39. Interview with Doris Buffett.
40. Howard wanted his children to attend Dundee’s Benson High School instead of Central, where he had suffered from snobbery.
41. Marion Barber Stahl was a partner in his own firm, Stahl and Updike, and had become counsel to the New York Daily News, among other clients. He and his wife, Dorothy, lived on Park Avenue and had no children. Obituary of Marion Stahl, New York Times, November 11, 1936.
42. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.
43. Interviews with Roberta Buffett Bialek, Warren Buffett, Doris Buffett.
44. Interview with Doris Buffett.
45. September 9, 1935, at the Columbian School.
46. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek as well as Warren Buffett.
Chapter 7
1. Adults interviewed by the author who attended Rosehill as children recall it as idyllic, yet the year before Warren started first grade, Rosehill parents pleaded for relief from overcrowded rooms and a “mud hole” playground. They were told not to expect help “until the sheriff collects back taxes.” “School Plea Proves Vain,” Omaha World-Herald, January 22, 1935.
2. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.
3. Walt Loomis, the teacher of the boxing lesson, was a big kid, about Doris’s age.
4. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.
5. Stella’s doctors referred to her as schizophrenic, while noting she suffered annually from predictable periods of agitation and confusion, and indicated that her personality did not deteriorate as expected in schizophrenia. Based on family history and Bernice’s statement that other older relatives in addition to Stella’s mother, Susan Barber, were “maniacal” and mentally unstable, bipolar disorder may be suspected as the real condition. This disease was barely understood, to say the least, in the 1930s and ’40s.
6. From an entry in Leila’s “day book.”
7. In an interview, one of his classmates, Joan Fugate Martin, recalled Warren showing up on his rounds periodically to “shoot the breeze” in her driveway.
8. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.
9. Interviews with Stu Erickson, Warren Buffett.
10. According to his Rosehill transcript, Warren was promoted to 4B in 1939.
11. Interview with Stu Erickson.
12. “My appendectomy was the high point of my social life,” Buffett says.
13. “I wish one of those nuns had gone bad,” he says today.
14. Rosco McGowen, “Dodgers Battle Cubs to 19-Inning Tie,” New York Times, May 18, 1939. (Warren and Ernest did not stay for the entire game.)
15. Ely Culbertson, Contract Bridge Complete: The New Gold Book of Bidding and Play. Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Co., 1936.
16. This explanation of bridge was provided by Bob Hamman, eleven-time world champion and #1-ranked bridge player in the world between 1985 and 2004. Hamman appears at the Berkshire shareholders’ meeting.
Chapter 8
1. Warren bought the gum for three cents a pack from his grandfather.
2. Interviews with Doris Buffett, Roberta Buffett Bialek.
3. Two presidents, Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt, had previously sought election to a third term. Both were defeated.
4. The Trans-Lux Corporation placed the first ticker-tape projection system at the New York Stock Exchange in 1923. The system worked something like a fax machine. Trans-Lux knew a good thing when it saw one: The company’s own stock was listed on the American Stock Exchange in 1925, and Trans-Lux remains the oldest listed company on the Amex today.
5. Frank Buffett had reconciled with Ernest on Henrietta’s death in 1921 and ran the other Buffett store. John Barber was a real estate agent.
6. Pyramid schemes are frauds that promise investors impossible returns, using cash from later investors to pay off earlier investors and create the appearance of success. To keep going, the scheme has to grow like a pyramid, but their geometrically compounding structure guarantees eventual failure and discovery.
7. Alden Whitman, “Sidney J. Weinberg Dies at 77; ‘Mr. Wall Street’ of Finance,” New York Times, July 24, 1969; Lisa Endlich, Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success. New York: Knopf, 1999.
8. That Weinberg cared about his opinion mattered more than the opinion itself; Buffett has no recollection of which stock he recommended to Weinberg.
9. Buffett later said, in an interview, that these were the words that ran through his head—“that’s where the money is”—although at the time he was not familiar with the famous quote attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton.
10. Almost a decade later, he would lower the age to 30 while talking to his sister Bertie, who was 14 or 15 at the time. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.
11. Buffett believes he overheard his father talking about the stock, which traded on the “Curb Exchange,” where brokers gathered in the street (later organized into the American Stock Exchange).
12. From the records of Buffett, Sklenicka & Co.
Chapter 9
1. “All these handouts in Europe are being used by the politicians to retain and expand their own power.” “U.S. Moving to Socialism,” citing Howard Buffett, Omaha World-Herald, September 30, 1948.
2. Roosevelt said this in Boston on October 30, 1940, while campaigning for his third term, fourteen months before Pearl Harbor.
3. Leila Buffett letter to Clyde and Edna Buffett, undated but approximately 1964.
4. United States Department of Agriculture and Nebraska Department of Agriculture, Nebraska Agricultural Statistics (preliminary report) 1930. Lincoln, Government Printing Office, 1930, p. 3.
5. Buffett’s impression of 1940s South Omaha was vivid: “If you walked around down there in those days, believe me, it was not conducive to eating hot dogs.”
6. John R. Commons, “Labor Conditions in Meat Packing and Recent Strike,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 1904; Roger Horowitz, “‘Where Men Will Not Work’: Gender, Power, Space and the Sexual Division of Labor in America’s Meatpacking Industry, 1890–1990,” Technology and Culture, 1997; Lawrence H. Larsen and Barbara J. Cottrell, The Gate City: A History of Omaha. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1997; Harry B. Otis, with Donald H. Erickson, E. Pluribus Omaha: Immigrants All. Omaha: Lamplighter Press (Douglas County Historical Society), 2000. Horowitz, commenting specifically on Omaha, points out that slaughterhouses in 1930 were still organized much the same way as portrayed in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle.
7. In 2005, the GAO cited “respiratory irritation or even asphyxiation from exposure to chemicals, pathogens, and gases” as a current occupational risk for industry workers in GAO 05-95 Health and Safety of Meat and Poultry Workers. See also Nebraska Meatpacking Industry Workers Bill of Rights (2000), a “voluntary instrument” whose “reach has been modest,” according to Joe Santos of the state labor department, as cited by Human Rights Watch in its report Blood, Sweat and Fear: Workers’ Rights in the U.S. Meat and Poultry Industry, December 2004.
8. This description of Washington in wartime owes much to David Brinkley’s Washington Goes to War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988).
9. With so many men off to war, 15% of the city’s buses and trolleys sat idle. The Capital Transit company refused to hire blacks as conductors and motormen after it hired one black conductor in 1943 and the white conductors walked off the job. (Over the course of 1944 and 1945, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, reported to the Attorney General that “If the company employs Negroes as operators there will be an immediate ‘wildcat’ strike…and the inevitable result would be the complete paralysis of the transportation system in the District of Columbia.” (Office memorandums re: racial conditions in Washington, D.C., September 5, 1944, and December 9, 1944, from Georgia State Special Collections.)
10. Howard University students used “stool-sitting” on two occasions: In April 1943, at Little Palace cafeteria, until the proprietor changed his policy, and a year later, with fifty-six stude
nts at Thompson’s Restaurant, where some whites joined the cause, a crowd gathered, and the police got Thompson’s to serve everyone, temporarily. (Flora Bryant Brown, “NAACP Sponsored Sit-Ins by Howard University Students in Washington, D.C., 1943–1944,” The Journal of Negro History, 85.4, Fall 2000).
11. Dr. Frank Reichel headed American Viscose.
12. Interviews with Doris Buffett, Roberta Buffett Bialek, Warren Buffett.
13. Buffett is probably embellishing a little here with hindsight.
14. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.
15. Gladys, formerly known as Gussie, changed her name to Mary sometime during this period. Warren vainly pursued a romance with her daughter Carolyn, who later married Buffett’s friend Walter Scott.
16. Warren claims it was Byron’s idea. Byron claims it was Warren’s idea. Stu says he can’t remember.
17. Joan Fugate Martin, who remembers the date, in an interview corroborated the story. She called the boys perfect gentlemen, but had nothing to add about their self-confessed awkwardness.
18. Interviews with Stu Erickson and Byron Swanson, who supplied various details of the story.
19. The phone number is from a letter from Mrs. Anna Mae Junno, whose grandfather used to work as a meat cutter.
20. The lowly stock boy was Charlie Munger.
21. Interview with Katie Buffett.
22. Ibid. Leila had a striver’s fascination with social hierarchies and upward mobility.
23. “You might argue that it was working in my grandfather’s grocery store that fostered a lot of desire for independence in me,” Buffett says.
24. This letter, which was at one time one of Buffett’s treasured heirlooms, resided in his desk drawer for many years, written on a piece of yellow paper. He can no longer locate it. Through a trade association, Ernest lobbied against chain stores and worked for legislation that would levy special taxes on them—in vain.
25. Interview with Doris Buffett.
26. Warren Buffett letter to Meg Greenfield, June 19, 1984.
27. Sadly, no one in the family can locate a copy of this manuscript today.
28. Spring Valley marketing brochure. The place had its own coat of arms.
29. “Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.” Before the WAVES, the Navy accepted women only as nurses.
30. Alice Deal Junior High School was named after the first junior high principal in Washington, D.C.
31. Buffett is reasonably sure Ms. Allwine was his English teacher and that “she had good reason” for her low opinion of him. “I deserved it,” he says.
32. Interview with Casper Heindel.
33. “I’m not sure I paid tax on that either,” Warren adds.
34. In her memoir, Leila wrote that Warren would not let her touch the money.
35. Roger Bell, who confirms the story in an interview, was saving war-bond stamps until he had enough to buy an actual bond, and cashed them in to fund the trip. “I told my mother we were going, but she didn’t believe me,” he says.
36. Interview with Roger Bell.
37. From Buffett’s 1944 report cards.
38. Based on comments in his report cards.
39. Interview with Norma Thurston-Perna.
40. Queen Wilhelmina owned stock in the Dutch holding company that had bought The Westchester.
41. He collected the bus passes from various routes. “They were colorful. I collected anything.” Asked if anyone else in his family ever collected anything: “No. They were more popular.”
42. Customers also discarded old magazines in the stairwells, and Warren would pick them up.
43. While Warren recalls the story, it was Lou Battistone who remembered its fascinating details.
44. Interview with Lou Battistone.
Chapter 10
1. This particular prank letter circulated widely in the mid-twentieth century. Where the idea originated and from whom Warren might have gotten a copy is unknown. What makes this fondly recalled prank funny (putting aside whether or how often he actually perpetrated it and upon whom) is how it plays to the commonplace interest in hidden lives and feet of clay. Its essence is a tribute to the power of shame.
2. The impact of Sears, the first department store in Tenleytown, and its unusual rooftop parking lot are described in Judith Beck Helm’s Tenleytown, D.C.: Country Village into City Neighborhood. Washington, D.C.: Tennally Press, 1981.
3. In an interview, Norma Thurston-Perna substantiates the essential elements of this story, recalls her boyfriend Don Danly “hooking” from Sears with Warren, adds that to some extent this behavior continued into high school, and mentions how annoyed she was to discover that an impressive honeysuckle fragrance and bath powder set given to her by Don as a birthday gift turned out to have been stolen from Sears.
4. A letter from Suzanne M. Armstrong to Warren Buffett, December 20, 2007, recalls a friend of her father’s cousin, Jimmy Parsons, stealing golf balls with Buffett while at Woodrow Wilson High School.
5. Hannibal was the antihero of the book and movie The Silence of the Lambs.
Chapter 11
1. See John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (New York: HarperCollins, 1955) for an admiring portrait of Taft written from the perspective of the other side of the aisle.
2. From 1933, when the U.S. went off the gold standard, through 1947, the Consumer Price Index fluctuated wildly, spiking over 18%. The history of the Federal Reserve under inflationary conditions was short and provided little evidence to support an opinion either way.
3. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek. The others remember this story.
4. Coffee with Congress.
5. Interview with Katie Buffett. Leila apparently became obsessed with Wallis Warfield Simpson around 1936 during the abdication crisis in England.
6. Woodrow Wilson’s terms ran through February and June. Because Warren had skipped half a grade, he started his sophomore year in February.
7. Cartoonist Al Capp created Li’l Abner, who inherited his strength from his mother, the domineering Mammy Yokum, whose knockout “Good night Irene” punch maintained discipline among the Yokum clan.
8. Interview with Doris Buffett.
9. Battistone recalls Howard giving them a lift at least part of the way.
10. Although most of this information is from Strength and Health, Elizabeth McCracken wrote “The Belle of the Barbell,” a tribute to Pudgy Stockton, in the New York Times Magazine, December 31, 2006.
11. Pudgy was married to Les Stockton, a bodybuilder who had introduced her to weight lifting.
Chapter 12
1. “It was never any big success at all…it did not do well. It did not do terribly either. And it didn’t last very long,” says Buffett.
2. In interviews, Roger Bell and Casper Heindel, as well as Warren Buffett, helped remember details about the farm. Buffett believes he bought this from or through his uncle John Barber, a real estate broker.
3. Interview with Casper Heindel. More than half of all Nebraska land was farmed by tenant farmers. Real property ownership with mortgages was unpopular because unstable crop prices left farmers vulnerable to foreclosure.
4. Interview with Norma Thurston-Perna.
5. In an interview, Lou Battistone observes that he noticed the “two sides” of Buffett’s brain in high school—the cool mathematical businessman and the burlesque-watching one—while at the burlesque.
6. Interview with Lou Battistone.
7. Buffett told this story at Harvard Business School in 2005.
8. Carnegie was a salesman for Armour & Co., covering the Omaha territory; the compatibility of his views with Buffett’s temperament probably owes something to a shared Midwestern ethos.
9. All text, Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1938. Copyright Dale Carnegie & Associates. Courtesy of Dale Carnegie & Associates.
10. Dale Carnegie quoting John Dewey.
11. The average man ea
rned $2,473 a year in 1946, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975, Series D-722–727, p. 164.
12. According to Lou Battistone in an interview.
13. According to a newspaper advertisement on July 24, 1931, at early Depression-era prices a dozen years earlier, quality refurbished golf balls cost three for $1.05.
14. Interview with Don Dedrick, a golf teammate from high school.
15. Interview with Lou Battistone.
16. “We were the only guys that paid the fifty-dollar stamp tax on pinball machines,” Warren says. “I’m not sure we would have done it if my dad hadn’t been insisting.”
17. Interview with Lou Battistone. The name “Wilson” came from Woodrow Wilson High School.
18. An essay into barbershop food concession ended quickly after the peanut dispenser, filled with five pounds of Spanish nuts, broke and got customers a handful of peanuts mixed with ground glass.
19. Dialogue and expressions used by Buffett in this story came from Lou Battistone, although the facts align with Buffett’s recollection.
20. Interview with Don Dedrick.
21. In one version of this story, told by a high school friend of Buffett’s who was not present, Kerlin was too smart to fall for it and never made it to the golf course. Whatever happened, Buffett’s version is, not surprisingly, funnier.
Chapter 13
1. Interview with Katie Buffett.
2. While this story sounds buffed and polished over the years, the tone of it rings true. Letters from Warren at college to his father a couple of years later have the same breeziness.
3. Interview with Stu Erickson.
4. Interview with Don Dedrick.
5. Interview with Bob Dwyer.
6. According to Gray, Buffett also jokingly dreamed up an idea for a magazine called Sex Crimes Illustrated while they were on the train to the Havre de Grace racetrack.
7. Interview with Bill Gray, now Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project.
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