One December Sunday afternoon when Warren was eleven, the Buffetts were driving back from a visit to West Point after church. As they listened to the radio in the car, the announcer broke in to say that the Japanese had struck Pearl Harbor. Nobody explained exactly what had happened or how many were killed or injured, but from the commotion Warren quickly realized that the world was going to change.
His father’s already reactionary political views quickly turned even more extreme. Howard and his friends considered Roosevelt a warmonger who lusted after dictatorship and was trying to achieve it by luring America into yet another European war.
Howard now came to believe that in a desperate gamble, Roosevelt and his army’s chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, had decided that “the only way to get us into the European war was to get the Japanese to attack us,” says Warren, “and not tip off the people at Pearl Harbor.” This belief was common among conservatives at the time, although Howard, as in most things, was strikingly firm in his convictions.
The following spring, the Nebraska Republican Party tapped Howard with the awkward job of finding a candidate to run for Congress against a popular incumbent, Charles F. McLaughlin. At the last minute, according to family lore, Howard entered his own name on the ballot, unable to find another sacrificial lamb willing to run against a heavily favored Democrat.
He found himself thrust into the role of campaigner. The Buffetts plastered simple flyers saying “Buffett for Congress” on telephone poles. They went to county fairs, where Howard and Leila handed out cards amid the livestock displays and entries in the best pickle competition. “He was the most unlikely candidate. He hated to speak in public. My mother was a good campaigner, but my dad was introverted.” Leila, a talker, instinctively knew how to work a crowd and enjoyed approaching people. The kids circulated, saying, “Would you vote for my daddy?” Afterward they got to ride on the Ferris wheel.
“Then we made this little fifteen-minute radio program. My mother played the organ; my father introduced us: ‘There’s Doris, age fourteen. And there’s Warren, age eleven.’ And my line was ‘Just a second, Pop, I’m reading the sports section.’ Then, the three of us sang ‘America the Beautiful.’ ” It was no stemwinder, but “With that fifteen-minute radio program, everybody started volunteering. Still, the other guy had been in for four terms.”
Howard struggled against the political handicaps of his pessimism and his literal honesty. Thus, the Buffett political platform demanded that voters “buy one-way tickets out of Washington for all of the screwballs, stuffed shirts, stool pigeons, sleepwalkers, and society snobs.”
This fire-breathing rhetoric belied a sweetness in him, a subtle wit, and a certain innocence. For years, Howard had carried in his pocket a handwritten piece of paper, softened and worn to the texture of linen, which said, “I am God’s child. I am in His Hands. As for my body—it was never meant to be permanent. As for my soul—it is immortal. Why, then, should I be afraid of anything?”1
Unfortunately for his only son, when it came to the streets of Omaha, Howard meant this almost literally.
When campaigning, he would roust Warren, now twelve years old, out of bed long before dawn, to head down to the stockyards in South Omaha. Along with the railroads, these were Omaha’s main business, employing almost twenty thousand people, mostly immigrants. More than eight million animals a year2 lumbered into a metropolis of meat and rolled out as billions of pounds of packaged goods.3 South Omaha once was a separate city, a short distance from downtown geographically but culturally a continent away. For decades it had served as the brewing ground for most of the city’s ethnic and racial unrest.
Warren planted his sneakers at one end of the block, hands clenched and eyes fixed anxiously on his father. Howard limped from a childhood bout with polio, and the family worried about his heart condition. Warren’s stomach churned as he watched his father down the street, approaching huge, cleaver-faced men in overalls on their way into the packinghouses for the five-thirty a.m. shift.
Many of them did not speak English at home. The least well off, the blacks and new immigrants, lived crammed into a buffer zone of boardinghouses and shanties next to the yards. Those with greater savvy and more means had worked their way out into the ethnic parishes nearby.
Men and women, black and white, these people were Democrats in every fiber of their being. The rest of Nebraska might be turning against the New Deal, the President’s cure for the Great Depression, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt was still a hero in this part of town. Yet the leaflets that Howard Buffett politely pressed into their callused hands shrieked that FDR was the greatest danger to democracy that America had ever known. If given a moment to speak, he would calmly explain why, as their Congressman, he would always vote to enact laws that the stockyard workers would oppose.
Howard was a zealot, but he was neither stupid nor crazy. Even though he placed his trust in God’s hands, he had a backup plan. Warren had not come for an education, nor to tag-team his father in a fight. His job was to run like hell for the cops if the stockyard workers started beating up his father.
Under the circumstances, a reasonable person might ask what Howard was doing there at all. His efforts might not be repaid by a single vote. But apparently he felt an obligation to appear before every potential voter in his district, however little of him they cared to see.
Warren always managed to return home intact; he never had to run for the cops. That may have been just luck or it may have been Howard’s demeanor, which conveyed his basic decency. Still, the Buffetts had no reason to believe the voters saw that, nor that if they did, it would overcome his underdog status. On election day, November 3, 1942, “My dad wrote out his concession statement. We all went to bed at eight-thirty or nine o’clock, because we never stayed up late. And he woke up the next morning to find out he’d won.”
Howard’s deep suspicion of foreign adventures was more than a quirk of his Quaker-like personality. It reflected a reservoir of conservative isolationism, which had once run deep and wide through the Midwest. Although that stream was drying up, Pearl Harbor had revived it for a little while. Despite Roosevelt’s overwhelming popularity, labor’s support for his foreign policies had wavered temporarily in Omaha, just long enough to get Howard elected against an opponent who had been, perhaps, overconfident.
The following January, the Buffetts rented out their house in Dundee and boarded a train to Virginia. They arrived at Washington’s Union Station to find a provincial city grown packed and chaotic. Great crowds of people filled the town, most of them working at vast new wartime government agencies. The military had commandeered every building, office, chair, and pencil within reach in the effort to get itself organized in the newly finished Pentagon, the world’s largest office building, which was outgrown by the time it was completed. By now, flimsy temporary office buildings lined every inch of the Mall.4 Rickety nineteenth-century wooden trolleys packed with government workers crept their way along impassable streets. Hordes of new arrivals had doubled the population. Following in the dust of the respectable, impoverished, and naive came pickpockets, prostitutes, grifters, and drifters, turning Washington into the nation’s crime capital.
The Buffetts had friends, the Reichels5—acquaintances of Howard’s from his stockbroking days—who told them, don’t live in Washington, it’s terrible. They knew of an enormous house in Virginia that someone in the Marines had just vacated. The house had ten fireplaces and a greenhouse. Although its grandeur was far above the Buffetts’ style, and it was located almost an hour from the city, they leased it temporarily. Howard rented a tiny apartment in the District of Columbia and commuted on the weekends. His time filled quickly as he started fitting in and learning the rules and procedures and unwritten customs of serving as a Congressman.
Leila soon began riding into Washington to look for a permanent place to live. She had been unusually irritable since their arrival and often spoke longingly of Omaha. The timing of the move had turned out to be inauspicious. Her sister Bernice had just insinuated that she would commit suicide, saying that she would not be responsible for what happened unless the family committed her to the Norfolk State Hospital, where their mother, Stella, was also housed. Edie, now in charge of her sister’s care, consulted a doctor. They thought that Bernice wanted to live with her mother and was conceivably using melodramatic means to get her way. Nevertheless, they took the suicide threat seriously, and the family sent her off to Norfolk.
The details of the Stahl family’s problems were rarely discussed in front of the children. Each adapted to Washington in his or her own way. Beautiful fifteen-year-old Doris felt like Dorothy, who had just left black-and-white Kansas and stepped into the Technicolor land of Oz. She became the belle of Fredericksburg and fell in love with the town.6 Leila began to treat her daughter as a social climber who had pretensions above her station, and still launched the occasional tirade against her. But by now, Doris’s spirit resisted her mother’s constraints, and she had begun to fight for her own identity.
Meanwhile, Warren, twelve years old, spent the first six weeks in an eighth-grade class that was “way behind” where he had been academically in Omaha. Naturally, his first instinct was to get a job, working at a bakery where he “did damned near nothing. I wasn’t baking and I wasn’t selling.” At home, furious and miserable at being uprooted, he reported a mysterious “allergy” that disturbed his sleep so that he had to sleep standing up. “I wrote my grandfather these pathetic letters, too, and he sort of said, ‘You’ve got to send that boy back. You know, you’re destroying my grandson.’ ” Succumbing, the Buffetts put Warren on a train back to Nebraska for a few months’ stay. To his delight, his companion on the train was Nebraska Senator Hugh Butler. He had always gotten along well with older people and chatted easily with Butler, in his precocious manner, all the way back to Omaha, his “allergy” forgotten.
Bertie, nine years old, felt close to her grandfather and thought she had a special bond with him. She was jealous. Trusting in her relationship with Ernest, she wrote him: “Don’t tell my parents, but send for me too.”
“When Bertie wrote the same kind of letters, I said, ‘Don’t pay any attention. She’s a fake.’ ”7
Ernest wrote back, “A girl should be with her mother.” Bertie sat in Fredericksburg, fuming that her brother always seemed to get his way.8
Warren returned to Rosehill School and reunited with his friends. Every day he showed up around noontime at the house of his father’s former partner, Carl Falk, whose wife, Gladys, served him sandwiches and tomato soup and kindness for lunch. He “worshipped” Mrs. Falk9 as if she were a surrogate mother, just as he had done with his friend Jack Frost’s mother, Hazel, and with his aunts.
Though Warren was comfortable with all these middle-aged women, he was shy, hopelessly shy, and girls his own age terrified him. Even so, he soon developed a crush on Dorothy Hume, one of the girls in his new eighth-grade class. His friend Stu Erickson had a similar crush on Margie Lee Canaday, and his other friend Byron Swanson had a crush on Joan Fugate. After weeks of talk, they worked themselves up to ask the girls to go to the movies.10
On the appointed Saturday, Byron and Warren went together to pick up their dates because they were afraid to show up alone. Thus the afternoon started with a lengthy trudge from house to house to the streetcar stop, walking for blocks in uncomfortable silence. Margie Lee, who lived in the opposite direction, arrived at the stop with Stu and they all boarded the streetcar, where the boys stared red-faced at their shoes throughout the trip downtown as the girls chatted easily with one another. When they reached the theater, Margie Lee, Dorothy, and Joan strolled directly to a row of seats and sat down next to each other. The boys’ plan to cuddle up with the girls during two horror films, The Mummy’s Tomb and Cat People, instantly fell apart. Instead, they sat in their own group and watched the girls’ brunette heads huddled together as they giggled and shrieked through the weekly serials, the cartoons, and both movies. After a painful trip to Walgreen’s for after-movie treats, the boys retraced their trip on the streetcar in a dazed little group and began the long march back to the girls’ houses before being dismissed by their dates. They had barely spoken a word the entire afternoon.11 All three were so mortified that it took each of them years thereafter to summon the courage to ask another girl out on a date.12
But while Warren lost heart, he did not lose interest; he next developed a crush on another girl in his class, Clo-Ann Kaul, a striking blonde. Yet she was not interested in him either. His way of diverting himself from disappointment was, again, making money.
“My grandfather liked the idea that I was always thinking of ways to make money. I used to go around the neighborhood collecting wastepaper and magazines to sell for scrap. My aunt Alice would take me down to the collection drop-off, where you could get thirty-five cents for a hundred pounds, or something like that.”
At Ernest’s house, Warren read a shelf full of back issues of the Progressive Grocer. Subjects like “how to stock a meat department” fascinated him. On the weekends, Ernest put him to work at Buffett & Son, the empire over which he presided. About the size of a two-story garage, it had a Spanish-style tile roof that stood out in the pleasant upper-middle-class suburb of Dundee. The Buffetts had always sold on “credit and delivery.” Ladies or their cooks would ring up Walnut 0761 on the telephone and read their lists to clerks who took down their orders.13 Clerks rushed around the store, scrambling up and down a rolling wooden ladder that flew back and forth along the shelves, retrieving boxes, bags, and cans, and filling their baskets from the pyramids of vegetables and fruit. They ran down to the basement to fill orders for sauerkraut and pickles that lay cooling in barrels near crates of eggs and other perishables. All the goods went into baskets, which the clerks on the mezzanine raised on a pulley, priced and packaged, and sent back downstairs. Then the orange Buffett & Son delivery trucks with rolled-up rubber or leather panels on the side drove the packages off to Omaha’s waiting housewives.
Ernest sat at a desk on the mezzanine and glared down at the clerks. Behind his back, the employees called him Old Man Ernie. “He didn’t do a damn thing. He just gave orders,” says Warren. “I mean, he was king. He could see everything. And if a customer walked in who wasn’t waited on like that …” Snap of the fingers and woe to the clerks. He believed in “work, work, plenty of work.” Ernest felt so responsible for making sure that no one in his charge had foolish notions about there being any free lunch in this world that he had once made a lowly stock boy bring two pennies to work to pay his Social Security tax in cash. This handover had been accompanied by a half-hour lecture on the evils of socialism.14
The only time Ernest left the mezzanine was the minute he saw an important woman drive up with her chauffeur. He would tear down the stairs, grab an order slip, and wait on her himself, handing peppermint sticks to her children.15 In the face of all this attention to rank, when her brother-in-law Fred once stopped waiting on Leila in order to attend to another customer, she stalked out in a huff and never shopped at the store again.16 Howard bought the groceries from then on.
Warren now felt like one of these clerks, hustling around the store under Old Man Ernie’s thumb. Working in his grandfather’s store, he came as close to being a slave as he ever would be in his life.
“He had me do a lot of little lesser jobs. Sometimes I was on the floor. Sometimes he had me counting wartime rationing stamps—sugar stamps, coffee stamps, sitting up on the mezzanine with him. And sometimes I was hiding where he couldn’t see me.
“The worst job was when he hired me and my friend John Pescal to shovel snow. We had this huge snowstorm, a foot of superwet snow. We had to shovel out the whole bank of snow, in front where the customers parked and in the alleyway behind the store, in the loading dock, and by the garage where we had the six trucks.
“We worked at this for about five hours—shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, shoveling. Eventually, we couldn’t even straighten our hands. And then we went to my grandfather. He said, ‘Well, how much should I pay you boys? A dime’s too little and a dollar’s too much!’
“I’ll never forget—John and I looked at each other.…”
That worked out to—at most—twenty cents an hour for shoveling snow.
“Oh no! This was the amount we were supposed to split. That was my grandfather.…”
Well, a Buffett was a Buffett, but Warren had learned a valuable lesson: Know what the deal is in advance.17
Ernest had two other Buffett traits: an impulsive streak with women and perfectionism. He had entered into two short-lived marriages after Henrietta died, once coming back from a vacation in California newly wed to a woman he had just met. His perfectionism expressed itself at work. Buffett & Son was a direct descendant of the oldest grocery store in Omaha and Ernest’s demanding ways were all in pursuit of an ideal vision of service to his customers. He felt certain the discount national chain stores that were encroaching on the neighborhoods were a fad that would disappear because they could never provide a comparable level of service. Sometime during this period, he wrote confidently to one of his relatives: “The day of the chain store is over.”18
When Buffett & Son ran out of bread, rather than disappoint his customers, Ernest sent Warren trotting down the street to the nearby Hinky Dinky supermarket to buy bread at retail. Warren did not enjoy this errand because he was quickly recognized once inside. “Hellooooooo, Mr. Buffett!” the clerks would call out to him, loud enough for everyone to hear, as he slunk through the store, “trying to look inconspicuous,” weighed down with armfuls of loaves. Ernest resented the Hinky Dinky, which, like Sommers, his other major competitor in Dundee, was run by a Jewish family. It rankled him to pay good money to a competitor, much less somebody Jewish. Like much of America before mid-century, Omaha practiced de facto segregation by both religion and race. Jews and Christians (and even Catholics and Protestants) lived essentially separate lives, with social clubs, civic groups, and many businesses refusing to accept Jews as members or hire them as employees. Ernest and Howard used the code name “Eskimos” to make offensive remarks about Jews when they were out in public. Since anti-Semitism was so much a matter of course in society at the time, Warren never gave their attitudes a thought.
Ernest, in fact, was an authority figure to Warren, and he only escaped that authority when he was at school, and for a few hours every Saturday when his grandfather put him to work on the delivery truck. Unloading groceries from the truck was exhausting work, and Warren started to figure out how much he disliked manual labor.
“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.19 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 conservative radio host, Fulton Lewis Jr. Afterward, 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.20
“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?”21
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* built in 1930 for the “socially and officially prominent,” Spring Valley was designed as a little “colony of outstanding personages.”22 Leila had paid $17,500 for the house, 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 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.
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 with thousands of new government workers and military personnel.
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 friends 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,23 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.24 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.25 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.26 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.
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.27 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.28 “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.29 “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.”
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.30 “Some of these grades were from the classes where I was supposedly good.” Warren’s teachers found him stubborn, rude, and lazy.31 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.32 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.33 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.34 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.35 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.36
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.37
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.
*“Restricted” meant Jews were not allowed to buy houses there.