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.