, Warren’s great-uncle Frank died. Frank had boomed “IT’S GOING TO ZERO!” about every stock down at Harris Upham when Warren was a boy, and when his will was read, the family discovered that he owned government bonds and nothing else.40 He had outlived “the gold-digger,” and the terms of his will placed the bonds in a restricted trust that required that, upon maturing, they could only be reinvested in more U.S. government bonds. As if to convince his nephew and trustee, Howard, Frank had also apparently left various family members subscriptions to Baxter’s Letter, a doomsday sheet that preached that government bonds were the only safe investment. Frank meant to be at peace in the afterlife, the only Buffett (so far) to arrange that his opinions would resound from the grave.