"We had lunch at the Exchange with a fellow named At Mol, a Dutchman, a member of the Stock Exchange and a very impressive-looking man. After lunch, a guy came along with a tray that had all these different kinds of tobacco leaves on it. He made up a cigar for Mr. Mol, who picked out the leaves that he wanted. And I thought, This is it. It doesn't get any better than this. A custom-made cigar."

A custom-made cigar. The visions that cigar evoked in Warren's mathematical mind! He had exactly zero interest in smoking a cigar. But working backward, he saw what hiring a man for such a frivolous purpose implied. To justify the expense must mean that, even while most of the country was still mired in the Depression, the cigar man's employer was making a great deal of money. He grasped it right away. The Stock Exchange must pour forth streams of money: rivers, fountains, cascades, torrents of money, enough to hire a man for the pure frippery of rolling cigars-handmade, custom-made cigars-for the Stock Exchange members' own particular pleasure.

That day, as he beheld the cigar man, a vision of his future was planted.

He kept that vision when he went back to Omaha, old enough now to organize his quest and pursue it all the more systematically. Even as he followed the pastimes of an ordinary boy, playing basketball and Ping-Pong and collecting coins and stamps; even as his family mourned his small, sweet grandfather, John Stahl, who died that year at age seventy-three-the first loss in his life-he worked with a passion for the future he saw ahead of him, right there in sight. He wanted money.

"It could make me independent. Then I could do what I wanted to do with my life. And the biggest thing I wanted to do was work for myself. I didn't want other people directing me. The idea of doing what I wanted to do every day was important to me."

A tool that would help him soon fell into his hands. One day, down at the Benson Library, a book beckoned from the shelves. Its shiny silver cover gleamed like a heap of coins, hinting at the value of its contents. Captivated by the title, he opened it and was immediately hooked. One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000, it was called. A million dollars, in other words!

Inside the cover, in a photograph, a tiny man gazed up at an enormous pile of coins.

"Opportunity Knocks," read the first page of the text. "Never in the history of the United States has the time been so favorable for a man with small capital to start his own business as it is today."

What a message! "We have all heard a great deal about the opportunities of bygone years.... Why, the opportunities of yesterday are as nothing compared with the opportunities that await the courageous, resourceful man of today! There are fortunes to be made that will make those of Astor and Rockefeller seem picayune." These words rose like sweet visions of heaven to Warren Buffett's eyes. He turned the pages faster.

"But," the book cautioned, "you cannot possibly succeed until you start. The way to begin making money is to begin.... Hundreds of thousands of people in this country who would like to make a lot of money are not making it because they are waiting for this, that, or the other to happen." Begin it! the book admonished, and explained how. Crammed with practical business advice and ideas for making money, One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000 started with "the story of money" and was written in a straightforward, friendly style, like someone sitting on the front stoop talking to a friend. Some of its ideas were limited-goat-dairying and running doll hospitals-but many were more practical. The idea that captivated Warren was pennyweight scales. If he had a weighing machine, he would weigh himself fifty times a day. He was sure that other people would pay money to do that too.

"The weighing machine was easy to understand. I'd buy a weighing machine and use the profits to buy more weighing machines. Pretty soon I'd have twenty weighing machines, and everybody would weigh themselves fifty times a day. I thought-that's where the money is.9 The compounding of it-what could be better than that?"

This concept-compounding-struck him as critically important. The book said he could make a thousand dollars. If he started with a thousand dollars and grew it ten percent a year: In five years, $1,000 became more than $1,600.

In ten years, it became almost $2,600.

In twenty-five years, it became more than $10,800.

The way that numbers exploded as they grew at a constant rate over time was how a small sum could turn into a fortune. He could picture the numbers compounding as vividly as the way a snowball grew when he rolled it across the lawn. Warren began to think about time in a different way. Compounding married the present to the future. If a dollar today was going to be worth ten some years from now, then in his mind the two were the same.

Sitting on the stoop at his friend Stu Erickson's, Warren announced that he would be a millionaire by the time he reached age thirty-five.10 That was an audacious, almost silly-sounding statement for a child to make in the depressed world of 1941. But his calculations-and the book-said it was possible. He had twenty-five years, and he needed more money. Still, he was sure he could do it. The more money he collected early on, the longer the money could compound, and the better his chances of achieving his goal.

A year later, he brought forth the kernel of his reality. To his family's amusement and surprise, by the spring of 1942, his hoard totaled $120.

Enlisting his sister Doris as a partner, he bought three shares of a stock for each of them, costing him $114.75 for his three shares of Cities Service Preferred.11 "I didn't understand that stock very well when I bought it," he says; he knew only that it was a favorite stock that Howard had sold to his customers for years.12 The market hit a low that June, and Cities Service Preferred plunged from $38.25 to $27 a share. Doris, he says, "reminded" him every day on the way to school that her stock was going down. Warren says he felt terribly responsible. So when the stock finally recovered, he sold at $40, netting a $5 profit for the two of them. "That's when I knew that he knew what he was doing," Doris recalls. But Cities Service quickly soared to $202 a share. Warren learned three lessons and would call this episode one of the most important of his life. One lesson was not to overly fixate on what he had paid for a stock. The second was not to rush unthinkingly to grab a small profit. He learned these two lessons by brooding over the $492 he would have made had he been more patient. It had taken five years of work, since he was six years old, to save the $120 to buy this stock. Based on how much he currently made from selling golf balls or peddling popcorn and peanuts at the ballpark, he realized that it could take years to earn back the profit he had "lost." He would never, never, never forget this mistake.

And there was a third lesson, which was about investing other people's money. If he made a mistake, it might get somebody upset at him. So he didn't want to have responsibility for anyone else's money unless he was sure he could succeed.

9.

Inky Fingers Omaha and Washington, D.C. * 19411944 One December Sunday afternoon when Warren was eleven, the Buffetts were driving back from a visit to West Point after church. As they listened to the radio in the car, the announcer broke in to say that the Japanese had struck Pearl Harbor. Nobody explained exactly what had happened or how many were killed or injured, but from the commotion Warren quickly realized that the world was going to change.

His father's already reactionary political views quickly turned even more extreme. Howard and his friends considered Roosevelt a warmonger who lusted after dictatorship and was trying to achieve it by luring America into yet another European war. They felt that Europe, a continent unable to settle its own petty bickerings before these turned into mortal disputes, must be allowed to burn in its own tinderbox.

Until now, Roosevelt's blandishments had not worked. Neither "international cooperation"-the wickedly deceitful Lend-Lease program, which Howard considered "Operation Rat Hole," 1 an outright gift of war supplies to England, neither a loan nor a lease-nor giving speeches alongside that portly, popular Englishman Winston Churchill, had drawn America into the war. Roosevelt had told the country-lying through his teeth, they agreed-"To you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance.... Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."2 Howard now came to believe that in a desperate gamble, Roosevelt and his army's chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, had decided that "the only way to get us into the European war was to get the Japanese to attack us," says Warren, "and not tip off the people at Pearl Harbor." This belief was common among conservatives at the time, although Howard, as in most things, was strikingly firm in his convictions.

The following spring, the Nebraska Republican Party tapped Howard with the awkward job of finding a candidate to run for Congress against a popular incumbent, Charles F. McLaughlin. At the last minute, according to family lore, Howard entered his own name on the ballot, unable to find another sacrificial lamb willing to run against a heavily favored Democrat.

He found himself thrust into the role of campaigner. The Buffetts plastered simple flyers saying "Buffett for Congress" on telephone poles. They went to county fairs, where Howard and Leila handed out cards amid the livestock displays and entries in the best pickle competition. "He was the most unlikely candidate. He hated to speak in public. My mother was a good campaigner, but my dad was introverted." Leila, a talker, instinctively knew how to work a crowd and enjoyed approaching people. The kids circulated, saying, "Would you vote for my daddy?" Afterward they got to ride on the Ferris wheel.

"Then we made this little fifteen-minute radio program. My mother played the organ; my father introduced us: 'There's Doris, age fourteen. And there's Warren, age eleven.' And my line was 'Just a second, Pop, I'm reading the sports section.' Then, the three of us sang 'America the Beautiful' while my mother played this little organ."

It was no stemwinder, but "With that fifteen-minute radio program, everybody started volunteering. Still, the other guy had been in for four terms."

Even with the help of volunteers, Howard struggled against the political handicaps of his pessimism and his literal honesty. Thus, the Buffett political platform bulged with dire warnings and bristled at the mindless social conformity observable everywhere in the 1940s Midwest. Howard demanded that voters "buy one-way tickets out of Washington for all of the screwballs, stuffed shirts, stool pigeons, sleepwalkers, and society snobs."

This fire-breathing rhetoric belied a sweetness in him, a subtle wit, and a certain innocence. For years, Howard had carried in his pocket a handwritten piece of paper, softened and worn to the texture of linen, which said, "I am God's child. I am in His Hands. As for my body-it was never meant to be permanent. As for my soul-it is immortal. Why, then, should I be afraid of anything?"3 Unfortunately for his only son, when it came to the streets of Omaha, Howard meant this almost literally.

When campaigning, he would roust Warren, now twelve years old, out of bed long before dawn, to head down to the stockyards in South Omaha. Along with the railroads, these were Omaha's main business, employing almost twenty thousand people, mostly immigrants. More than eight million animals a year4 lumbered into a metropolis of meat and rolled out as billions of pounds of packaged goods.5 South Omaha once was a separate city, a short distance from downtown geographically but culturally a continent away. For decades it had served as the brewing ground for most of the city's ethnic and racial unrest.

Warren planted his sneakers at one end of the block, hands clenched and eyes fixed anxiously on his father. Howard limped from a childhood bout with polio, and the family worried about his heart condition. Warren's stomach churned as he watched his father down the street, approaching huge, cleaver-faced men in overalls on their way into the packinghouses for the five-thirty a.m. shift.

Many of them did not speak English at home. The least well off, the blacks and new immigrants, lived crammed into a buffer zone of boardinghouses and shanties next to the yards. Those with greater savvy and more means had worked their way out into the ethnic parishes nearby, living in neat small houses with steeply pitched roofs that rolled up and down South Omaha's hills: Czechs in Little Bohemia, Serbs and Croats in Goose Hollow, the Poles in G Town (the former Greek Town); the Greeks were long gone, their homes destroyed in a 1909 anti-immigrant riot.

The people whom Howard approached ranged from the top rank of workers, the specialized butchers from the killing gang who worked on the highest floor of the slaughterhouse, to those on the lower floors, in the boneyard, the lard department, and the fertilizing department. A handful of women trimmed pork, twisted wieners, painted and labeled cans, plucked chickens, and sorted eggs. Management especially prized black women, who could be counted on to fill offal room jobs, and for less pay than whites.6 They cleaned the "pluck"-intestines, bladder, hearts, glands, and other organs-their hands immersed in water and waste, sorting, salting, and packing intestines for casings in a hell of heat and ankle-deep bloody water. They panted shallowly with open mouths to keep airborne particles of excrement out of the deeper parts of their lungs.7 Even the newest and lowliest immigrant or black man would not set foot in the offal room. That was strictly black women's work.

Men and women, black and white, these people were Democrats in every fiber of their being. The rest of Nebraska might be turning against the New Deal, the President's cure for the Great Depression, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt was still a hero in this part of town. Yet the leaflets that Howard Buffett politely pressed into their callused hands shrieked that FDR was the greatest danger to democracy that America had ever known. If given a moment to speak, he would calmly explain why, as their Congressman, he would always vote to enact laws that the stockyard workers would oppose.

Howard was a zealot, but he was neither stupid nor crazy. Even though he placed his trust in God's hands, he had a backup plan. Warren had not come for an education, nor to tag-team his father in a fight. His job was to run like hell for the cops if the stockyard workers started beating up his father.

Under the circumstances, a reasonable person might ask what Howard was doing there at all. His efforts might not be repaid by a single vote. But apparently he felt an obligation to appear before every potential voter in his district, however little of him they cared to see.

Warren always managed to return home intact; he never had to run for the cops. That may have been just luck or it may have been Howard's demeanor, which conveyed his basic decency. Still, the Buffetts had no reason to believe the voters saw that, nor that if they did, it would overcome his underdog status. On election day, November 3, 1942, Doris, convinced that her father had lost, went downtown and bought herself a new pin to wear to school the next day so she would have something to look forward to. "My dad wrote out his concession statement. We all went to bed at eight-thirty or nine o'clock, because we never stayed up late. And he woke up the next morning to find out he'd won."

Howard's deep suspicion of foreign adventures was more than a quirk of his own Quaker-like personality. It reflected a reservoir of conservative isolationism, which had once run deep and wide through the Midwest. Although that stream was drying up, Pearl Harbor had revived it for a little while. Despite Roosevelt's overwhelming popularity, labor's support for his foreign policies had wavered temporarily in Omaha, just long enough to get Howard elected against an opponent who had been, perhaps, overconfident.

The following January, the Buffetts rented out their house in Dundee and boarded a train to Virginia. Ernest handed them a hamper of beautifully packaged food along with instructions not to stray into any other cars, lest they pick up dread diseases from traveling servicemen.

They arrived at Washington's Union Station to find a provincial city grown packed and chaotic. Great crowds of people filled the town, most of them working at vast new wartime government agencies. The military had commandeered every building, office, chair, and pencil within reach in the effort to get itself organized in the newly finished Pentagon, the world's largest office building, which was outgrown by the time it was completed. By now, flimsy temporary office buildings lined every inch of the Mall.8 Hordes of new arrivals had doubled the population. A ragged army of black men and women streamed across the 14th Street Bridge from Virginia, fleeing the tobacco farms, cotton fields, and textile mills of the poverty-stricken South, lured by the prospect of any job at all in the busiest city in the world. Following in the dust of the respectable, impoverished, and naive came pickpockets, prostitutes, grifters, and drifters, turning Washington into the nation's crime capital.

Rickety nineteenth-century wooden trolleys packed with government workers crept their way along impassable streets. At any of the trolley stops, local residents might be picketing against Capital Transit, which had refused to hire blacks.9 Still, the logjam of segregation was slowly starting to break. At Little Palace cafeteria on the black side of town, Howard University students were staging a series of "lunch counter sit-ins," challenging the restaurant's policy of refusing them service by simply occupying all available tables and refusing to leave, effectively shutting the place down.10 The Buffetts had friends, the Reichels11-acquaintances of Howard's from his stockbroking days-who told them, don't live in Washington, it's terrible. They knew of an enormous house in Virginia that someone in the Marines had just vacated. It sat on a hill above the Rappahannock River, next door to Chatham, headquarters of the Union Army in the battle of Fredericksburg. The house had ten fireplaces, formal gardens, cutting gardens, and a greenhouse. Although its grandeur was far above the Buffetts' style, and it was located almost an hour from the city, they leased it temporarily. Howard rented a tiny apartment in the District of Columbia and commuted on the weekends. His time filled quickly as the Nebraska delegation assigned him to the financial committees, and he started fitting in and learning the rules and procedures and unwritten customs of serving as a Congressman.

Leila soon began riding into Washington to look for a permanent place to live. She had been unusually irritable since their arrival and often spoke longingly of Omaha. The timing of the move had turned out to be inauspicious. Her sister Bernice had just insinuated that she would commit suicide, saying that she would not be responsible for what happened unless the family committed her to the Norfolk State Hospital, where their mother, Stella, was also housed. Edie, now in charge of her sister's care, consulted with a doctor. They thought that Bernice wanted to live with her mother and was conceivably using melodramatic means to get her way. Nevertheless, they clearly had to take the suicide threat seriously, and the family sent her off to Norfolk.

The details of the Stahl family's problems were rarely discussed in front of the children. Each adapted to Washington in his or her own way. Beautiful fifteen-year-old Doris felt like Dorothy, who had just left black-and-white Kansas and stepped into the Technicolor land of Oz. Her life was transformed. She became the belle of Fredericksburg and fell in love with the town.12 Leila began to treat her daughter as a social climber who had pretensions above her station, and still launched the occasional tirade against her. But by now, Doris's spirit resisted her mother's constraints, and she had begun to fight for her own identity.

Meanwhile, Warren, twelve years old, spent the first six weeks in an eighth-grade class that was "way behind" where he had been academically in Omaha. Naturally, his first instinct was to get a job, working at a bakery where he "did damned near nothing. I wasn't baking and I wasn't selling." At home, furious and miserable at being uprooted, he wanted to be sent back to Omaha and reported a mysterious "allergy" that disturbed his sleep. He claimed that he had to sleep standing up. "I wrote my grandfather these pathetic letters, too, and he sort of said, 'You've got to send that boy back. You know, you're destroying my grandson.'" Succumbing, the Buffetts put Warren on a train back to Nebraska for a few months' stay. To his delight, his companion on the train was Nebraska Senator Hugh Butler. He had always gotten along well with older people and chatted easily with Butler, in his precocious manner, all the way back to Omaha, his "allergy" forgotten.

Bertie, nine years old, felt close to her grandfather and thought she had a special bond with him. She was jealous. Trusting in her relationship with Ernest, she wrote him: "Don't tell my parents, but send for me too."

"When Bertie wrote the same kind of letters, I said, 'Don't pay any attention. She's a fake.'"13 Ernest wrote back, "A girl should be with her mother." Bertie sat in Fredericksburg, fuming that her brother always seemed to get his way.14 Warren returned to Rosehill School and reunited with his friends. Every day he showed up around noontime at the house of his father's former partner, Carl Falk, whose wife, Gladys, served him sandwiches and tomato soup and kindness for lunch. He "worshipped" Mrs. Falk15 as if she were a surrogate mother, just as he had done with his friend Jack Frost's mother, Hazel, and with his aunts.

Though Warren was comfortable with all these middle-aged women, he was shy, hopelessly shy, and girls his own age terrified him. Even so, he soon developed a crush on Dorothy Hume, one of the girls in his new eighth-grade class. His friend Stu Erickson had a similar crush on Margie Lee Canady, and his other friend Byron Swanson had a crush on Joan Fugate. After weeks of talk, they worked themselves up to ask the girls to go to the movies.16 But when Warren walked over to Dorothy's house to invite her, he chickened out when her father answered the door. Warren tried to sell him a magazine subscription instead. Finally, however, he managed to ask Dorothy, and she said yes.

On the appointed Saturday, Byron and Warren went together to pick up their dates because they were afraid to show up alone. Thus the afternoon started with a lengthy trudge from house to house to the streetcar stop, walking for blocks in uncomfortable silence. Margie Lee, who lived in the opposite direction, arrived at the stop with Stu and they all boarded the streetcar, where the boys stared red-faced at their shoes throughout the trip downtown as the girls chatted easily with one another. When they reached the theater, Margie Lee, Dorothy, and Joan strolled directly to a row of seats and sat down next to each other. The boys' plan to cuddle up with the girls during two horror films, The Mummy's Tomb and Cat People, instantly fell apart. Instead, they sat in their own group and watched the girls' brunette heads huddled together as they giggled and shrieked through the weekly serials, the cartoons, and both movies. After a painful trip to Walgreen's for after-movie treats, the boys retraced their trip on the streetcar in a dazed little group and began the long march to the girls' houses before being dismissed by their dates. They had barely spoken a word the entire afternoon.17 All three were so mortified that it took each of them years thereafter to summon the courage to ask another girl out on a date.18 But while Warren lost heart, he did not lose interest; he next developed a crush on another girl in his class, Clo-Ann Kaul, a striking blonde. Yet she was not interested in him either; he seemed unable to make any headway at all with girls. His way of diverting himself from disappointment was, again, making money.

"My grandfather liked the idea that I was always thinking of ways to make money. I used to go around the neighborhood collecting wastepaper and magazines to sell for scrap. My aunt Alice would take me down to the collection drop-off, where you could get thirty-five cents for a hundred pounds, or something like that."

At Ernest's house, Warren read a shelf full of back issues of the Progressive Grocer. Subjects like "how to stock a meat department" fascinated him. On the weekends, Ernest put him to work at Buffett & Son, the empire over which he presided. About the size of a two-story garage, it had a Spanish-style tile roof that stood out in the pleasant upper-middle-class suburb of Dundee. The Buffetts had always sold on "credit and delivery." Ladies or their cooks would ring up Walnut 0761 on the telephone and read their lists to clerks who took down their orders.19 Clerks rushed around the store, scrambling up and down a rolling wooden ladder that flew back and forth along the shelves, retrieving boxes, bags, and cans, and filling their baskets from the pyramids of vegetables and fruit. To cut a hand of bananas, they took down the wicked sharp knife next to a four-foot bunch of bananas that hung from a hook by the back door. They ran down to the basement to fill orders for sauerkraut and pickles that lay cooling in barrels near crates of eggs and other perishables. All the goods went into baskets, which the clerks on the mezzanine raised on a pulley, priced and packaged, and sent back downstairs. Then the orange Buffett & Son delivery trucks with rolled-up rubber or leather panels on the side drove the packages off to Omaha's waiting housewives.

Ernest sat at a desk on the mezzanine and glared down at the clerks. Behind his back, the employees called him Old Man Ernie. "He didn't do a damn thing. He just gave orders," says Warren. "I mean, he was king. He could see everything. And if a customer walked in who wasn't waited on like that..." Snap of the fingers and woe to the clerks. He believed in "work, work, plenty of work." Ernest felt so responsible for making sure that no one in his charge had foolish notions about there being any free lunch in this world that he had once made a lowly stock boy bring two pennies to work to pay his Social Security tax in cash. This handover had been accompanied by a half-hour lecture on the evils of socialism, so that said stock boy would fully understand how that devil Roosevelt and the tweedy, pipe-smoking Ivy League professors he had brought into the government were ruining the country.20 The only time Ernest left the mezzanine was the minute he saw an important woman drive up with her chauffeur. He would tear down the stairs, grab an order slip, and wait on her himself, showing her the new "alligator pears"-avocados-just flown in from Hawaii and handing peppermint sticks to her children.21 In the face of all this attention to rank, when her brother-in-law Fred once stopped waiting on Leila in order to attend to another customer, she stalked out in a huff and never shopped at the store again.22 Howard bought the groceries from then on.

Warren now felt like one of these clerks, hustling around the store under Old Man Ernie's thumb. Working in his grandfather's store, he came as close to being a slave as he ever would be in his life.

"He had me do a lot of little lesser jobs. Sometimes I was on the floor. Sometimes he had me counting wartime rationing stamps-sugar stamps, coffee stamps, sitting up on the mezzanine with him. And sometimes I was hiding where he couldn't see me.

"The worst job was when he hired me and my friend John Pescal to shovel snow. We had this huge snowstorm, a foot of superwet snow. We had to shovel out the whole bank of snow, in front where the customers parked and in the alleyway behind the store, in the loading dock, and by the garage where we had the six trucks.

"We worked at this for about five hours-shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, shoveling. Eventually, we couldn't even straighten our hands. And then we went to my grandfather. He said, 'Well, how much should I pay you boys? A dime's too little and a dollar's too much!'

"I'll never forget-John and I looked at each other...."

That worked out to-at most-twenty cents an hour for shoveling snow.

"Oh no! This was the amount we were supposed to split. That was my grandfather...."

Well, a Buffett was a Buffett, but Warren had learned a valuable lesson: Know what the deal is in advance.23 Ernest had two other Buffett traits: an impulsive streak with women and an obsession with perfection. He had entered into two short-lived marriages after Henrietta died, once coming back from a vacation in California newly wed to a woman he had just met. His perfectionism, however, expressed itself at work. Buffett & Son was a direct descendant of the oldest grocery store in Omaha and Ernest's demanding ways were all in pursuit of an ideal vision of service to his customers. He felt certain the discount national chain stores that were encroaching on the neighborhoods were a fad that would disappear because they could never provide a comparable level of service. Sometime during this period, he wrote confidently to one of his relatives: "The day of the chain store is over."24 When Buffett & Son ran out of bread, rather than disappoint his customers, Ernest sent Warren trotting down the street to the nearby Hinky Dinky supermarket to buy bread at retail. Warren did not enjoy this errand because he was quickly recognized once inside. "Hellooooooo, Mr. Buffett!" the clerks would call out to him, loud enough for everyone to hear, as he slunk through the store, "trying to look inconspicuous," weighed down with armfuls of loaves. Ernest resented the Hinky Dinky, which, like Sommers, his other major competitor in Dundee, was run by a Jewish family. It rankled him to pay good money to a competitor, much less somebody Jewish. Like much of America before mid-century, Omaha practiced de facto segregation by both religion and race. Jews and Christians (and even Catholics and Protestants) lived essentially separate lives, with social clubs, civic groups, and many businesses refusing to accept Jews as members or hire them as employees. Ernest and Howard used the code name "Eskimos" to make offensive remarks about Jews when they were out in public. Since anti-Semitism was so much a matter of course in society at the time, Warren never gave their attitudes a thought.

Ernest, in fact, was an authority figure to Warren, and he only escaped that authority when he was at school, and for a few hours every Saturday when his grandfather put him to work on the delivery truck. Unloading groceries from the truck was exhausting work, and Warren started to figure out how much he disliked manual labor.

"There was this driver, Eddie, that I thought was a hundred years old. He was probably about sixty-five, although he had driven a mule truck back when Buffett & Son delivered that way.

"He had the craziest delivery system that involved going first to Benson, then about five miles back to Dundee to drop somebody's groceries off, then back to Benson. All this during wartime gas rationing. Finally I asked why, and he gave me this disgusted look and said, 'If it's early enough, we may catch her when she's undressed.'" Warren at first had no idea what this cryptic phrase meant. "He took the groceries up to the house personally in the mornings while I carried twenty-four-bottle boxes of empty soda bottles that were being returned to the store. Eddie would be there ogling Mrs. Kaul, the best-looking customer, trying to catch her undressed." Mrs. Kaul was Clo-Ann Kaul's mother, and while Warren was hauling empty soda bottles, Clo-Ann was ignoring him. "I may have been the lowest-paid person to ever work in the grocery business. I didn't learn anything-except that I didn't like hard work."

Warren took his battle for autonomy home to Ernest's Sunday dinner table. He had despised everything green from birth, except money. Now, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and asparagus lined Warren's plate like foot soldiers in a battle of wills. With his parents, he had generally gotten his way. Ernest, however, brooked no nonsense. While Alice tried coaxing her nephew, his grandfather glared from his seat at one end of the table, waiting, waiting, waiting for Warren to finish his vegetables. "You sat at the table for two hours to finish your asparagus, but he always won in the end."

In most other ways, however, being at Ernest's brought Warren a large measure of freedom. In his grandfather's garage, he had spotted Doris's blue Schwinn bicycle with her initials on it-a gift from Ernest, left behind when they went to Washington. Warren had never owned a bicycle. "A bicycle was a pretty big present in those days, you know," he says. He started riding Doris's. After a while he traded it in, using it as most of the down payment on a boy's bike.25 Nobody said anything. Warren had that "halo."

His grandfather doted on him, in his way. At night he and Ernest listened with "reverential attention" to Ernest's favorite radio host, Fulton Lewis Jr., who expounded constantly on the theme that America should not get involved in foreign wars. Ernest needed no convincing.

After Fulton Lewis Jr. recharged his conservative energies, Ernest would gather his latest thoughts on the best seller he was writing. He had decided to call it How to Run a Grocery Store and a Few Things I Learned about Fishing, feeling these were "the only two subjects about which mankind had any valid concern.26 "I would sit there at night, or late afternoon, early evening, and my grandfather would dictate this to me. I'd write it on the back of old ledger sheets because we never wasted anything at Buffett and Son. He thought that it was the book all America was waiting for. I mean, there wasn't any sense writing another book. Not Gone with the Wind or anything like that. Why would anybody want to read Gone with the Wind when they could be reading How to Run a Grocery Store and a Few Things I Learned about Fishing?"27 Warren loved it all, or almost all. He was so glad to be back in Omaha and reunited with his aunt, grandfather, and friends that he almost forgot about Washington for a while.

A few months later, the rest of the family made the three-day drive to Nebraska for the summer and moved into a rented house. Their finances were becoming stretched. Heretofore, the stockyards had simply been the home of some of Howard's constituents. But when their reek drifted through town every time the wind blew from the south, everybody in Omaha knew-that was the smell of money. Howard now bought the South Omaha Feed Company to supplement his Congressional salary. And Warren went to work for his father.

"South Omaha Feed was a huge warehouse that seemed hundreds of feet long and had no air-conditioning. My job was to carry fifty-pound sacks of animal feed from a freight car into the warehouse. You can't imagine how big a freight car looks when you get inside and it is packed to the top. And a freight car in the summer, that is really something. There was a guy named Frankie Zick who was tossing these things around. He was a weight lifter. I had on a short-sleeved shirt because it was so hot, and struggling to sort of get these feed bags into my arms and drag them. By noon my arms were kind of a bloody mess. That job lasted for about three hours. I just walked over to the streetcar and went home. Manual labor is for the birds."

Before the summer ended, the family took a short vacation at Lake Okoboji. As they were leaving, Doris discovered that Warren had traded in her bicycle. But through some miscarriage of family justice, again he suffered no consequences. Indeed, when summer ended and his parents forced Warren, sullen and grim-faced, onto a train headed back to Washington, the new bicycle he had bought for himself with his filched funds went along. Doris was furious. But the theft of her bicycle only marked the beginning of her brother's descent into behavior that would ultimately force his parents to take action.

Back in Washington, the Buffetts moved into the Fitchous' house, an attractive two-story white colonial with a mimosa tree in the yard in the sophisticated Washington suburb of Spring Valley, right off Massachusetts Avenue. A restricted community*6 built in 1930 for the "socially and officially prominent," Spring Valley was designed as a little "colony of outstanding personages."28 The homes ranged from gigantic stone Tudor mansions to white two-story clapboard colonials like the Buffetts' house. Leila had paid $17,500 for it, including some furniture. Warren got the front bedroom. The families on either side had sons, all older than Warren. Across the street lived the Keavneys, and Warren, now thirteen years old, developed a crush on Mrs. Keavney, the nearest motherly middle-aged woman in sight. "I was nuts about her," he says.

The neighborhood had an international feel; it teemed with diplomats. The WAVES,29 women members of the wartime Navy, were headquartered at the nearby huge Gothic-style campus of American University. The Buffetts began adjusting to wartime life in Washington, a very different place from Omaha. The country had finally become prosperous, the Depression over, but with wartime rationing on, money mattered less and less. Everyday life was measured in points and coupons: 48 blue points a month for canned goods; 64 red points for perishables; coupons for meat, shoes, butter, sugar, gasoline, and stockings. No amount of money would buy meat without coupons; only chicken went unrationed. With butter rationed and scarce, everyone learned to squeeze yellow food coloring into containers of tasteless white oleomargarine. No one could buy a new car, because the carmakers devoted their plants to defense work. To take an automobile trip, you pooled the family's gas coupons. Blowing out a tire could mean serious trouble, since automobile tires were among the most strictly rationed commodities.

Every morning, Howard took the streetcar that ran down Wisconsin Avenue to M Street in Georgetown, then turned down Pennsylvania Avenue. He got off near the old Executive Office Building and went to work in a Washington that heaved and roiled. The government and diplomatic community had ballooned, and the streets were packed with people in kilts and turbans and saris, with armies of clerical workers, and with a sea of uniformed military.

From time to time, black women in Sunday dresses and church hats picketed the Capitol to protest lynchings in the South. Air-raid wardens walked the neighborhoods to check that all houses had opaque blackout curtains. Once or twice a month the Buffetts were required to go down to their basement and turn out all the lights for a mandatory blackout drill.

Leila disliked Washington from the day she arrived. She was homesick for Omaha, and lonely too. Immersed in his new job, Howard had become a more distant husband and father. He worked at the office all day, then read the Congressional Record and legislative materials all evening. He spent Saturdays at the office and often returned there on Sunday afternoons after church.

Doris now attended Woodrow Wilson High School, where again she fell in right away with the popular crowd. Bertie, too, made friends easily, finding a compatible group of girls in the neighborhood. Warren's experience was nothing like his sisters'. He enrolled at Alice Deal Junior High School,30 which sat atop the highest hill in Washington, overlooking Spring Valley, the black school in the hollow behind it, and the rest of the city below.

The students in his class-many of them diplomats' kids-were a world more polished than Warren and his now-lost friends from Rosehill School. At first, he had difficulty making friends. He went out for basketball and football, but since he wore glasses and was timid in physical contact sports, neither was a success. "I'd been pulled away from my friends and I wasn't making new friends. I was young for my class. I was not poised at all. I wasn't a terrible athlete, but I wasn't a great athlete in the least, so that was not an entry ticket. And Doris and Bertie were knockouts, so they did fine. A good-looking girl does not have trouble, because the world will adjust to her. So they both fit in better than I did, far better, which was a little irritating too."

His grades started out at Cs and Bs and improved to As, except in English. "Mostly my grades related to how I felt about the teachers. I hated my English teacher, Miss Allwine.31 Music class was also Cs all the way through." Miss Baum, the music teacher, was the best-looking teacher in the school. Most of the boys had crushes on her, but Warren had real difficulties with Miss Baum, who reported that he needed to improve in cooperation, courtesy, and self-reliance.

"I was the youngest one in the class. I was interested in girls, and I wasn't avoiding them, but I felt I had less poise. The girls were way ahead of me socially. When I left Omaha, nobody in my class was dancing. When I moved to Washington, everybody had been dancing for a year or two. So I never caught up, in effect."

The Buffetts' move when Warren was twelve had deprived him of a crucial experience: Addie Fogg's dancing class. At the American Legion hall in Omaha on Friday nights, Addie Fogg, a short, stout woman of middle age, lined the boys and girls up by height and paired them off, boys in bow ties and girls in stiff petticoats. They practiced the fox trot and box-step waltz. A boy learned how a "gentleman" behaves in public with a young lady, and struggled through elementary small talk to break a painful silence. He felt the touch of a girl's hand, learned to hold her by the waist, and sensed her face close to his own. He tasted for the first time the demands and potential pleasures of leading a partner as they moved in unison. With its many small but shared embarrassments and triumphs, this group rite of passage awakened in its graduates a sense of belonging. To miss it could be profoundly isolating. Already insecure, Warren had been left behind, a child among budding young men.

His classmates noticed he was friendly but seemed shy, especially around girls.32 He was a year younger than most of them, born in August and having skipped a half grade at Rosehill. "I was out of whack. I felt very inept with girls at that time, and socially in general. But with older people, I was fine."

Not long after the family's arrival in Spring Valley, Howard's friend Ed S. Miller-one of those older people-called from Omaha. He wanted to talk to Warren.

"'Warren,' he said, 'I'm in a terrible jam. The board of directors told me to get rid of our Washington, D.C., warehouse. This is a real problem for me. We have hundreds of pounds-cases-of stale cornflakes and cases of Barbecubes dog biscuits. I'm in a real pickle. I'm twelve hundred miles away and you're the only businessman I know in Washington.'

"So he said, 'I know I can count on you. As a matter of fact, I told our warehouse men to deliver these cornflakes and Barbecubes dog biscuits to your house. Whatever you get for them, send me half; you keep the rest.'

"And all of a sudden, these huge trucks come up and fill our garage, fill our basement, everything! Now my dad couldn't get the car in or anything.

"And now I've got these things.

"Well, I just tried to figure out who it would be useful to, you know. And obviously the dog biscuits would be useful to a kennel. The cornflakes were not fit for human consumption anymore, so I figured they might be good for some animal. I sold the cornflakes to some poultry guy. I made probably a hundred bucks for the merchandise.33 When I sent the fifty percent to Mr. Miller, he wrote back and said, 'You saved my job.'

"There were some awfully nice people like that back in Omaha. I always liked to hang around with adults when I was a kid. Always. I would walk over to church or something, and then I would just drop in on people.

"My dad's friends were very nice too. They had this Bible class and various things at the rectory, and they would come over to the house and play bridge afterward. All these guys were very, very nice to me; they all liked me and called me Warreny. I'd learned Ping-Pong from taking out books from the library and practicing at the Y. They knew I enjoyed playing with them down in the basement, and they'd take me on.

"I had all these things I was doing in Omaha. I had a nice niche there.

"When we moved to Washington, the Ping-Pong table disappeared. It was like my cornet. And the Boy Scouts. I was doing all these different things, but they all ended when we moved.

"So I was mad.

"But I didn't know exactly how to direct that. I just knew I was having a whole lot less fun than I was having before my dad got elected."

After his father took him to watch a couple of sessions of Congress, Warren decided he wanted to become a congressional page, but Howard was not in a position to pull that off. Instead, Warren got a job caddying at the Chevy Chase Club, but once again discovered that physical labor did not suit him. "My mother sewed towels inside my shirts because I was carrying these heavy bags around. Sometimes the golfers-mainly women golfers-would feel sorry for me and practically carry the things themselves." He needed a job that better fit his skills and talents.

Almost from birth, like all the Buffetts, Warren had lived and breathed the news. He loved hearing it and now he would enter the business of delivering it and find he loved that too. He got himself hired to throw a paper route, delivering the Washington Post and two different routes for the Times-Herald. The Times-Herald belonged to Cissy Patterson, the autocratic cousin of Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick. It catered to the right wing, which hated FDR and kept the President up nights worrying what it would print the next day. Cissy Patterson feuded with Eugene Meyer, a financier who owned the Washington Post and supported FDR in every line of his paper's type.

Warren started delivering in Spring Valley, near his home. "The first year, the houses were far apart, which I was not too keen on. You had to deliver it every day, including Christmas Day. On Christmas morning, the family had to wait until I had done my paper route. When I was sick, my mom delivered the papers, but I handled the money. I had these jars in my room with half dollars and quarters.34 Then he added an afternoon route to his workload.

"The Evening Star, which was owned by this blue-blooded Washington family, was the dominant paper in town."

In the afternoons, he rolled down the streets on his bike, grabbing copies of the Star to throw from the huge basket on the front. Near the end of the route he had to steel himself. "On Sedgwick was this terrible dog.