1. “It was never any big success at all … it did not do well. It did not do terribly either. And it didn’t last very long,” says Buffett.
2. In interviews, Roger Bell and Casper Heindel, as well as Warren Buffett, helped remember details about the farm. Buffett believes he bought this from or through his uncle John Barber, a real estate broker.
3. Interview with Casper Heindel. More than half of all Nebraska land was farmed by tenant farmers. Real property ownership with mortgages was unpopular because unstable crop prices left farmers vulnerable to foreclosure.
4. Interview with Norma Thurston-Perna.
5. In an interview, Lou Battistone observes that he noticed the “two sides” of Buffett’s brain in high school—the cool mathematical businessman and the burlesque-watching one—while at the burlesque.
6. Interview with Lou Battistone.
7. Buffett told this story at Harvard Business School in 2005.
8. Carnegie was a salesman for Armour & Co., covering the Omaha territory; the compatibility of his views with Buffett’s temperament probably owes something to a shared Midwestern ethos.
9. All text, Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1938. Copyright Dale Carnegie & Associates. Courtesy of Dale Carnegie & Associates.
10. Dale Carnegie quoting John Dewey.
11. The average man earned $2,473 a year in 1946, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975, Series D-722–727, p. 164.
12. According to Lou Battistone in an interview.
13. According to a newspaper advertisement on July 24, 1931, at early Depression-era prices a dozen years earlier, quality refurbished golf balls cost three for $1.05.
14. Interview with Don Dedrick, a golf teammate from high school.
15. Interview with Lou Battistone.
16. “We were the only guys that paid the fifty-dollar stamp tax on pinball machines,” Warren says. “I’m not sure we would have done it if my dad hadn’t been insisting.”
17. Interview with Lou Battistone. The name “Wilson” came from Woodrow Wilson High School.
18. An essay into barbershop food concession ended quickly after the peanut dispenser, filled with five pounds of Spanish nuts, broke and got customers a handful of peanuts mixed with ground glass.
19. Dialogue and expressions used by Buffett in this story came from Lou Battistone, although the facts align with Buffett’s recollection.
20. Interview with Don Dedrick.
21. In one version of this story, told by a high school friend of Buffett’s who was not present, Kerlin was too smart to fall for it and never made it to the golf course. Whatever happened, Buffett’s version is, not surprisingly, funnier.