Bad grades, tax evasion, and running away were the least of Warren’s troubles in junior high. His parents didn’t know it, but their son had turned to a life of crime.
“Well, I was antisocial, in eighth and ninth grade, after I moved there. I fell in with bad people and did things I shouldn’t have. I was just rebelling. I was unhappy.”
He started with minor schoolboy pranks.
“I loved print shop. I used to make calculations in print-shop class of the frequency of letters and numbers. That was something I could do by myself. I could set type, you know, and that sort of thing. I enjoyed printing up all kinds of things.
“I made up a letterhead from the American Temperance Union, Reverend A. W. Paul, President. I’d write letters to people on that letterhead saying that for years I’d lectured around the country on the evils of drink, and in these travels my appearances were always accompanied by my young apprentice, Harold. Harold was an example of what drink could do to men. He’d stand there on the stage with a pint, drooling, unable to comprehend what was going on around him, pathetic. Then I said that, unfortunately, young Harold died last week, and a mutual friend had suggested that you might be a replacement for him.”1
The people with whom Warren felt most comfortable encouraged his antisocial impulses. He and a couple of new friends, Don Danly and Charlie Tron, took to hanging out at the new Sears store. Near Tenley Circle where Nebraska and Wisconsin Avenues intersected, the store was an eye-opening swoop of modern design dropped into the middle of Tenleytown, the second oldest neighborhood in Washington. Letters the height of a man spelled out SEARS on a curved metal deck several stories above sidewalk level.2 On the roof behind the Sears sign was hidden a great novelty, an open-air parking garage, which quickly became popular with high school kids as a place to park and neck. The store had become the hangout for all the junior high kids too. Warren and his friends rode the H2 bus there at lunchtime or on Saturdays.
Most of the kids liked the dark little lunch counter Sears had installed in the basement, with its mesmerizing conveyer belt that spit out doughnuts all day long. But Warren, Don, and Charlie preferred Woolworth’s across the street, even though the police station was on the opposite corner. Woolworth’s sat kitty-corner from Sears. They could eat lunch and case the joint through the windows.
After their hamburgers, the boys would stroll down the stairs into Sears’s lower level, bypassing the lunch counter and going straight to the sporting-goods section.
“We’d just steal the place blind. We’d steal stuff for which we had no use. We’d steal golf bags and golf clubs. I walked out of the lower level where the sporting goods were, up the stairway to the street, carrying a golf bag and golf clubs, and the clubs were stolen, and so was the bag. I stole hundreds of golf balls.” They referred to their theft as “hooking.”
“I don’t know how we didn’t get caught. We couldn’t have looked innocent. A teenager who’s doing something wrong does not look innocent.3
“I took the golf balls and filled up these orange sacks in my closet. As fast as Sears put them out, I was hooking them. I had no use for them, really. I wasn’t selling them then. It’s hard to think of a reason why you had this multiplying group of golf balls in the closet, this orange sack that’s just getting bigger all the time. I should have diversified my theft. Instead, I made up this crazy story for my parents—and I know they didn’t believe me, but—I told them I had this friend, and his father had died. He kept finding more of these golf balls that his father had bought. Who knows what my parents talked about at night.”4
The Buffetts were aghast. Warren was their gifted child, but by the end of 1944, he had become the school delinquent. “My grades were a quantification of my unhappiness. Math—Cs. English—C, D, D. Everything Xs for self-reliance, industry, courtesy. The less I interacted with teachers, the better it was. They actually put me in a room by myself there for a while where they would kind of shove my lessons under the door like Hannibal Lecter.”5
When graduation day came and the students were told to show up in a suit and tie, Warren refused. With that his principal, Bertie Backus, had had enough.
“They wouldn’t let me graduate with the class at Alice Deal, because I was so disruptive and I wouldn’t wear clothes that were appropriate. It was major. It was unpleasant. I was really rebelling. Some of the teachers predicted that I was going to be a disastrous failure. I set the record for checks on deficiencies in deportment and all that.
“But my dad never gave up on me. And my mother didn’t either, actually. Neither one. It’s great to have parents that believe in you.”
Yet by the spring of 1945, as Warren was starting high school, the Buffetts had had enough too. By now, it was no great mystery how to motivate Warren. Howard threatened to take away the source of his money.
“My dad, who was always supportive of me, said, ‘I know what you’re capable of. And I’m not asking you to perform one hundred percent, but you can either keep behaving this way or you can do something in relation to your potential. But if you don’t do it, you have to give up the paper routes.’ And that hit me. My dad was low-key, just sort of letting me know he was disappointed with me. And that killed me probably a lot more than his telling me I couldn’t do this or that, you know.”