1. Warren Buffett letter to Howard L. Clark, American Express Company, June 16, 1964.
2. L. J. Davis, “Buffett Takes Stock,” New York Times, April 1, 1990.
3. In July 1964, Buffett’s letter to partners said, “… our General category now includes three companies where BPL is the largest single stockholder.” Readers could infer from this a fairly concentrated portfolio.
4. Letter from Warren Buffett to partners, November 1, 1965.
5. Letter from Warren Buffett to partners, October 9, 1967.
6. Letter from Warren Buffett to partners, January 20, 1966.
7. Interview with John Harding.
8. In 1962, according to an interview with Joyce Cowin.
9. Per capita. According to Everett Allen in Children of the Light: The Rise and Fall of New Bedford Whaling and the Death of the Arctic Fleet (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), yearly income from whaling amounted to $12 million by 1854, making New Bedford probably the richest city per capita in the world before the Civil War.
10. Horatio Hathaway, A New Bedford Merchant. Boston: D. B. Updike, the Merrymount Press, 1930.
11. Partnership agreement, Hathaway Manufacturing Company, 1888. Among the other partners was William W. Crapo, a longtime New Bedford associate of Hetty Green’s, who also invested $25,000. The total initial capital was $400,000.
12. With a fortune estimated at $100 million.
13. Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.
14. The North was no workers’ paradise, but in the South there were virtually no laws against child labor, excessive work hours, or unsafe work conditions. The mills owned the workers’ houses and the stores where they shopped, controlled their water supply, owned their churches, and effectively controlled the state governments and the courts. Machine-gun-bearing state militia prevented strikes. The workers were more like sharecroppers. Nearly ten thousand Northern workers had lost their jobs when the textile industry marched southward to the Carolinas in search of cheaper labor when air-conditioned plants were constructed after World War II.
15. Seabury Stanton, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., A Saga of Courage. New York: Newcomen Society of North America, 1962. Stanton made this address to the Newcomen Society in Boston on November 29, 1961.
16. Ibid.
17. In A Saga of Courage, Seabury says he conceived of the Stantons as forming part of an “unbroken thread of ownership” that stretched back to Oliver Chace, who had founded New England’s textile industry and created Berkshire Fine Spinning’s oldest predecessor company in 1806. Chace was a former apprentice of Samuel Slater, who first brought Sir Richard Arkwright’s innovative spinning-frame technology to the United States at the end of the eighteenth century.
18. Hathaway Manufacturing Corporation Open House tour brochure, September 1953. Courtesy of Mary Stanton Plowden-Wardlaw.
19. If the goal had been to save jobs, the money to modernize need not have been spent. Roger Lowenstein, in Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (New York: Doubleday, 1996), quotes Ken Chace (now deceased) as saying that Seabury hadn’t the slightest idea of return on investment.
20. Stanton (now deceased) is stated as having these opinions in “Berkshire Hathaway’s Brave New World,” by Jerome Campbell, Modern Textiles, December 1957.
21. Berkshire Hathaway 1994 chairman’s letter.
22. Interviews with David S. Gottesman, Marshall Weinberg.
23. Letter to Warren Buffett on May 4, 1990, from James M. Clark Jr. at Tweedy, Browne Co., noting that “Howard Browne gave various accounts code initials.”
24. Interview with Ed Anderson.
25. Interviews with Chris Browne, Ed Anderson.
26. According to Ed Anderson, this is how Buffett traded. The author is well acquainted with Buffetting in other contexts.
27. The commission sounds tiny, but at ten cents a share, Buffett later said, it was by far the highest commission he ever paid on a stock.
28. Interviews with Mary Stanton Plowden-Wardlaw, Verne McKenzie.
29. Otis thought Seabury’s strategy of trying to bypass the New York “converters”—who turned the company’s “gray goods” into finished dyed goods and sold them to customers—was a serious misjudgment.
30. “If you’re in a business that can’t take a long strike, you’re basically playing a game of chicken with your labor unions because they’re going to lose their jobs, too, if you close down.… And there’s a lot of game theory involved. To some extent, the weaker you are, the better your bargaining position is—because if you’re extremely weak, even a very short strike will put you out of business; and the people on the other side of the negotiating table understand that. On the other hand, if you have a fair amount of strength, they can push you harder. But it is no fun being in a business where you can’t take a strike.” Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, “The Incentives in Hedge Funds Are Awesome, But Don’t Expect the Returns to Be Too Swift,” Outstanding Investor Digest, Vol. XVI, No. 4 & 5, Year End 2001 Edition.
31. Several of the Grahamites swear they saw the room. Buffett swears this story is not true. A former Plaza Hotel employee confirms that the seventeenth floor did have a few exceptionally small rooms, with bad views, and that it was possible to haggle the room prices down, especially later in the evening.
32. Interview with Ken Chace Jr.
33. According to Roger Lowenstein’s Buffett, Ken Chace was the source. Warren does not recall any of the details, including talking to Jack Stanton, but he says Ken Chace’s account is most likely correct.
34. Mary Stanton Plowden-Wardlaw, letter to Warren Buffett, June 3, 1991. Stanley Rubin set it up.
35. Interview with Mary Stanton Plowden-Wardlaw.
36. The detailed version of this story was related in Roger Lowenstein’s Buffett, with Ken Chace as the source. Buffett recalls sitting on a bench near the Plaza with Chace, eating ice cream.
37. “The Junior League is an organization of women committed to promoting voluntarism, developing the potential of women and improving the community through the effective action and leadership of trained volunteers. Its purpose is exclusively educational and charitable,” according to its mission statement. (The author is a member.)
38. He replaced the elderly Abram Berkowitz, who worked for the company’s law firm, Ropes & Gray, and had cooperatively decided to step down.
39. Stanton said he “hastened [his] retirement due to a disagreement with regard to policy with certain outside interests which have purchased sufficient stock to control the company.” “Seabury Stanton Resigns at Berkshire,” New Bedford Standard-Times, May 10, 1965.
40. Berkshire Hathaway Board of Directors’ minutes, May 10, 1965.
41. “Buffett Means Business,” Daily News Record, May 20, 1965.
42. Adapted in part from the documentary Vintage Buffett: Warren Buffett Shares His Wealth (June 2004) and in part from interviews.