Warren graduated sixteenth out of 350 in his high school class, putting “future stockbroker” under his picture in the yearbook.1 The first thing he and Danly did with their freedom was to go in together and buy a used hearse. Warren parked the hearse in front of the house and used it to take a girl out on a date.2 When Howard came home later, he asked, “Who put that hearse out here?” Then Leila said one of their neighbors was gravely ill, and she was not having a hearse in front of the house. That was the end of the hearse.
While he and Don were selling the hearse, Warren gave up his paper routes and got a summer job as a relief circulation manager for the Times-Herald. Whenever he had to substitute for his paper carriers, he rose at four a.m. and delivered the papers from a little Ford coupe he borrowed from David Brown, a young man from Fredericksburg who had a crush on Doris and who had gone into the Navy.3 Standing on the running board of the car with the door open, he coasted at about fifteen miles an hour, one hand reaching inside the car to hold on to the wheel, the other hand grabbing the papers and pitching them onto the subscribers’ lawns. He rationalized that at such an early hour of the morning, nothing too terrible was likely to result from driving the car that way.4
Afterward he stopped by the Toddle House to treat himself to a double order of hash browns with paprika for breakfast. Then he went on to his second job, distributing papers at Georgetown University Hospital.
“I had to give the priests and nuns about a half a dozen papers free, which always irritated me no end. I thought they weren’t supposed to be interested in secular things. But this was part of the deal. And then I went room by room.
“After they had the baby, the women in the obstetrics ward would see me come in and say, ‘Oh, Warren! I’m going to give you something more valuable than a cash tip. I’m going to tell you when my baby was born and how much it weighed. Eight thirty-one a.m., six pounds and eleven ounces.’ ” These “tips” were meant for betting on the “policy racket,” the numbers game in Washington.5
Warren ground his teeth whenever he got useless information instead of a cash tip. The policy racket odds were terrible. “The policy racket paid off six hundred to one, and the guy that was your runner got ten percent of it. So you have a five-hundred-forty-to-one payoff on what was a thousand-to-one shot, basically. People made penny bets and dime bets. If you put a penny up, you might win $5.40 net. And everybody in town played. Some of my newspaper delivery customers used to ask me, ‘Do you run policy numbers?’ I never did. My dad would not have approved if I’d become a policy runner.”
He was already a good enough oddsmaker to work in Vegas, but he probably would not have bet on the next thing his father did. Howard Buffett voted for a bill that actually passed. One of the most controversial pieces of legislation ever enacted in the United States, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act severely restricted the tactics used by labor unions. It made it illegal for them to support one another through secondary strikes and authorized U.S. Presidents to declare a national emergency and force striking workers back to work. It was referred to as a “slave labor” bill.6 Omaha was, of course, a union town, but it would never have occurred to Howard to vote according to his constituents’ preferences; he always voted his principles.
So when the Buffetts went home to Omaha for a visit during the summer, and Warren went to a hometown baseball game with his father, he saw just how unpopular Howard had become among the blue-collar voters. “They introduced the dignitaries in between the doubleheader. And he stood up and everybody in the place started booing. He just stood there and didn’t say anything. He could handle things like that. But you just can’t imagine the effect that has on a kid.”
Even the mildest forms of confrontation terrified him. But soon he would be standing on his own, out from under his father’s wing.
In the fall, at seventeen, he was starting college. The Buffetts had long taken for granted that Warren would attend the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school.7 Wharton was the nation’s most important undergraduate business college. In theory, Penn and Warren were a perfect fit.
Warren would have just as soon skipped the whole thing. “What was the point?” he asked himself. “I knew what I wanted to do. I was making enough money to live on. College was only going to slow me down.” But he would never have defied his father on something so important, so he acquiesced.
Knowing their son’s immaturity, the Buffetts arranged a roommate for him who was the son of some friends from Omaha. Five years older, Chuck Peterson had just returned from eighteen months’ service in the war. He was a handsome young man-about-town, dating a different girl every night, and drinking. Naively, the Petersons supposed that Warren might settle Chuck down, while the Buffetts reckoned that an older boy might help Warren adjust to college.
In the fall of 1947, the entire family piled into the car and drove Warren to Philadelphia, where they deposited him and his raccoon coat in a little dormitory suite with a shared bathroom.
As the Buffetts drove away to return to Washington, they left their son at a campus filled with people much like Chuck. An army of World War II veterans marched across College Green and filled the Quad, the centers of Penn university life. Their worldliness widened by years the gap Warren had felt between himself and his classmates ever since moving to Washington. Penn was a football powerhouse; its fall social life revolved around football dates, followed by fraternity parties. Warren loved sports, but the social requirements were beyond him. He was used to spending much of his time honing ideas, counting his money, organizing his collections, and playing music in the privacy of his room. At Penn, his solitude battered by the sixteen hundred flirting, necking, jitterbugging, keg-tapping, football-tossing members of the Class of 1951,8 he was a butterfly in a beehive.
The bees reacted much as expected to the butterfly that had flown into their midst. Chuck retained his military tidiness and the habit of constantly polishing his shoes. When he met his new roommate, Warren’s disgraceful wardrobe shocked him. He soon discovered that the way Warren dressed symptomized something else. Just as Leila waited hand and foot on Howard and did all the work around the house, Warren had never been taught the most basic ways of taking care of himself.
Chuck woke late the first morning to find the bathroom in a mess and his new roommate gone to early classes. When he saw Warren that evening, he said, “Clean up after yourself, will you?” “Okay, Chas-o,” Warren said. “I came in this morning and you left a razor lying at the bottom of the sink,” Chuck went on. “You left soap all over the sink, the towels were on the floor, and it’s sloppier than hell. I like things neat.” Warren appeared to agree. “Okay, Chas-o, okay, Chas-o,” he said.
The next morning, when Chuck got up, he stepped through sodden towels on the bathroom floor to find tiny damp hairs covering the sink, and a brand-new, soaking-wet electric razor lying in the basin, tethered to the outlet in the wall by its cord. “Warren, lookit,” said Chuck that evening. “Unplug the damn thing. Somebody’s going to get electrocuted. You’re driving me nuts with your sloppiness.” “Okay, okay, fine, Chas-o,” said Warren.
The next day was exactly as before. Chuck realized that his words were bouncing off Warren’s head. He lost his temper and unplugged the razor, filled the sink with water, and threw the razor in. The following morning, Warren had bought a new razor, plugged it in, and left the bathroom in the same state as before.
Chas-o gave up. He was living in a pigsty with a hyperactive teenager who hopped around in constant motion, drumming his hands, beating them on every nearby surface. Warren was obsessed with Al Jolson and played Jolson records day and night.9 He sang, over and over, imitating Jolson: “Mammy, my little Mammy, I’d walk a million miles for one of your smiles, my Mammy!”10
Chuck needed to study, and he could not hear himself think inside the suite. Warren, on the other hand, had plenty of time to sing. He hadn’t bought a lot of textbooks, but he had read the ones he bought at the beginning of the semester, before classes started, the way someone else might flip through a Life magazine. Then he threw them aside and never opened them again. This left him all night long to sing “Mammy” if he felt like it. Chuck thought he was going mad. Warren knew he was immature, but he couldn’t help it.
“I probably wouldn’t have fit in very well anyplace at that time. I was still out of sync with the world. But I was also younger than anybody else, and, on top of that, I was young for my age in many ways. I really didn’t fit in socially.”
That fall, Leila and Doris struggled to describe Warren’s crew-cut, slightly bucktoothed appearance truthfully on a radio show in Washington called Coffee with Congress.
Host: Incidentally, is Warren good-looking?
Leila: He was good-looking as a small child. He’s just boyish—I wouldn’t call him good-looking, but he’s not poor-looking either.
Host: He’s handsome-looking.
Leila: No, not handsome, just friendly.
Host: Let’s take the girls’ angle: Is he a cute boy?
Doris (diplomatically): I think he has a rugged sort of look.11
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. 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. Chuck won easily.
Within a day or two, 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. “I was his first victim at Penn,” Chuck recalls. Ping-Pong kept Warren out of the suite and away from the record player while Chuck was studying.12
But Ping-Pong 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, and his game of bolo—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, 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. 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 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 this, he won’t eat that,” she said. “He always makes me fix something special for him.” Chuck, ignorant of Warren’s history, saw only that Leila was well-trained, not that Warren calmed his fears by controlling his mother.
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.13 He flaunted obnoxious feats of memory by quoting page numbers and passages back in class and correcting his teachers on their text citations.14 “You forgot the comma,” he said to one.15
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.”16
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.
Warren returned that summer to his duties as relief circulation manager for the Times-Herald. He also reunited with his pal Don Danly. They thought about buying a fire engine together, 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.17
They put the Rolls in the garage underneath the Buffett house and started the motor. 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, “and Warren watched admiringly and encouraged it along.” 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.18
When fall came, he left Bobbie behind and returned to Penn as an eighteen-year-old sophomore. Warren had little interest in Greek life but had pledged his father’s fraternity, Alpha Sigma Phi. 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 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.19 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.20
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. A bridge game went on twenty-four hours a day in a corner alcove, and Warren would sit down and play a few hands.21 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.22
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—so they could use them.23
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.24
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.25 “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.26
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.27 Since hardly anybody had a car at that time, his fraternity brothers were impressed.28 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.29 His face would flush and he would stare at his shoes if anyone talked about sex.30 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.”
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.31
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 E. Dewey against the weak incumbent Harry Truman, who had become President on FDR’s death.
The Buffetts had grown to hate Truman, who had implemented the Marshall Plan, which sent eighteen million tons of food to Europe after World War II. Howard was one of seventy-four Congressmen who had voted against it. Convinced that the Marshall Plan was 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.32
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,” as if the election were over.
Dewey, too, appeared to be a shoo-in. The polls showed that Truman was trailing him badly. Truman ignored this, and for months had been traveling around the country speaking from the back of his train on a “whistle-stop” tour. 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.33
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.34 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.
But Howard, of course, dreaded inflation and believed that government bonds could turn into worthless paper. Overcoming his scruples, he went to work to break the terms of Frank’s will and got a judge to approve some technical changes so the money could eventually be invested in stocks.35
These events took place during what Leila called the “worst winter in years.” Blizzards buried the Midwest and hay had to be airlifted to Nebraska from surrounding states for weeks during the freeze to keep the snowbound livestock from dying on their feet.36 The winter of the haylift became emblematic of the Truman victory. Howard, who had never gotten rich, now had two kids in college and another about to start. He went back to work at his old firm, now known as Buffett-Falk, but his partner Carl Falk, who had been handling his clients during his absence in Washington, was not interested in sharing them now. Striding around downtown Omaha with the bitter snow pelting his face, Howard tried to drum up new clients. But his long absence meant that his writings were the way most people knew him now, and articles like “Human Freedom Rests on Gold Redeemable Money” had given him the reputation of an extremist.37 In the spring of 1949, he went out into the countryside and knocked on farmhouse doors in search of a new clientele.38
As for Warren, his father’s defeat left him heartsick, but also offered him an excuse for leaving the East Coast. He was bored at school and hated Philadelphia so much that he had nicknamed it “Filthy-delphia.”39
At the end of the spring semester he headed back home for good, so relieved that he signed his letters “Ex-Wharton Buffett.” He rationalized this by saying that enrolling at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where he would spend the last years of his college career, would be cheaper than Penn.40 He gave the little Ford coupe back to David Brown, its tires threadbare. Warren wanted only one memento of Penn. On the way out the door, he and Clyde flipped a coin to see who got to keep their treasured copy of S. J. Simon’s Why You Lose at Bridge. Warren won.