1. Even so, only three in a hundred Americans owned stocks. Many had borrowed heavily to play the market, entranced by John J. Raskob’s article, “Everybody Ought to Be Rich” in the August 1929 Ladies’ Home Journal and Edgar Lawrence Smith’s proof that stocks outperform bonds (Common Stocks as Long-Term Investments. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1925).
2. “Stock Prices Slump $14,000,000,000 in Nation-Wide Stampede to Unload; Bankers to Support Market Today,” New York Times, October 29, 1929; David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; John Brooks, Once in Golconda, A True Drama of Wall Street; 1920–1938. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Roger Babson’s famous warning, “I repeat what I said at this time last year and the year before, that sooner or later a crash is coming,” was useless.
3. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear. Kennedy notes that interest payment on the national debt rose from $25 million annually in 1914 to $1 billion annually in the 1920s due to World War I, accounting for one-third of the federal budget. The actual budget in 1929 was $3.127 billion a year (Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 1999—Historical Tables, Table 1.1—Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits: 1789–2003. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office).
4. By the bottom tick on November 13, the market had lost $26 to $30 billion of its roughly $80 billion precrash value (Kennedy, op. cit., Brooks, op. cit.). World War I cost approximately $32 billion (Robert McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993; also Hugh Rockoff, It’s Over, Over There: The U.S. Economy in World War I, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 10580).
5. Charlie Munger reported that all the Buffetts, including those employed elsewhere, worked at the store, in a letter to Katharine Graham dated November 13, 1974.
6. Coffee with Congress.
7. Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
8. Roger Lowenstein, in Buffett, cites Leila Buffett’s memoirs for this fact.
9. Ernest Buffett letter to Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Buffett and Marjorie Bailey, August 17, 1931.
10. “Union State Bank Closes Doors Today: Reports Assets in Good Condition; Reopening Planned,” Omaha World-Herald, August 15, 1931. Characteristically, the story understated the bank’s dire situation. It went into reorganization under regulatory supervision and filed for bankruptcy.
11. Howard had borrowed $9,000 to buy $10,000 of stock in the bank. The stock was now worthless. The house and mortgage were in Leila’s name. Standard Accident Insurance Company, Howard Homan Buffett application for fidelity bond.
12. “Buffett, Sklenicka and Falk Form New Firm,” Omaha Bee News, September 8, 1931. Statement of Buffett, Sklenicka & Co. for the month ending September 30, 1931.
13. The wave crested in December 1931 with the failure of the Bank of the United States, an official-sounding institution that had nothing to do with the government. The $286 million collapse broke a record, took down 400,000 depositors, and was understood by everyone—in one sense or another—as a failure of public trust (Kennedy, Freedom from Fear). It kicked the quivering legs out from under the banking system and sent the already battered economy into collapse.
14. Although its return on revenues was low, the firm by then was consistently profitable and would remain so, with the exception of a couple of months.
15. By the end of 1932, Howard Buffett was averaging 40–50% more in commissions than in 1931, based on financial statements of Buffett, Sklenicka & Co.
16. Charles Lindbergh Jr., “The Little Eaglet,” was kidnapped on March 1, 1932. His body was found on May 12, 1932. Many parents in the 1920s and 1930s were preoccupied with kidnapping, a fear that actually began with the Leopold and Loeb case in 1924 but peaked with the Lindbergh baby. An Omaha country-club groundskeeper claimed he was kidnapped and robbed of $7. In Dallas a minister faked his own kidnapping, trussing himself to his church’s electric fan (Omaha World-Herald, August 4, 1931, and June 20, 1931).
17. According to Roberta Buffett Bialek, Howard once had rheumatic fever, which may have weakened his heart.
18. Interview with Doris Buffett.
19. Interview with Doris Buffett. Warren also remembers this.
20. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.
21. Interviews with Jack Frost, Norma Thurston-Perna, Stu Erikson, Lou Battistone.
22. The correct clinical term for Leila’s condition is unknown, but it may have boiled down to a literal pain in the neck: occipital neuralgia, a chronic pain disorder caused by irritation or injury to the occipital nerve, which is located in the back of the scalp. This disorder causes throbbing, migrainelike pain, which originates at the nape of the neck and spreads up and around the forehead and scalp. Occipital neuralgia can result from physical stress, trauma, or repeated contraction of the neck muscles.
23. Interview with Katie Buffett. This may have been while pregnant with either Warren or Bertie.
24. Interview with Katie Buffett.
25. “Beer Is Back! Omaha to Have Belated Party,” Omaha World-Herald, August 9, 1933; “Nebraska Would Have Voted Down Ten Commandments, Dry Head Says,” Omaha World-Herald, November 15, 1944; “Roosevelt Issues Plea for Repeal of Prohibition,” Associated Press, July 8, 1933, as printed in Omaha World-Herald.
26. U.S. and Nebraska Division of Agricultural Statistics, Nebraska Agricultural Statistics, Historical Record 1866–1954. Lincoln: Government Printing Office, 1957; Almanac for Nebraskans 1939, The Federal Writers’ Project Works Progress Administration, State of Nebraska; Clinton Warne, “Some Effects of the Introduction of the Automobile on Highways and Land Values in Nebraska,” Nebraska History quarterly, The Nebraska State Historical Society, Vol. 38, Number 1, March 1957, page 4.
27. In Kansas, a banker sent to foreclose on a farm turned up dead, shot full of .22- and .38-caliber bullets and dragged by his own car. “Forecloser on Farm Found Fatally Shot,” Omaha World-Herald, January 31, 1933. See also “ ‘Nickel Bidders’ Halted by Use of Injunctions,” Omaha World-Herald, January 27, 1933; “Tax Sales Blocked by 300 Farmers in Council Bluffs,” Omaha World-Herald, February 27, 1933; “Penny Sale Turned into Real Auction,” Omaha World-Herald, March 12, 1933; “Neighbors Bid $8.05 at Sale When Man with Son, Ill, Asks Note Money,” Omaha World-Herald, January 28, 1933, for examples of the mortgage crisis.
28. “The Dust Storm of November 12 and 13, 1933,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, February 1934; “60 Miles an Hour in Iowa,” special to the New York Times, November 13, 1933; Waudemar Kaempffert, “The Week in Science: Storms of Dust,” New York Times, November 19, 1933.
29. Cited from Leila’s memoirs in Roger Lowenstein’s Buffett.
30. From the Almanac for Nebraskans 1939. Sponsored by the Nebraska State Historical Society, which also contained some tall tales such as the idea of scouring pots by holding them up to a keyhole.
31. “Hot Weather and the Drought of 1934,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, June–July 1934.
32. Grasshoppers are the informal state mascot; Nebraska terms itself the “Bugeater State.” Long before the Cornhuskers name, the University of Nebraska football team called itself the “Bugeaters” in 1892 in honor of its flying guests. Nebraska football fans still informally call themselves Bugeaters. Grasshoppers love drought conditions and contribute to soil erosion by devouring every living plant down to the black earth. From 1934–1938 the estimated national cost of grasshopper destruction was $315.8 million (about $4.7 billion in 2007 dollars). The region encompassing Nebraska, the Dakotas, Kansas, and Iowa was the epicenter of grasshopper infestation. See Almanac for Nebraskans 1939; also Ivan Ray Tannehill, Drought: Its Causes and Effects. Princeton: University Press, 1947.
33. “Farmers Harvest Hoppers for Fish Bait,” Omaha World-Herald, August 1, 1931.
34. As asserted in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural address (March 4, 1933)—he was speaking, however, of economic paralysis.
35. Lacking electronic security and thoughtful cash controls, banks were more vulnerable to robbery in those days, and an epidemic of bank robberies took place in the 1930s.
36. Several Buffetts, including Howard and Bertie, contracted polio. Another epidemic took place in the mid-1940s. People born after the vaccine became available in the 1950s and ’60s may find the chronic anxiety this disease engendered difficult to comprehend, but it was very real at the time.
37. Ted Keitch letter to Warren Buffett, May 29, 2003. Keitch’s father worked at the Buffett store.
38. Interview with Doris Buffett.
39. Howard wanted his children to attend Dundee’s Benson High School instead of Central, where he had suffered from snobbery.
40. 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.
41. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.
42. Interviews with Roberta Buffett Bialek, Warren Buffett, Doris Buffett.
43. Interview with Doris Buffett.
44. September 9, 1935, at the Columbian School.
45. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek as well as Warren Buffett.