"I liked to work by myself, where I could spend my time thinking about things I wanted to think about. Washington was upsetting at first, but I was in my own world all the time. I could be sitting in a room thinking, or I could be riding around flinging things and thinking."

The thoughts he was thinking were angry thoughts. He spent his days acting them out at Alice Deal Junior High. Bertie Backus, Alice Deal's principal, prided herself on knowing each pupil by name. She soon had special reason to know Warren Buffett's.

"I was kind of behind when I got there, and then I fell further behind. I was just mad at the world. I did a lot of daydreaming, and I was always charting things-I would bring stock charts to school and just wasn't paying attention to what was going on in class. Then I got to be friends with John McRae and Roger Bell. And I became disruptive."

The pleasing personality of his childhood all but disappeared. In one class, Warren enlisted John McRae to play chess with him while the teacher was talking, just to be obnoxious. In another class, he cut open a golf ball, which squirted some sort of liquid onto the ceiling.

The boys had started to golf. John McRae's father worked as a greenskeeper at Tregaron, a famous estate close to downtown Washington that belonged to heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and her husband, Joseph E. Davies, who was ambassador to Russia. The family had dozens of servants and was almost never home, so the boys went over and played on the nine-hole golf course. Then Warren convinced Roger and John to run away with him to Hershey, Pennsylvania, where they were going to try to get jobs caddying at a well-known golf course.35 "We hitchhiked. And after we had successfully gone a hundred fifty miles or so, we made it to Hershey and stopped at this hotel and we made the mistake of bragging to the bellboy.

"The next morning, when we came down, there was this huge highway patrolman waiting for us, who took us down to the highway patrol headquarters.

"We just started lying. And we lied and lied and lied about having our parents' permission. All the while there was this Teletype machine spitting out alerts about this and that. I was sitting there thinking that pretty soon there was going to be an alert from Washington, D.C., and this guy will know we're lying. All I wanted to do was get out of there."

Somehow they lied convincingly enough that the patrolman let them go.36 "We started walking toward Gettysburg or someplace. We were having no luck hitchhiking, and then a trucker picked us up and stuffed all three of us into the cab." They were so scared by then, they only wanted to go home. "The trucker stopped at a diner in Baltimore and divided us up with other truckers. It was getting dark and we felt like we'd never get out of there alive, but they took us back to Washington, separately. Roger Bell's mother was in the hospital. I mean, she had gone to the hospital over this, which made me feel terrible 'cause I had talked Roger into going. I was on my way to being a four-star delinquent."

He had made another friend by then, Lou Battistone; but, as in Omaha, he had kept his friendship with Lou separate from his relationship with Roger and John. Meanwhile, Warren was doing worse than ever at school. His grades dropped to Cs and Ds and even D minuses: in English, in history, in freehand drawing, in music, even Cs in mathematics.37 "Some of these grades were from the classes where I was supposedly good." Warren's teachers found him stubborn, rude, and lazy.38 Some of the teachers gave him double black Xs, for extra bad. His behavior was shocking for the times. In the 1940s, children did what they were told and obeyed their teachers. "I was going downhill fast. My parents were dying, they were dying."

He excelled in only one class, and that was typing. Washington was fighting the war on paper, and typing was considered a critical skill.

At Alice Deal, typing was taught by placing black covers over the keys so that the students were forced to type by touch.39 It helped to be able to memorize, and it paid to have good hand-eye coordination. Warren was gifted at both. "I made As every semester in typing. We all had these manual typewriters and, of course, you'd slam the carriage back to hear this 'ding!'

"I was-by far-the best in the class at typing out of twenty people in the room. When they'd have a speed test, I would just race through the first line so I could SLAM the carriage back. Everybody else would stop at that point, because they were still on the first word when they would hear my 'ding!' Then they'd panic, and they'd try to go faster, and they'd screw up. So I had a lot of fun in typing class."

Warren put this same ferocious energy into his three paper routes. He took to the paper-throwing as if he had been born with inky fingers. Next, says Lou Battistone, "he conned the route manager, with that personality of his, into giving him The Westchester" in historic Tenleytown. In this, Warren had pulled off a coup. The Westchester was the kind of route an adult news carrier would ordinarily manage.

"It was a great opportunity. The Westchester was classy. The Westchester was just the creme de la creme. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands owned it.40 There were six U.S. Senators on that route, and colonels, and Supreme Court justices, all these biggies. There was Oveta Culp Hobby, and Leon Henderson, the head of the Office of Price Administration." Mrs. Hobby came from a famous Texas publishing family, and had moved to Washington to serve as director of the WACs, the Women's Army Corps.

"So all of a sudden, I had this huge operation. I might have been thirteen or fourteen years old. I first got The Westchester just for the Post. I had to give up my other morning routes when I got The Westchester, and I felt badly." Warren had grown close to his Times-Herald manager. "And when I told him that I had the chance to get the Post at The Westchester and that meant I had to give up his route in Spring Valley...he was terrific with me, but that was really kind of a sad moment."

By then Warren considered himself an experienced paper-route operator, but he was tackling a complex logistical challenge. The Westchester consisted of five buildings that sprawled over 27 acres, four of them connected and one separate. The route included two more apartment buildings across Cathedral Avenue, the Marlin and the Warwick. He would also be covering a small route of single-family homes up to Wisconsin Avenue.

"I started on a Sunday, and they handed me a book telling me the people and their apartment numbers. There was no training session and I didn't have the book in advance." He put on his tennis shoes and pulled out his bus pass, which cost three cents each way, and climbed sleepily aboard the Capital Transit bus. He did not stop for breakfast.

"I got up there around four-thirty a.m. There were these bundles and bundles of papers. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I didn't know how the numbering system worked or anything. I sat there for hours and hours sorting and bundling the papers. I was short papers in the end, because people just took them from the bundles as they left for church.

"The whole thing was a disaster. I thought, what the hell have I gotten into? It took until ten or eleven in the morning to finish up.

"But I stumbled my way through. And it got better and I got good very fast. It was easy."

Warren raced out of his house to catch the first N2 bus over to The Westchester at 3900 Cathedral Avenue every morning. Often he had bus-pass number 001, the first person buying a bus pass each week.41 The driver got used to looking out for him if he was running a little late. He would jump off the bus and run the couple of blocks over to The Westchester.

He had figured out the most efficient route and turned what could have been a boring and repetitive job delivering hundreds of newspapers each day into a competition with himself. "See, the papers were a little thinner in those days, because of newsprint rationing. A thirty-six-page paper was a pretty good-size paper. I'd stand at one end of the hallway with a bundle and pull off a paper, fold it over flat, and tuck it to make a pancake, or roll it into a biscuit. Then I smacked it against my thigh. And I'd twist it against my wrist to put some spin on it and slide it down the hall. I could slide that thing fifty, even a hundred feet. It was kind of a test of skill, because the apartment doors were at different lengths down the hallway. I'd do the longest ones first. But the trick was to be able to do it in such a way that they'd all come to rest a few inches from the door. And sometimes people would have milk bottles, which made it more interesting."

He also sold calendars to his newspaper customers, and he developed another sideline too. He asked all his customers for their old magazines as scrap paper for the war effort.42 Then he would check the labels on the magazines to figure out when the subscriptions were expiring, using a code book he had gotten from Moore-Cottrell, the publishing powerhouse that had hired him as an agent to sell magazines. He made a card file of subscribers, and before their subscriptions expired, Warren would be knocking at their door, selling them a new magazine.43 Because The Westchester had so much turnover in wartime, Warren's biggest dread was customers who skipped out and didn't pay, leaving him stuck with the cost of their papers. After a few people skipped out on him, he started tipping the elevator girls to let him know when people were about to move. Then the imperious Oveta Culp Hobby got behind. He thought that she should have a little more empathy for her paperboy, since she owned her own newspaper, the Houston Post. But he began to worry that she would skip out on him.

"I paid my own bills monthly, always on time, and I always showed up to deliver the papers. I was a responsible kid. I got presented with a war bond for perfect service. With the customers, I didn't want to let the receivables build up. I tried all kinds of things with Oveta Culp Hobby-leaving notes-and finally ended up knocking on her door at six in the morning to catch her before she could escape." Shy in other ways, Warren was never timid when it came to money. When Mrs. Hobby answered the door, "I handed her an envelope, and she had to pay me."

After school, Warren rode the bus back to Spring Valley and jumped on his bike to deliver the Star. On rainy winter afternoons, he would sometimes come off his paper route and appear on the doorstep of his friends' homes. He always wore battered canvas sneakers, so full of holes that his feet were swimming to the ankles; his skin would be pimply with cold inside a soaking-wet oversize plaid shirt. For some reason he never seemed to wear a coat. Motherly Mrs. Whoever would smile and shake her head at the pitiful sight, bundle him up, and towel him off while he basked in her warmth.44 At the end of 1944, Warren filed his first income tax return. He paid only seven dollars in taxes; to get it down to that, he deducted his wristwatch and bicycle as business expenses. He knew that was questionable. But at the time, he was not above cutting a few corners to get where he wanted to go.

At age fourteen, he had now fulfilled the promise laid out in his favorite book, One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000. His savings now totaled around a thousand dollars. He took great pride in that accomplishment. So far, he was ahead of the game, way ahead of the game, and getting ahead of the game, he knew, was the way to his goal.

10.

True Crime Stories Washington, D.C. * 19431945 Bad grades, tax evasion, and running away were the least of Warren's troubles in junior high. His parents didn't know it, but their son had turned to a life of crime.

"Well, I was antisocial, in eighth and ninth grade, after I moved there. I fell in with bad people and did things I shouldn't have. I was just rebelling. I was unhappy."

He started with minor schoolboy pranks.

"I loved print shop. I used to make calculations in print-shop class of the frequency of letters and numbers. That was something I could do by myself. I could set type, you know, and that sort of thing. I enjoyed printing up all kinds of things.

"I made up a letterhead from the American Temperance Union, Reverend A. W. Paul, President. I'd write letters to people on that letterhead saying that for years I'd lectured around the country on the evils of drink, and in these travels my appearances were always accompanied by my young apprentice, Harold. Harold was an example of what drink could do to men. He'd stand there on the stage with a pint, drooling, unable to comprehend what was going on around him, pathetic. Then I said that, unfortunately, young Harold died last week, and a mutual friend had suggested that you might be a replacement for him."1 The people with whom Warren felt most comfortable encouraged his antisocial impulses. He and a couple of new friends, Don Danly and Charlie Tron, took to hanging out at the new Sears store. Near Tenley Circle where Nebraska and Wisconsin Avenues intersected, the store was an eye-opening swoop of modern design dropped into the middle of Tenleytown, the second oldest neighborhood in Washington. Letters the height of a man spelled out SEARS on a curved metal deck several stories above sidewalk level.2 On the roof behind the Sears sign was hidden a great novelty, an open-air parking garage, which quickly became popular with high school kids as a place to park and neck. The store had become the hangout for all the junior high kids too. Warren and his friends rode the H2 bus there at lunchtime or on Saturdays.

Most of the kids liked the dark little lunch counter Sears had installed in the basement, with its mesmerizing conveyer belt that spit out doughnuts all day long. But Warren, Don, and Charlie preferred Woolworth's across the street, even though the police station was on the opposite corner. Woolworth's sat kitty-corner from Sears. They could eat lunch and case the joint through the windows.

After their hamburgers, the boys would stroll down the stairs into Sears's lower level, bypassing the lunch counter and going straight to the sporting-goods section.

"We'd just steal the place blind. We'd steal stuff for which we had no use. We'd steal golf bags and golf clubs. I walked out of the lower level where the sporting goods were, up the stairway to the street, carrying a golf bag and golf clubs, and the clubs were stolen, and so was the bag. I stole hundreds of golf balls." They referred to their theft as "hooking."

"I don't know how we didn't get caught. We couldn't have looked innocent. A teenager who's doing something wrong does not look innocent.3 "I took the golf balls and filled up these orange sacks in my closet. As fast as Sears put them out, I was hooking them. I had no use for them, really. I wasn't selling them then. It's hard to think of a reason why you had this multiplying group of golf balls in the closet, this orange sack that's just getting bigger all the time. I should have diversified my theft. Instead, I made up this crazy story for my parents-and I know they didn't believe me, but-I told them I had this friend, and his father had died. He kept finding more of these golf balls that his father had bought. Who knows what my parents talked about at night."4 The Buffetts were aghast. Warren was their gifted child, but by the end of 1944, he had become the school delinquent. "My grades were a quantification of my unhappiness. Math-Cs. English-C, D, D. Everything Xs for self-reliance, industry, courtesy. The less I interacted with teachers, the better it was. They actually put me in a room by myself there for a while where they would kind of shove my lessons under the door like Hannibal Lecter."5 When graduation day came and the students were told to show up in a suit and tie, Warren refused. With that his principal, Bertie Backus, had had enough.

"They wouldn't let me graduate with the class at Alice Deal, because I was so disruptive and I wouldn't wear clothes that were appropriate. It was major. It was unpleasant. I was really rebelling. Some of the teachers predicted that I was going to be a disastrous failure. I set the record for checks on deficiencies in deportment and all that.

"But my dad never gave up on me. And my mother didn't either, actually. Neither one. It's great to have parents that believe in you."

Yet by the spring of 1945, as Warren was starting high school, the Buffetts had had enough too. By now, it was no great mystery how to motivate Warren. Howard threatened to take away the source of his money.

"My dad, who was always supportive of me, said, 'I know what you're capable of. And I'm not asking you to perform one hundred percent, but you can either keep behaving this way or you can do something in relation to your potential. But if you don't do it, you have to give up the paper routes.' And that hit me. My dad was low-key, just sort of letting me know he was disappointed with me. And that killed me probably a lot more than his telling me I couldn't do this or that, you know."

11.

Pudgy She Was Not Washington, D.C. * 19441945 The disruption Warren had created in his family's life undoubtedly made his father's already challenging career as a new Congressman no easier. Members of the 78th Congress fraternized under a sort of jolly monarchy ruled by House Speaker Sam Rayburn, a Texas Democrat who kept five portraits of Robert E. Lee in his office, all facing south. The House that Rayburn oversaw was a comfortable home for the typical backbencher, an elbow-grabber who lived for county fairs and the chance to kiss somebody's grandma, a beauty queen, or any secretary he could catch. Famed for his artful behind-the-scenes vote-wrangling and powerful oratory, Rayburn operated a sort of private saloon in the afternoons where he served "bourbon and branch" water to his favorites.

Naturally, Howard was not among them. Besides the fact that he was a Republican, his idea of a good time was reading the Congressional Record every night. He never went near a saloon. And yet, in many other ways, he did fit the profile of the typical Congressman of the era-hailing from a small city, graduate of a state university, middling student, background in community politics, Rotarian from the middle of the middle class, not part of the country-club set, and a foe of Communism.

But instead of joining the rest of his peers in what amounted to a club and beginning the climb up the ladder of power, Howard Buffett quickly gained a reputation as perhaps the least-backslapping Congressman ever to represent his state. He stayed miles away from the "rubber chicken circuit" of campaign money and vote-getting events that occupied so many Congressmen, and made it known his vote was not for sale or barter. He turned down a raise because the people who elected him had voted him in at a lower salary. He went around with eyebrows lofted at the perks that came with being a Congressman. The subsidized restaurants, the payrolls padded with friends, relatives, and mistresses, the greenhouse that supplied free plants, the "stationery store" that sold, at wholesale prices, everything from tires to jewelry-Howard was shocked by all of it and let that be known.

His long-standing isolationism was shared by a friend, Republican leader Robert Taft.1 But isolationists were no longer entering Congress; they were leaving or retiring. Moreover, with the country at war and the government running at a deficit, Howard was obsessed with the quixotic goal of trying to return the country to the "gold standard." The United States had dropped the gold standard in 1933. Ever since, the Treasury had been printing money freely to finance first the New Deal and now the war. Howard feared that someday the United States might wind up like Germany in the 1930s, when people had to cart wheelbarrows of money down the street to buy a head of cabbage-the direct result of Germany being forced to deplete its gold stock to pay reparations after World War I.2 The economic chaos that resulted was one of the major factors that had led to Hitler.

Certain that the government was going to spend the country into ruination, Howard bought a farm back in Nebraska to serve as a refuge for the family when everybody else starved. A distrust of government bonds was so well-entrenched in the Buffett household that when the family held a powwow about giving a savings bond to somebody for a birthday present, young Bertie, nine years old, thought her parents were trying to put one over on the guy. "But won't he know they're worthless?"3 she asked.

Howard's rigidity impeded him from doing his job, which was to legislate.

"He would lose these votes in the House, maybe 412 to 3. My dad would be among the three. And it just didn't get to him. He was very much at peace. It would have gotten to me-I get mad when I lose. I can't ever recall seeing him depressed or despondent. He just figured he was doing the best he could. He went his own way, and he knew why he was there-for us kids. He had a very pessimistic appraisal of where the country was going, but he was not a pessimist."

The way Howard invariably held aloft his principles-instead of working toward Republican Party goals by joining coalitions-strained relationships with his colleagues and took a toll on the family. Leila cared about fitting in; other people's opinions mattered to her. She was also competitive. "Why can't you be a little more flexible," she said, "like Ken Wherry?"-the junior Nebraska senator who was moving quickly up the ranks. Howard was having none of it. "We believed in him," says Doris, "but it was hard to see him lose all the time." That was an understatement. All the Buffetts admired Howard's fortitude and credit their father for teaching them integrity. But each of the children absorbed in their own way a desire to belong that somehow muted or balanced the family streak of independence.

Her husband's stance as the lone wolf of the party exacerbated Leila's irritable mood. Still miserable about living in Washington, she tried to create a miniature Omaha and spent her free time with the women of the Nebraska delegation. But that free time was limited, for she no longer had a cleaning lady. She felt put upon. "I gave it all up to marry Howard,"4 she would say, adding this lament to her stories of how she and Howard had sacrificed for their ungrateful children's welfare. But rather than teaching those children to help around the house, she did everything, because "it was just easier to do it myself." Feelings of martyrdom made her angry at the kids a lot of the time, especially at Doris, who was having her own issues about fitting in.

Although strikingly pretty, Doris says she never felt that way, and was insecure about whether she was good enough for the sophisticated Washington crowd of which she longed to be a part. She was invited to the French Embassy for Margaret Truman's birthday party and was added to The Debutante Register, as she began planning to debut as a Princess of Ak-Sar-Ben*7 with the crowd she would have been graduating with back in Omaha. Warren made fun of her for her pretensions.

Leila, herself a determined striver who cared deeply about appearances, would pore over every bit of news about the Duchess of Windsor, a penniless commoner who had been rescued by a prince.5 But, unlike the duchess, who spent the rest of her life amassing one of the world's most impressive collections of jewels, Leila's ambition and pride wrapped themselves in a self-conscious disdain for ostentation. She pictured the family as a middle-class Midwestern archetype, a Saturday Evening Post magazine cover, and berated Doris for being socially ambitious.

Still fourteen years old, Warren became a sophomore at Woodrow Wilson High School in February 1945, upon his graduation from Alice Deal.6 He wanted to be both "special" and "normal" at the same time. Much less mature than his classmates, he was being carefully watched by his parents, who were determined to see him straighten out. His paper routes were the source of his autonomy, such autonomy as he now had. And he had been reading-as well as throwing-the papers.

"I read the comics, the sports section, and looked at the stock pages every morning before I delivered the newspapers. I read the cartoon Li'l Abner every morning. I had to know what Li'l Abner was doing every day. His appeal was that he made you feel so smart. You'd read this thing and think, 'If I was in that position...this guy is so dumb.' Because here was Daisy Mae, this incredible woman who was just nuts about him, and was always chasing after him, and he just kept passing her up and not noticing her. Every red-blooded American boy in those days would have been just waiting there for Daisy Mae to catch him."

Daisy Mae Scragg, the hillbilly heroine of the Appalachian cartoon hamlet of Dogpatch, was a bodacious blonde whose cleavage burst from an off-the-shoulder polka-dot blouse. The dim-witted strongman Li'l Abner Yokum spent most of his time trying to evade Daisy Mae's marital designs on him. But the faster he ran away, the more deaf he seemed to her attention and longing, the more he spurned her, the harder Daisy Mae chased him. Even though rich and powerful men wooed her, to Daisy Mae there was but one man on earth, Li'l Abner.7 Besides elusiveness, Li'l Abner's only apparent asset was his manly physique. Warren's poor record with girls so far suggested that if he ever wanted to attract the interest of a girl like Daisy Mae, he had better do something to make himself more attractive. Now he developed a new interest, which conveniently gave him an excuse as well for hiding away down in the basement. The way that Frankie Zick could clean-and-jerk fifty-pound bags of animal feed for hours at a time at South Omaha Feed had impressed him. He got his friend Lou Battistone interested and they embarked on a weight-lifting program. At the time, weight training was not the stuff of serious athletes, but it had many qualities that appealed to Warren: systems, measuring, counting, repetition, and competing with yourself. In search of technique, he had discovered Bob Hoffman and his magazine, Strength and Health.

Strength and Health was Hoffman's attempt to overcome the stigma against weight lifting through aggressive promotion. It was edited, published, and apparently written largely by Hoffman himself. Ads for his products appeared on nearly every page. "Uncle" Bob's technical knowledge, his razzle-dazzle, the man's unflagging ability to market himself, were striking.

"He was the coach of most of the Olympic team. He was the head of the York Barbell Company, and he was the author of the Big Arms and the Big Chest books. The basic thing he sold initially was barbell sets. If you went to a sporting-goods store then, everything was York barbells. You could buy all these different kinds of sets."

Warren got a set of dumbbells and a barbell with a set of plates in increments of one and a quarter pounds that slipped on and off the bar, which he tightened with a little screwdriver that came with the set. He kept the weights in the basement and was "always down there clanking. My parents got a big kick out of the whole thing."

Sometimes he went down to the YMCA to lift weights among other young men. He and Lou took their hobby seriously, making insider jokes about the "heavy and light" lifting system and "upright rowing motions." They paid close attention to everything Uncle Bob wrote. Hoffman knew how to adapt to the tenor of the times. Everyone knew about the vicious Jap soldier's ability to withstand pain and suffering, so he wrote that the point of lifting weights was to fight the Japanese. He illustrated this with a photo of a vicious Jap soldier, arched in a backbend from his toes to the crown of his head, lifting a huge set of cement barbells over his chest, training to beat the Allies. Warren was not lifting weights to fight the Japanese, or, for that matter, to fight anybody. Everything that Uncle Bob wrote, however, inspired him in his competition with himself.

But while Warren was clanking down in the basement, the Republicans were in hell. Franklin Roosevelt had managed to win a fourth term as President, ensuring the Democrats another four years in the White House. At the dinner table, the family listened to much ranting from Howard. Then, on April 12, Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and his Vice President, Harry Truman, succeeded him as President.

Roosevelt's death sent most of the country into deep mourning, tinged with fear. Three and a half years into the war, the country had lost the man who made it feel secure, and it had low expectations of Truman. He retained FDR's cabinet and sounded so humble that some thought he might be overwhelmed by the job. But to the Buffetts, no one could be worse than FDR. The family down the street whose father worked for the Canadian Embassy came to call on their Congressman neighbor upon the President's death and pay their condolences. But when they arrived, Doris says, "Yo, ho, ho, we were celebrating."8 And to Warren, the death of a President meant another way to make money. Newspapers put out special editions, and he hustled himself out to the street corner, hawking papers while everybody mourned.

One month later, on May 8, 1945, came V-E Day, the formal end of the war in Europe, following Germany's unconditional surrender. Again there were special editions to sell, and Warren echoed his father's political convictions as a matter of course. But at the time, he was only passingly interested in these adult concerns, because his real obsession was weight lifting and Bob Hoffman. He spent most of his free time down in the basement. A few weeks later, when school was out, he could wait no longer. He had to meet his idol, Uncle Bob. "He was it. I had to see him in person."

With their parents' amused blessing, Warren and Lou took off for York, Pennsylvania, hitchhhiking part of the way.9 "He had this barbell factory up there in York where they turned this stuff out. It was really more of a foundry. And he had the whole Olympic team working there. John Grimek was the big bodybuilder. Steve Stanko held the world's record then for the clean and jerk: three hundred eighty-one pounds. But this is before they had super-heavyweight classifications."

In one sense the visit was demoralizing. "The guys did not bulk up the same way in those days. It blew my mind that here were these guys that were Olympic champions, but a lot of them were small because they were in smaller-weight classes. And if you saw them in a foundry, wearing foundry-type clothes, they just looked like nothing." But in another sense, the sight of those fairly ordinary-looking men lifted the boys' aspirations. Maybe success in bodybuilding was within their reach. They saw themselves becoming men, physical specimens who could impress a woman. "Uncle Bob-when he spoke, it was like God was talking to us. And when you looked at yourself in the mirror, you saw deltoids and abs and the latissimus dorsi and everything. You learned every muscle group."

But the most impressive celebrity in Strength and Health-apart from Uncle Bob himself-was not John Grimek, the greatest bodybuilder in the world. It was a woman.

"There were not a lot of women in Strength and Health. Pudgy Stockton's about the only one that ever made it. I liked Pudgy. She was impressive. We talked about her a lot at school."

That was more than a slight understatement. Warren and Lou were obsessed with Abbye "Pudgy" Stockton, a work of art in human flesh-taut thighs rippling as her chiseled arms lofted a huge barbell above her wind-whipped hair, bikini showing off her tiny waist and perky bosom to all the musclemen and gaping onlookers at Santa Monica's Muscle Beach. Five foot one and 115 pounds, she could lift a grown man in the air over her head and do it without sacrificing any of her femininity. As the world's "Foremost Female Physical Culturist," she wrote "Barbelles," a column in Strength and Health, and conducted a Salon of Figure Development, "specializing in bust development, figure contouring, and reducing" in Los Angeles.10 "She had the muscle tone of Mitzi Gaynor and the mammary development of Sophia Loren," says Lou Battistone. "She was phenomenal. And we-I have to admit to you-we lusted for her."

Until now, Daisy Mae had been Warren's fantasy girl. He would always look for the qualities of Daisy Mae in a woman. But Pudgy-Pudgy was real.

It was not clear, however, exactly what you did if you had a girlfriend like Pudgy.11 The boys puzzled over ads for "Bob Hoffman's guide to a successful happy marriage," which featured "Premarital examination. How to examine your wife before marriage to make sure she's 'intact,' as well as courtship, why people marry, and minor forms of lovemaking." Just what were the minor forms of lovemaking? they wondered. Even the major forms were largely a mystery to them; the ads in the back of Strength and Health were the best the 1940s could do in terms of sex education. Don't worry, Dad, we're down in the basement, doing a little studying for our physics exam.

However, in the end, Warren's fascination with numbers won out.

"You know, you kept measuring that biceps to see if it'd gone from thirteen to thirteen and a quarter inches. And you were always worried whether you were loosening up the tape or anything. But I never improved from looking like the Charles Atlas 'before' picture. I think my biceps went from thirteen inches to thirteen and a quarter inches after thousands of curls.

"The Big Arms book didn't do me much good."

12.

Silent Sales Washington, D.C. * 19451947 That August, while the Buffetts were back in Omaha, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; on September 2, Japan formally surrendered. The war was over. Americans celebrated in near hysteria. But Warren recalls that he quickly started thinking through the next chess moves after the dropping of the bombs.

"I didn't know anything about physics. But I knew you could kill a couple of hundred thousand people if you were the first one to use the bomb in a war. It's as if I run into some guy in a dark alley, and I've got a cannon, but he's got a gun. If he's willing to pull the trigger and I have some moral compunction against doing it, he wins. Einstein said right away, 'This has changed everything in the world except how men think.' It put a fuse to the end of the world. Now, it may be a long fuse, and there may be ways to interrupt it, but once that metaphorical bomb has a dozen fuses all burning, the problem becomes a different sort of thing than if no fuse is lit. I was only fourteen, but it seemed to me just totally clear what was going to happen, and it has happened to quite a degree."

A few weeks later, with the family back in Washington, Warren returned to finish tenth grade at Woodrow Wilson High School, at fifteen still a kid but now also a businessman. He was making so much money throwing papers that he had accumulated more than $2,000. Howard had let his son invest in Builders Supply Co., a hardware store that he and Carl Falk were opening next to the feed store back in Omaha.1 Meanwhile, Warren himself had bought a forty-acre farm for $1,200 about seventy miles away, near Walthill, in Thurston County, Nebraska.2 A tenant farmer worked the farm and they shared the profits-just the kind of arrangement Warren liked, with someone else doing the sweaty, boring work. Warren began introducing himself to people in high school as Warren Buffett from Nebraska, who owned a tenant farm back in the Midwest.3 He thought like a businessman but did not look like one. He fit uncomfortably into the high school crowd, showing up with the same tattered sneakers and droopy socks peeking out from under baggy trousers day after day, skinny neck and narrow shoulders swallowed inside his shirt. If forced into dress shoes, he wore startling yellow or white socks above the scuffed leather. He seemed to squirm in his seat all the time. Sometimes he looked shy, almost innocent. At others, he wore a sharp, tough expression.

Doris and Warren ignored each other if their paths crossed in the halls of high school. "Doris, who was very popular, was particularly ashamed of me, because I dressed terribly. Sometimes your sister would help you get socialized but I rejected that, basically. It wasn't her fault; I was painfully aware of being socially maladjusted. I may just have felt so hopeless."

Warren's stone-faced, smart-aleck act covered up the feelings of inadequacy that had made his life so difficult since leaving Omaha. He desperately wanted to be normal, but still felt very much the outsider.

He was "hesitant," said classmate Norma Thurston, his friend Don Danly's girlfriend, "and he chose his words carefully and never made any commitment, however small, if he thought he might have to take it back."4 Many of his classmates plunged enthusiastically into teenage life, joining fraternities and sororities, getting pinned, and going to parties in their families' basements where they served soda pop, hot dogs, and ice cream and then turned the lights down while everybody necked. Instead of necking, Warren rubber-necked. He had a regular Saturday night reservation with Lou Battistone at Jimmy Lake's theater, a local burlesque joint, where they had a fantasy flirtation with one of the dancers, Kitty Lyne. Warren would roar with laughter when a comedian took a pratfall or the second banana in the balcony started heckling him.5 He spent twenty-five dollars on a 1920s-style raccoon coat. When he wore it down to Jimmy Lake's, the bouncer told him, "No clowning around, you guys. Either take that coat off, or you can't come in."6 He took it off.

The side of Warren that had robbed Sears blind was in transition: fading, but not gone. He and Danly still took the occasional five-finger discount at Sears. When his teachers told him they had most of their retirement savings in AT&T stock, he shorted it, then showed them the trade tickets to give them heartburn. "I was a pain in the ass," he says.7 His exceptional powers of reasoning and smart-aleck tendencies combined into a talent for taking perverse stands. Somehow, probably because he was the son of a Congressman, he wound up appearing on a radio program on January 3, 1946. CBS "American School of the Air" brought its program to WTOP, the local station owned by the Washington Post. On that Saturday morning, Warren went down to the station, where he and four other kids sat around a microphone and debated as "Congress in Session."

The show's hostess assigned him the job of spicing up the debate. He argued convincingly in favor of absurdities-ideas on the order of eliminating income taxes or annexing Japan. "When they wanted someone to take a crazy position," he says, "I did it." But while he relished argument for its own sake, his clever retorts, lightning-fast counterarguments, and general contrariness hindered his quest to be liked by his peers.

Until now, Warren's efforts to get along with people had had mixed results. He charmed adults, except for his teachers. He felt ill at ease with his peers, but had always managed to make a few close friends. He desperately wanted people to like him and especially not to attack him personally. He wanted a system. In fact, he already had one, but he wasn't using the system to its full effect. Now, lacking any other resources, he began to work harder at it.

Warren had found this system at his grandfather's house, where he read everything he could get his hands on at a blazing pace, just as he did at home. Browsing the bookshelf in the back bedroom, he had consumed every issue of the Progressive Grocer and every single copy of the Daily Nebraskan that had been edited by his father, and worked his way like a boll weevil through all fifteen years of the Reader's Digest that Ernest had accumulated. This bookcase also held a series of small biographies, many of them on business leaders. Since a young age Warren had studied the lives of men like Jay Cooke, Daniel Drew, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. Some of these books he read and reread. One of them was special-not a biography but a paperback written by former salesman Dale Carnegie,8 enticingly titled How to Win Friends and Influence People. He had discovered it at age eight or nine.

Warren knew he needed to win friends, and he wanted to influence people. He opened the book. It hooked him from the first page. "If you want to gather honey," it began, "don't kick over the beehive."9 Criticism is futile, said Carnegie.

Rule number one: Don't criticize, condemn, or complain.

This idea riveted Warren. Criticism was something he knew everything about.

Criticism puts people on the defensive, Carnegie said, and makes them strive to justify themselves. It is dangerous, because it wounds people's precious pride, hurts their sense of importance, and arouses resentment. Carnegie advocated avoiding confrontation. "People don't want criticism. They want honest and sincere appreciation." I am not talking about flattery, Carnegie said. Flattery is insincere and selfish. Appreciation is sincere and comes from the heart. The deepest urge in human nature is "the desire to be important."10 Although "don't criticize" was the most important, there were thirty rules in all.

Everybody wants attention and admiration. Nobody wants to be criticized.

The sweetest sound in the English language is the sound of a person's own name.

The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.

If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.