1. Wead, who declined to be interviewed, was the director of Wesley House, a community improvement organization of the Methodist Church.
2. Interview with Racquel Newman and her son, Tom Newman. A number of other people recalled Susie and Rackie’s activities.
3. Interview with Chuck Peterson.
4. Buffett had met Rosenfield through a connection to Hochschild-Kohn.
5. Grinnell’s founder, Congregational minister Josiah Grinnell, pastor of the First Congregational church in Washington, D.C., bolted from its doors in 1852 when his Southern congregation took exception to his abolitionist views. It was Grinnell who sought advice from the famous New York Herald editor Horace Greeley and who heard the words that every schoolchild in America would subsequently learn without knowing their source: “Go West, young man, go West!” The phrase was originally written by John Soule in the Terre Haute Express in 1851.
6. Interview with Waldo “Wally” Walker, Dean of Administration at the time.
7. The luckless George Champion, chairman of the board of Chase Manhattan Bank, followed King on the program, speaking on “Our Obsolete Welfare State.”
8. This common paraphrase of Lowell was more eloquent than Lowell’s actual words: “Though her portion be the scaffold, And upon the throne be wrong.” James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), “The Present Crisis,” 1844.
9. Interview with Hallie Smith.
10. From King’s 1963 speech at Western Michigan University. King may have said something like this at the October 1967 Grinnell Convocation, but no transcript exists.
11. King first said this in Cleveland in 1963 and used variations of it in most major speeches thereafter. He called the idea that you can’t legislate morality a “half-truth.” “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me,” he said, “but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that is pretty important.”
12. Despite flirting briefly with the magic 1,000, it had ended down more than 15%.
13. Letter to partners, January 25, 1967.
14. Letter to partners, January 24, 1968.
15. Galbraith in an interview by Israel Shenker, “Galbraith: ’29 Repeats Itself Today,” published in the New York Times on May 3, 1970. “The explosion in the mutual funds is the counterpart of the old investment trusts. The public has shown extraordinary willingness to believe there are financial geniuses in the hundreds. Financial genius is a rising stock market. Financial chicanery is a falling stock market.” Galbraith reiterates this in “The Commitment to Innocent Fraud,” Challenge, Sept.–Oct. 1999: “In the world of finance, genius is a rising market.”
16. “Race Violence Flares in Omaha After Negro Teen-Ager Is Slain,” New York Times, March 6, 1968; Associated Press, “Disorder, Shooting Trail Wallace Visit”; UPI, “1 Wounded, 16 Held in Omaha Strike,” July 8, 1968.
17. He recovered after a lengthy hospital stay. Part of this account is from The Gate City: A History of Omaha (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
18. In a December 1981 Playboy interview, Henry Fonda, an Omaha native, recounts witnessing the same event: “It was an experience I will never forget.… My dad’s office looked down on the courthouse square and we went up and watched from the window.… It was so horrifying. When it was all over, we went home. My dad never talked about it, never lectured. He just knew the impression it would have on me.”
19. Interview with Racquel Newman.
20. The club was renamed Ironwood in 1999.
21. By coincidence, at the time, Chuck Peterson had also been put up for the Highland. Peterson was eating there a lot with fellow flying enthusiast Bob Levine and thought he ought to join instead of freeloading.
22. Stan Lipsey, another friend of Buffett’s, weighed in on behalf of Chuck Peterson. “I got so high-profile because of that,” says Lipsey, “that they made me serve on the board next year. No good deed goes unpunished. A golf buddy named Buck Friedman was the chairman. He was very serious, and I’d be trying to crack them up. He didn’t like that I’d call him Buckets.”